Still Very Hot...

Dear Everyone,

  Thank you for your prayers that I would be able to withstand the extreme heat of Taiwan. God has heard your prayers because it has been pouring down rain for the past three days and is expected to last all week! Now that it's raining though I wish I could go back to the heat haha.

  This past week was pretty fun! On pday I went with my good friend Elder Lauti and some old members from my first area in Tainan to go eat at an all you can eat grill. I love eating at those! It was also fun to hang out with some old friends. Then on Tuesday we had a great Zone Training Meeting ZTM. Our zone has been working really hard and doing a great job so we decided to have a fun ZTM for a change. We made a scavenger hunt for them all to do. Each team had about 6 stations to go to and at each place there was a riddle that they had to solve which led them to the next clue. And at some of the stations we had a teaching skill that they had to practice; like, talking to someone on the street, teaching with their companion in unity, and giving an invitation for baptism. We had them go in groups of 2 or 4 with people other than their companion so they could learn of other missionaries ways of teaching. Everyone really liked the scavenger hunt and had a really fun time. 

 We also got to go on exchanges twice this week. Once on Tuesday with Elder Porter and Elder Pothier who are in our zone, and then once on Friday with the APs up in Taizhong. They were both super fun. On Friday we took the train up for 3 hours to Taizhong and did our weekly planning on the train. It was raining the entire way up so I was glad I was on the train. On the way back on Saturday afternoon, it was raining super hard as well. We took the train past Ping Dong all the way down to Chaozhou so Elder Steele could do another baptismal interview with on of the Dong Gang Elder's investigators. Her name was Sister S... She is such a sweet lady about 50 years old and she was so grateful that she could finally be baptized. For the past two years her parents would not let her, but they recently changed their minds and said that she could. 

  Our investigator S... is really hard to get a hold of. He says that he hasn't been doing well recently so he just turns off his phone and doesn't want to use it. So we were really worried about what happened to him, but then we bumped into him at a Family Mart (convenient store) and sat down and had a good talk with him. He expressed to us some of the guilt that he had been feeling about some of his past actions that had really hurt his family. He wondered if God would even accept him because of the things that he had done. We had a good talk about the Atonement of Jesus Christ and that as long as we truly desire to change and make things right that God would readily accept us. It's not going to be easy for S... to get his life in harmony with the teachings of Jesus Christ, but he wants to very badly!

  It was a great week and I'm looking forward to an even better week coming up! Love you all lots! (I hope our apartment doesn't flood with all this rain haha)

Love,

Elder Stevens