Visiting With Friends, Training Stake Leaders, And More...

Hey Everyone! 

   I hope you all had a great week! HAPPY FATHER'S DAY to my Dad and Grandpa too!!! We've had an awesome week down in PingDong! It was a super rainy and humid week, but it was all still good. Towards the end of the week it didn't rain too bad.

  On Monday two old friends of Elder Steele and I came to visit us. My old temporary companion J... and our friend who was baptized in the Donghai ward when I was up there named O... Unfortunately, on the day they came up it rained really hard so we couldn't do much. We ate a big lunch and then went shopping for groceries. We sat in the store's massage chairs for a very long time... and then played some ping pong at the church. (I have yet to find someone from Taiwan that is better at ping pong than me! That stereotype is still a lie!) 

  This week Elder Steele and I have been working extra hard to find more people to teach. We spend pretty much all day riding our bikes on the street talking to anyone that will stop and listen to us. It's very tiring and when we leave the door in the morning sometimes it's a little daunting knowing that we will be doing that for the entire day with no lessons to teach, but I have a testimony that if we just dive into it and work hard, it becomes lots of fun and we meet lots of fun people!

  Yes dad, we are getting plenty of exercise too. 3 times a week we get up at 5:45 to go to the gym nearby our apartment and go weightlifting. It's been really fun getting back into that routine. And on the other days I usually just work out inside with our dumbbells or just do sit ups and stuff. Sometimes when we stay inside I am super tired, so instead of working out I will just study Chinese because I enjoy doing that.

  Lately our zone is doing very well. I don't know why, but for some reason lots of companionship got sick recently and had to stay inside for some of the time, but everyone is good now! Last Thursday Elder Steele and I gave a training to the stake presidency and all the bishoprics in the Ping Dong stake. It was very scary haha. I didn't know until afterwards, but when Elder Steele wrote down some of his goals for last week, one of them was to "survive the training meeting with the stake leaders." That's how I was feeling too. The stake president didn't really give us a super specific topic to train about, they just said that we needed to tell them how to improve missionary work...which is a very broad topic haha. It turned out alright though. We just talked about the basics and the importance of the member's support. We discussed the advantages of having the members allow us to teach our investigators in their homes so that they could feel the special spirit there. I think that it was a decent training, but I am thankful that it is over and we can worry about others things now haha. (Dad don't get me wrong. If you invite the missionaries to do a training I believe that they would be happy to do it. I usually am super pumped to give training because it makes me feel like the members trust me with the responsibility. Maybe it was because it was a broad topic haha)

  We had a great day yesterday. We had two friends that came to church included a guy named L... He has been coming English class and other activities for 7 years now but has never really showed any interest in the church itself. But now he has been progressing a lot and is preparing to be baptized in July. 

  Well I've gotta go now. We are going with some other missionaries to eat at a buffet. That's pretty much what we do here for pdays. We go out and eat a lot! It's super fun though. We pay about 10 bucks for all you can eat Chinese food. It's the best. 

Love you all!

Elder Stevens