Old Dutch Fort And More...

February 16, 2015

Hello Everybody!

I hope everyone is doing well! I'm sorry to hear that the weather is so miserable back home. If it makes you feel any better, pretty soon I'll be miserable too with all the humidity that is coming my way! Yeah I'm not too excited about that.

This week started off a lot like last week. Every lesson that we had planned canceled on us until Friday. We just basically tracted and talked to people on the streets for most of the time. It's really hard to actually find anyone to teach now because GuoNian, Chinese New Year is coming up this week. Everyone is really busy and going to be out of town with family. Then the last three days we had a ton of lessons and hardly had any time to rest. I wish that they would space themselves out throughout the week, but I'm not complaining about having lessons.

We taught F... the Word of Wisdom and he was a little reluctant at first to give up drinking. He said that he would try slowly quitting and he could eventually do it. We asked him, well why not right now? He surprisingly agreed and said that he would quit right then and there. I believe he'll do it too. He's had to make lots of changes from his former religion, but he said that he's really noticed a difference in his life and is a lot happier. It hasn't been easy for him to live away from his family in a country where he can't really speak to anyone. He struggled for the first year being here, but he said that ever since he found us, he's been a lot happier.

Last week, a guy named C... Dx and his girlfriend D... J... just randomly showed up to church. I'd never seen them before, but apparently C... has not attended Church in a while and just decided it was time to come back. His girlfriend is really cool, but shy. She is not a member, but is really interested. After the second lesson, she agreed to set a baptismal date for April! I hope she's not just agreeing to follow her boyfriend, but I don't really think so. She wasn't like jumping straight into accepting the date. She really thought about it for a while. That was a pretty big miracle that came right to us.

Last pday we went to an old fort in AnPing that used to be occupied by the Dutch a long time ago. It was pretty cool. There isn't a whole lot left of the original fort, but there were a few walls remaining. Today we are planning to have a ping pong tournament with some other missionaries. I'm pretty excited, because I haven't play some good ping pong in a long time. I've probably gotten pretty bad now. Every chapel has a ping pong table, but we literally never use it and the one time we did, everyone was bad. I guess the stereotype about Asian being sweet at ping pong is not always accurate. Well that's about it for the week. I love you all!

Love

Andrew