This week Sister Liu shared the following experience...
More rain, more dogs, and GENERAL CONFERENCE :)
More rain, more dogs, and GENERAL CONFERENCE :)
HELLO EVERYONE :)
So this week...
Monday. April 6. Day 90.
Pouring rain. So no more silk skirts for me. It was a pretty relaxing P-day though. At night we went to go look for this less active's house. It was on the other side of town in this super sketchy area. If you know me, I'm afraid of the dark like no other. I don't think I have ever been so scared.. I kept thinking an axe murderer was going to jump out at us. We sort of got lost so we had to bike back and forth, and we didn't have a GPS... just a paper map, you know, those super helpful things.. Anyways, I just sang primary songs in my head the entire bike ride, they really do help :)
Tuesday. April 7. Day 91.
3 month anniversary! YAY! Can you believe it's been 3 months already?? We had District Training Meeting in the morning, Elder Ward focused on how we can find more people, since we are struggling a little bit here :/ But we have a lot of new ideas, so hopefully we get some new investigators soon! At night the ward had a fireside for an RM (returned missionary) that served in the area 12 years ago. He gave us missionaries a ton of advice for the area. Even though things have changed over the years, I think a lot of it will still help us :)
Wednesday. April 8. Day 92.
Wednesday was a day full of tracting and contacting... Which was good, everyone here is very polite, even if they want to reject you.. which is a good and bad thing. I can never really tell what people want :/
Thursday. April 9. Day 93.
We went to teach a member family a lesson on thursday. What we didn't know was that it was going to be a 40 minute bike ride... Good thing it wasn't too hot. Our area is big and they pretty much just lived on the edge. But, the wife was able to give us a lot of information on the recent converts and less actives. (Side story: On our way there, we got kind of lost and went through this narrow alley. There was a dead end, with giant dogs there. Which of course started barking and looked like they were seriously contemplating eating us for dinner. Sister Defranchi used her bike to block the dogs while I got on my bike, turned around, and biked out of the alley. I know, my trainer is great. Then she leaped on her bike and got out of there as fast as we could. Have you ever tried turning your bike around in a narrow alley? If you have, props to you, because that was a serious struggle for me.. anyways moral of the story: never go into alleys. ever again.)
Friday. April 10. Day 94.
Another day of a lot of tracting and a lot of contacting. We still haven't found any real potentials yet, but we have to keep on trying. They don't really slam doors in our face here, it's more of they just stare at us like we are aliens or something. They really are polite though. This one family asked us if we wanted to come in, and we said "Sure!" Turns out, they didn't expect us to say yes, because then they were like "Wait, no, actually no, it's ok. We need to go." Then they closed the door. Sister Defranchi and I couldn't stop laughing about that later.. Mission memories.
Saturday. April 11. Day 95.
Got to finally watch General Conference! Conference was soooo good! Favorite talk was by Dale G. Remlund- anyone who has the chance should definitely re-read it (https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2015/04/latter-day-saints-keep-on-trying?lang=eng). It was like a movie marathon for us missionaries. We got our own room in the church to watch it in English :) We brought snacks and then the members gave us even more snacks. It was like a movie theater :) The members here are really great, missionaries say that the friendliest most welcoming ward is definitely the Chao Zhou ward. Hopefully I get to stay here for a while :)
Sunday. April 12. Day 96.
General Conference Day 2 :) Favorite talks of the day- Holland and Uchtdorf :) Of course. All my questions that I wrote down were answered at general conference- it seriously is the greatest thing. It was also one of our elder's birthday, so blew up a bunch of balloons and filled the room with it :) But, we weren't very smart and blew up all the balloons the night before in our apartments, so on sunday morning we had to bike to the church with bags of balloons attached to our bikes... Yeah. It was definitely a sight to see. The bishop and his wife, and some members, helped celebrate the birthday. It's really nice to see how the ward here is really a family. We contacted and tracted more at night, still haven't run into anyone yet, but we are still going strong, and will keep on trying this week!
Love you all so much!
Love, Sister Liu
劉 姐 妹