Bake me to Church

So this week was super busy! Almost every day we were out of the apartment before 10:00 doing random things. 

Elder Fernandes led a good district meeting this week by having us discuss the most important thing for our missionary work. We had different cards that said things like:" God and Jesus Christ," or " daily repentance." We were all choosing as a district the most important thing, and we chose to be "led by the spirit." If we are led by the spirit, then we will know what God wants us to do, we will be obedient, and we won't have to worry about not being productive missionaries. We all took the invite to go and do something different in our companionship to have the spirit lead us more. Right after we left District meeting, we went on exchanges with the Xinzhu zone leaders. I went with Elder Anderson and it was way fun. It was really busy though. We were biking everywhere super fast and had 4 lessons. Elder Anderson's bike was pretty messed up because he's a really old missionary. Whenever he stopped pedaling, the chain almost flew off. On the way back home that night, we were going down a hill, and his chain wrapped around his Derailer. It destroyed it and it broke it off. We had to just set the bikes on the side of the road and take a taxi home. The miracle from that night is that the Taxi driver was actually Christian! We talked about the Bible with him for a little and then gave him the Book of Mormon before we got off. He was super grateful for it, and before the night was over they set up to meet with him!

We have been really trying to make our English class good here in Miaoli. We are kind of starting new. So we have a few ideas. One of the things we want to do is make chocolate chip cookies here for English class. That may not sound like a big deal, but in Taiwan it's super hard to find all of the ingredients to make them. We are making them on Wednesday with our English class in hopes of getting new students to start coming more. So we are taking them to church through giving them baked American chocolate chip cookies haha!! We'll see if they taste the same!

This week was a bit of a struggle to find new investigators. We found 4 new ones, but by the end of the week 3 of them dropped us telling us they don't have interest. So that's been a struggle, but we are staying positive and know that we will get a lot of success soon.

Probably one of the highlights of this week for me was my interview with the mission president. He told us he was so happy to have both of us together and that he thinks we'll do great. I only have one more interview with President Jergenson before he goes home at the end of June. So I asked him a piece of advice he could give me. He told me that we need to listen to what the prophet's say, and then immediately obey and live by that standard. Or just do what God wants us to immediately. He said that there will be new changes and when the new mission president comes, some things will be different. He said to just listen, and not focus on the way things were before, but how we need to change right when we hear new direction. It was good advice, and he said we can all be happier because of it.

Thank you for everyone who emails me! I really appreciate it and hope you all are doing well!

-Elder Thayne

Bottom picture is from Taizhong mission. The others are here in Miaoli.