Sorry for not emailing these past few weeks! I wrote a really long spirit filled email last week and then the whole thing got deleted cause my phone restarted... So needless to say I didn't have the heart to write it all over again. I'm back now though!
Another transfer came and went. -Elder Cheung and I are still together. We expected that just cause of how special it was that we were put together in the first place. We had good interviews with president talking about the districts of missionaries here. Since I am the district leader we need to take a train to Hualien at least once a week which wastes lots of time and money. We just have to travel outside our area a lot. The missionaries in Hualien actually have a city with lots of people and we only see them once a week so our missionary work is completely different. There are two areas around us in the same valley that are small areas. We talked to president and he thought it's a good idea to combine them and now we have the most rural district in the mission here! Maybe even all of Taiwan! We're pretty excited to see how we can help our three small areas.
Elder Cheung and I have been wanting to have more spiritual experiences lately and we've seen some pretty cool things happen.
We were trying to teach one of our friends and he asked us if we could walk on this bike trail and talk to him as we walked. We were walking with him trying to teach him and it just wasn't going anywhere. He is one of the hardest people I've ever taught because he doubts everything in the universe. Even the most simple things he gets confused because he looks at everything from a logical and scientifical perspective. We give him small invites to do and he listens to us without really listening and trying what we tell him. We asked him if we could just share the plan of salvation with him for five minutes without him talking and he agreed. As we were sharing you could tell he doubted a lot of the parts and wanted to ask questions. After we were done I could tell he wanted to say something. He told us he had something for us to consider. I kinda got the impression it was a question or some information that would make us doubt our faith in God, but at that exact moment he completely forgot what he was about to say. He just stood there trying to think for a few minutes but couldn't come up with it. I know that was God stopping him from trying to destroy our faith.
Lately we've had members and people we are teaching in the hospital for bad health issues. The first was the friend who has been in bad health that he's been asleep for the whole time I've been in this area. This last time we went he had finally woken up. When we came in and I brought a Book of Mormon for him he started to cry. He wasn't able to speak but you could tell he was so grateful and this experience had humbled him so much. Hopefully when he recovers completely he'll be ready to change his life around.
A really special experience happened with a member who got rushed to the hospital on Friday. We were called by his wife to come in and give him a blessing. We came in and he was in the ICU and just looked pretty bad. He gave us a paper with a message he wanted us to text his parents telling them what the situation was because his wife is Taiwanese and her English isn't the best. After that he told us how the protein in his legs were the worst they've ever been, and there were lots of problems in his body. He was afraid for his wife, since they've had so many health and financial problems in the past, it's been hard for them. He's afraid that she won't be able to take this and she'll break. He asked us to bless his wife in the blessing however we could. So as we layed our hands on his head we gave him a priesthood blessing. I forgot most of what I said in that blessing, I also didn't really know what I was saying as it was coming out. I was of course afraid that I would say something that wasn't according to God's will. But as we finished we stepped back and he was on the hospital bed crying. He told me:" yesterday I was praying because I was without hope, and what you said in that blessing is exactly what Heavenly Father said to me yesterday. There is no way you could have known that. I never mentioned anything about yesterday to you. This just confirms to me that we have two true servants of Jesus Christ."
I was so humbled that God was able to work through us to help this man. I know God cares about all of us and will send people to help us in our times of need. I love you all and enjoy the pictures!
-Elder Grayson Thayne
If any of you ever wanna send me something
4/F, #24, Lane 183
Jin Hua Street
Da-an, Taipei 106
Taiwan
My legs bend really weird. My shoes are falling apart. -Elder Cheung spilling curry on his white shirt, can't say that hasn't happened before. Us three destroyed in frisbee so we had to be separate from the rest.
