Week 85

Good morning everyone:) Hope you all have had a great week. Ours was pretty roller-coastery. It's okay, though because the goods outweigh the bads. hahaha it's funny how change, especially in mission life, gets rid of some of our challenges, but it deals us a whole new hand to play with. and no matter where you go, you can't get away from challenges because that's what it's all about. haha chinese has been beating me up recently, but it's given me a different perspective on things. Elder Ward gave me a quote from Muhammed Ali where he said "i hated every minute of training, but i told myself 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion'." How awesome is that?!?! suffer through it now, and celebrate later. It's all worth it.

Elder Ward and i tried something this week that i haven't tried my whole mission. Morning train contacting! haha it was great! we did it twice and got 5 phone numbers from it. We met with two of those people this weekend and one of them is really keen to learn. Her name is Chloe. She's been to church a couple times and is really interested to know about it. and she's studying Statistics at Sydney University! haha so i gave her a high-five and told her that's what i want to study. She said it's really hard.... hahaha oh well. if it's not hard, it's not worth it, right? But we talked to her about God for a while and moved it into the restoration. It was a great lesson and we'll be seeing her this week again, hopefully.

Matt got confirmed yesterday! he is now a full-on member. We just need to get him the aaronic priesthood and into the temple for baptisms for the dead. He is the man. He's given up a lot to get to where he's at right now. i look up to him a lot. I can't remember how much i've told yous about him, but he's 27, doesn't speak hardly any english. he works with drywall or something. i couldn't understand when he was telling me. but it's hard labor and he used to smoke heaps, but he gave it up, and he is doing really well. he asked if he can pass the sacrament ever so we are going to talk to him about the priesthood tonight. keep praying for him!

We met with a recent convert, brother Yin on friday night and he is awesome. He just got the Melchizedek Priesthood last week and apparently he's given the missionaries like 3 referrals that have all gotten baptised. And our investigator, mr. Xu, who is supposed to be getting baptised this weekend, was a referral from him. We talked to him about the kingdoms of glory and he told us the he thinks he will be going to the terrestrial. this led us to a long talk about enduring to the end and it was so cool because he expressed to us how difficult it is to endure to the end. And he's right. It's really not easy. He said if it was endure for a couple days, or a couple months, that would be easy, but until the end is a long time. That's something i've thought a lot about because i've both heard of and seen missionaries go home and NOT endure to the end. So i've been worried about that happening to me. It's definitely not easy to live the gospel, and i know it won't be easy when i come home, but as i sat in that kitchen with brother yin and elder ward i realized just how valuable the celestial kingdom is. It's worth every effort and sacrifice necessary to obtain it. We suffer now, and live the rest of eternity champions!

Another investigator we met with on saturday was Carol. She is pretty interested in learning about God and we gave her a plan of salvation pamphlet last time we saw her so we went over it with her. She told us that it was hard for her to believe that we will be resurrected. so that was sad for us to hear, but we kept talking about the plan of salvation and then we brought up eternal families and her eyes seemed to light up. she suddenly had a bunch of questions for us and it was really good. We finished the lesson and realized that looking back on it, it was the most all over the place lesson we'd had in a long time, but we both felt it went really well. We invited her to church but she told us she'd been to church before and it was too boring..... dangit. hahaha its times like those where i realize why people like Hillsong do what they do... haaha oh well. we'll get her there. there's a special invitation sunday coming up in april so we will get her there.

Love you all! have a great week! church is true! love you all very much. Miss you like crazy. i talked to sister back this past week and they are for sure doing a group going home on august 11 so i'm not sure but i think i will probably go in that group just so i can have a couple weeks before school starts. i think that would be nice.

Love,

Elder Tingey

PS one of the ladies we teach english looked up our church on the internet and ended up on the website for taiwan and she asked us about our slogan.... so i didn't really know what she was talking about but i guess they stress this a lot in taiwan: 没有任何的成功能够弥补家庭的失败 no success can compensate for failure in the home. Good stuff.

here's the four amigos on our way out the door. i had a picture of the harbor and the opera house, but my SD card just freaked out and all my pictures got deleted! dang it! but the only ones i lost were the ones from this past week because i have a backup USB! haha thinkin smart. so i'll get another pic of the harbour this week and send it to yous.