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Sunday, December 18, 2011

Starting from Zero

Well I dont even know where to start for this week's email.

Remember how last week I told you how well my companion and I have been doing? Well It has only gone uphill since then.
Last week we taught 18 lessons just on the street, and got 15 new investigators. All of our other numbers such as investigators at church were also consequentially high.

Well a couple of days ago President Chan came up to me while I was on exchanges and congratulated me and told me how happy he is and how well we have been doing. He asked what our secret is for doing so well and my answer was the Book of Mormon.

When my companion and I have been out finding, we will bring around 6 BoMs with us with these little calendar bookmarks that we made that has everyday up until Christmas and a section in the BoM to read that day. They all have to do with Christ's birth or Christmas in some way. We just go out and ask people a little bit about Christmas then tell them we want to give them a present. We then ask if we can explain it a little bit and sit them down and teach the entire restoration focusing on the Book of Mormon. Sometimes we have had to come back within an hour of going out in order to get more Books of Mormon.

The best part? Most of the people have been reading! That has resulted in us being able to reschedule them and teach them more.

Well one day we were out finding at night on some roof of a random tower in Tsz Wan Shan. I have no idea how we got there because we were trying to find the bus station but somehow ended up on the roof of a tower... Well we were walking around and found two boys and two girls smoking. We went to talk to them and ask them what they were doing. They looked pretty guilty and just said, "smoking".  We kept talking to them and got the two boys' phone numbers then left. They didnt seem super promising. But that was a bad impression.
The next day we called them and they suprisingly rescheduled for that night to teach them. We showed up and they brought another friend. The day after that we taught them again and they brought two more friends. The day after that they invited us to go hiking up monkey mountain with them.
We had a really good time, and saw tons of monkeys. They are EVERYWHERE up there. It is really scary because they are the same Rhesus monkeys from Puerto Rico, and they just stand in the middle of the path and will not move for you so you have to try and walk around them. But if you get too close or look at them in the eyes they will start making noises and opening their mouth and lifting their hand up like they are gonig to hit you. There are a lot of little baby monkeys, but if you look at them the older monkeys will run or swing at you.
Well anyways, we taught these two kids (Lam and Tony) up in the mountains and committed them to be baptized. We told them we would have to teach them a lot of things including commandments before they could be baptized though.
Sunday they came to church and were able to stay after to watch a baptism. That just made them want to be baptized even more. But we knew it would be difficult and we had to bring up the Word of Wisdom in the next lesson. The hard part about Hong Kong is most of the teenagers here smoke and drink. These kids are only 16 but have been smoking since they were like 10.
A few nights ago we met them at a soccer field and were about to teach them but then 2 more of their friends showed up who we had never met before. We talked to them and they were interested in our message so Elder Palfreyman taught them and I went to a different bench with Tony and Lam. I was a little nervous because I was going to teach them the Word of Wisdom all on my own. But it actually went really well. They both said they knew they had to stop drinking and smoking. Tea and coffee were probably the biggest shock to them. Tony's mom makes him homemade tea everyday and he was nervous about telling her he couldnt drink it anymore because of his new religion. But I talked to them about the blessings and in the end we agreed they would stop drinking tea and coffe right away and that next week they would stop smoking and drinking.

They were both pretty down about this, but I think it went okay because they invited us to go fishing with them tomorrow. Well I called last night and they are both not drinking any tea or coffee, but next week will be the real test.
They both have so much faith though. They both say they know the Book of Mormon is true, and they say they know the Word of Wisdom is a commandment from God.
Lam's dad died a little while ago. It makes me so happy to have met him because he is sooo happy to know he can see his dad again, and he prayed once that his dad would accept the gospel in heaven.
I see miracles daily, but these two boys have really stuck out lately. Not only are they awesome investigators, but they have been giving us referalls left and right. It is good too because they are both really popular kids in their school, so nobody judges them at all and everyone respects them a lot.

I found some graffiti on a wall that says "Start from Zero". This is graffitied all over around an area in Lok Fu, and I am not sure what it is supposed to mean, but I took a picture with it. I was thinking about how the times that we have had the most success is often after we have the least. Part of it may be God humbling us, but I think part of it is that we realize we need to work even harder and step it up more. Now that we have had a great week that the entire mission has heard about (everyone is calling us or when they run into us they are mentioning they heard we are on fire and asking how we are doing it), I dont want to just sit back and relax. I want to mentally always be starting from "zero". Always be working and focused as I would if we had no investigators or no lessons that week. Never to stop once we reach our goals, but to keep going.

Well, have a GREAT week! Good luck with finals!
Love you all!

Love, Jordan

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