April 5, 2015 FuHuoJie

Happy Easter everyone! seems like that went quick. jeez. That means its getting all warm and ready for summer back home. Makes me miss the lake a bit. or just having my shirt off in general. But there is good news to that, I can take my shirt off when I'm in the shower so it isn't all bad right? hahaha

We had a good week full of sharing about Christ's resurrection to a bunch of people who didn't have any idea who Christ was... Asia for you.

Instead, April 5 was the national holiday here called "saomu" which means "clean the grave" so we had a good number of people unable to make it to church because they had to go out and clean the grave for their ancestors so they dont get angry and curse them. People here are so funny.

Last Monday Sean took us out to DaXi for some fun. Went hiking for a bit. Taiwan's mountains really are so pretty. But ridiculously humid. As you could imagine. And nearly every mountain hike is to some temple of sorts with a nonstop crew of karaoke fanatics blasting their tone deaf voices for all to hear. That is entertaining! So we went out and hiked around this reservoir that I guess is super low from the lack of rain. I hope everyone enjoyed their showers this past week. So did I :-) They delayed it a week because of the crazy rainstorms we had last week. But this past week has brought no rain so this wednesday and thursday the water will for sure be shut off. Looking forward to that.

hiking it up again

some Taiwanese scenery with the TuDiGong's

here is the devil reservoir

Hiking crew (except we were finishing as the rest were starting haha)

After hiking we ate iKea. I was in heaven.

best thing ever

Ikea

I took up a new habit, a watermelon here is super cheap. Also there are red, orange and yellow watermelons so that is interesting.. But with summer moving in really fast, I need to drink more water and I need to eat more fruit to stay healthy. So kill two birds with one stone and eat a whole melon as your lunch. I think it is a brilliant idea and I love it.

the yellow melon!!

Aside for all that fun and games, this week brought some of the biggest surprise miracles I have seen. As you know from last week, I was planning on having 1 baptism this weekend. That baptism happened and LaiJM's son was looking so "shuai" (chinese equivalent of "handsome") in his little man suit as he sat super excited to be baptized. HaoWei did it like a champ, him and I got in the water and it was freezing, but he got right in and didn't complain. So that was really cool to see.

shuai

But perhaps the shock miracle of this week was I had 2 baptisms this weekend. My Phillippino investigator that I've been teaching for a while surprised us hahaha. We've been meeting since last November. And there was a point in time that I thought we lost him. But we saw him last Wednesday and he says "my only concern about getting baptized was I still haven't read the BOM the whole way through yet." I tell him he could get baptized this weekend if he wanted. And he says lets do it. So then it was a rush against the clock to get that all sorted out. And quite stressful for me as well if I can be honest. But his baptism was also beautiful. And when I make it to the Phillippines in the future, then we are going to go have some fun. Looking forward to then.

Ian my man!

And to top all of that off with a cherry on top, I got a call last night that I will be moving this week. And training. Nothing more exciting than training and whitewashing at the same time! Pray for me. hahaha. I'm super excited!!!!

Love you all!! Hope all is going well. Keep writing me! I love all the letters/emails i can get! Hope Conference was good. I will be watching that next week somewhere still unknown to me at the moment. Have a good week!!

so good to see this shuaige! elder Huntsman