My First Typhoon

Hello Everyone!

 

It's been a great week here in Yuli with lots of awesome experiences!  Elder Relyea and I have been meeting with the Rong family that was found by the sister missionaries a couple months ago. They are doing great! We had the opportunity to share the Plan of Salvation with them this past week and talk about eternal families. They really absorbed all of these restored truths and when we asked them if they would want to have an eternal family they all said, "Yes!" They are an aborigine family with a little bit of christian background. The best part has been seeing the dad's disposition change as he learns more about the gospel and as his faith grows. He is even helping his kids to say prayers before meals! How awesome. 

On Saturday, we were tracting and ran into an older man in his late 50's or 60's. He doesn't really have a religion but says that he will sometimes read from religious books, including the bible. We asked him if he believed in God and what he thought his relationship was with him. He said that he did believe in God and he believed that God was the creator of our spirits, our father. My companion and I looked at each other and said... "Ya, He is!!" We were both really surprised because many people here don't really know what attributes God has at all, many of them don't even believe in God. We continued to teach him about prophets and the Book of Mormon and he seemed to really like it and accepted the copy of the Book of Mormon that we gave to him. He is so humble and really accepting of what we teach him.  We will be heading back to his house tonight to meet with him again. We're really excited! The work is moving forth in Yuli.

Of other news, I experienced my first typhoon here in Taiwan. At first we thought it was going to be really big, but the typhoon decided to hit the northern part of Taiwan hardest and we just got a little bit of rain mixed with some huge winds. Trying to ride our bikes in the wind was really funny because we had to focus on not falling over while pedaling as hard as we could to move only a couple miles per hour.  The typhoon has come and gone now so we are doing fine and are back to enjoying the sun.

Last night, I also had a pretty funny experience. I woke up at about 1 o'clock and felt something on the back of my head so i knocked it off and sat up so I could look down at my pillow to see what it was - a Fat cockroach right there!  As it started to run off my bed, I jumped up and turned on the light, then pulled my bed away from the wall, found a shoe and smashed it! The whole time my companion stayed asleep only to wake up when I was getting back in bed and he said "why is the light on?" He turned it off and I just laughed. Crazy story!

To end on a better note, my companion and I were also able to do some service for a less active man in our branch who lives up in the mountains. We spent about 3 hours moving old furniture from his house to a little shack back in the jungle where he stored stuff. It was super pretty up there. It was fun doing service and fun being able to build a good relationship with this man. He is just great!

Well that about sums it up for this week. Thing are going great here. I hope you all have a wonderful summer back at home.

Love you!

Elder Bastian