Body Malfunctions and Cookies For Jesus!

April 9, 2017 email

These are the three sisters that Emma lives with.  Her companion is Sister Lin in the stripes in the middle.  

This week was really really great! 

It is starting to get hot as sin here and it's only April. Not gonna lie, I'm a little scared for a Taidong Summer. I have heard stories about how hot it gets here throughout my entire mission. Now I am going to live to tell another story. Even though it's hot it is absolutely BEAUTIFUL!!!!! The sky is absolutely massive here and you can even see the starts at night:) The work is magical here and we were blessed to see so many miracles this week!

pday was super simple this week. It was Elder Jacksons birthday so we bought a MASSIVE shaved ice!! Literally we had to have 15 people there so that we could eat it all. Then we went grocery shopping and found some neat little trinkets:) lots of fun.

Elder Jackson's birthday BING!!  Look at the size of that thing!  A bing is something that I have heard James talking about since the day I met him, almost 25 years ago.  It is a giant shaved ice that is covered in the most lovely ripe, fresh fruit on the planet and then doused with sweetened condensed milk!  He says that a Mango Bing in Taiwan will change your life!!  I am planning on eating one when we pick Emma up in July:)

Tuesday, now that was a funny day. We had scheduled to got to Hualian for exchanges with our sister Training leaders, we went to buy train tickets and were there for 30 minutes trying to buy them. BUT ALL THE TRAINS WERE FULL!!!! WTHECK! It was a holiday weekend here in Taiwan so everyone was taking the train back home....hahahaha. That was a funny phone call to the sisters. "Hey all the tickets are sold out! we can't come! sorry!"  We all had a good laugh together. the only rough part was that since we had planned for exchanges we made sure not to schedule anyone while we were gone. So now we had a whole day of nothing!!!!!! oh no!! But not really oh no, we saw so many miracles while we went out finding. This week we have really been trying to listen to every first impression that we have, cause that one is definitely from the spirit!

We were biking down a street and were stopped at a red light when we looked to out left and saw this little phone store. There were two little kids inside too. We had a prompting to go and just invite them to english class. We listened to the prompting and as a result saw a miracle!! We went in to talk to this little family and turns out that the dad used to be an investigator . The 2 kids were absolutely the best and were so dang cute:) an 8 year old girl and 12 year old boy. We started talking to them about the gospel and asked if we could do an FHE with them! They WERE SO WILLING!!!WHAT?! MIRACLES!!!

This friday we had the best FHE them about families and they are wanting to learn more:)

What do we learn from this?! That we must always listen to the promptings of the spirit!The first one! we just have to humbly and bravely obey and act!

This week sister Lin and I also put on a killer english class. It was How to Bake Chocolate Chip Cookies. Our class usually only has about 4-5 people, but since we announced it last week and got everyone excited we had 15 people come and 5 of them were new students! Cookies for Jesus! it was a blast. Everyone loved it. Cookies+the restored gospel of Jesus Christ=MAGIC.

This week really did have so many fun little moments, here's a few more.

-we went on exchanges with the other sisters in our apartment!

-On exchange sister Liu and I taught an english lesson, that was tricky, but she was way cool!

-Sister Lin and i hugged all the grandmas we talked to.

-A 5 year old boy gave me his number:) he wants to date jane:) hahahaha

-and much more!

Conference was so wonderful this week. I was so filled with the spirit and it was an awesome self check for me. I am so grateful and know that Thomas S. Monson is the prophet on the earth today. He is Gods messenger. Listen to Him! Read your scriptures dang it!

Listening to conference

Sister Lin LOVES Emma's hammock:)

But really, conference was awesome. One of our investigators loved it so much.She came to all the sunday sessions, than when it was done, she looked and me and said, "Was that all true?! Where can I pay tithing!" What?! She is truly awesome. 

Her name is Zhang Yue Mei. We met her earlier this week.She is a referral from taipei that lives in our area. We went by her house this wednesday and got to know her. She is struggling. She is 60 years old and her husband just passed away last year. She is living in pain and sadness and does not know how to escape. We shared with her #becauseofhim and she just started to bawl. All she could say was, "wow. They filmed this really well."She is really cute. She is so ready and excited to keep learning more about the plan of salvation.

Ok! Now for the funniest story of the week to finish all this jazz off. Alright so saturday night we had a pass off lesson with some of the elders from the 3rd ward. I'll cut to the chase and just say that the investigator is a little nuts, a little crazy, and we were dead tired after the lesson. 

Sister Lin and I were pooped, we were going to grab some dinner and sister Lin was like, I know what we can eat! "鹹酥雞 Click here to see a picture of what Emma ate!" I was like "Ok!" I had never eaten it before, Basically it's just a ton of mushrooms, vegetables, meat, and everything you can imagine all put in a fryer and then drenched in seasoning.

Taidong friends!

I was STARVING! We ran home to eat it and I took one bite and it tasted pretty good. Then my stomach started to do backflips, I was like, that's

weird, maybe I just have gas. So I kept eating. I took a few more bites and could just feel the oil running down my throat. like SO much. after about like 5 minutes of eating my stomach was screaming for help! I went to the bathroom and basically died for 20 minutes! I pooped my guts out and then got hives all over my stomach, my eye and mouth got swollen like none other. My comp was dying:)!! So I took some benedryl and CRASHED the rest of the night. the next day I woke up no problem:) They think I have a allergy to high doses of MSG. neat. 

so ya. This week was really really awesome. Till next!!

xoxooxoxoxox

emma