July 29 2013

Hello everyone! Hope you are all well. Last week was great! The only exception that I was (and am) sick. For four days (Starting from when I woke up on Wednesday, to Saturday evening), I had a sore throat. Now that that is gone, a cold has moved in instead, starting yesterday and continuing right now. It is all fine though, I took some medicine and life as a missionary went on as normal :)

The biggest news of last week is that I had a baptism! Sort of :) Remember that fellow I talked about a while ago who went back to Taiwan, Gaoxiong? He was baptized last Saturday in the ward there. I've been in touch with him ever since he left and he sent me pictures from the baptism. He is the first person to be baptized who I found personally. Incidentally, his friends in Australia (the ones he lived with while he was here) came to English class last Tuesday. :)  [Editor's note: this is the friend who lent him his phone to call for Mother's Day, so we got to meet and talk to him] 

We had less lessons this past week than the week before as we adjust, but it was still a good week. The highlights were the dinners we had with members, and what happened at church. [Editor's note: grrr, I've taught him the correct usage of terms "less" and "fewer"!!] 

On Wednesday we had dinner at the house of the 1st councilor in Elder's Quorum. One of his house mates is not a member, so he invited him along in addition to the investigators we brought. It was a very good experience, especially for the nonmember house mate. It was his first time meeting missionaries from our Church in such an environment. The funny thing is that the member, who almost forgot about the dinner they signed up for and so prepared at the last minute, bought Tiramisu for dessert without thinking... Instead, we enjoyed some nice ice cream and Milo :) (Milo is an Australian thing, like Nesquik except made of malted barley, not chocolate)

Thursday was a bit of a disappointment because we had two lessons (including dinner at a member's house) fall through. However, Friday made up for it because of dinner at a member's house where we discussed baptism with our investigator from Peru. He really wants to be baptized, he just wants to know if the Book of Mormon is true first, so we committed him to read and pray. It went well. [Editor's note: the Friday meal was at with the nephew of a friend I've made on a missionary mom's email group - fun connection]

At church on Sunday, we had not one... not two... not three... not even four, five, or six but SEVEN people who were invited by friends to come and came along! One was the friend of a recent Chinese convert, the others were a group of friends from Taiwan who came with one of their friends who was invited by a member. On top of this, we had three of our own investigators at church. We had our work cut out for us, haha.

After church we did some finding, then our investigator who recently returned from Bundaberg invited us to her house for dinner. She moved in with members less than a month ago. She is still quitting smoking, our lesson after the meal was focused on how she can receive the help to do that.

Turns out my companion is scared of snakes, by the way. :) One of the members has two pet snakes (one is almost 3 meters long, the other about half that size or less) and, without warning snuck the smaller snake out of its cage and surprised my companion with it.

That's all for the week. Hope everyone has a good one! Take care!

Elder J. Colton Ladd