12-15-2014

12-15-2014

Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 13:17:39 +0800
Subject: Blasting through the week
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello the family!!

This week has gone by pretty good, the whole mission is getting ready for Christmas and we are getting really excited as this month we will probably be having the most baptisms in a month than we have had in quite awhile.  Also we here in Donggang are still looking forward to be able to try to get a baptism this month, however we might not be able to... we will see more on that in just a little bit.

This week started off pretty good, we were really trying to focus on our person that wanted to get baptized this next Sunday, and so we wanted to meet with her twice this week, outside of Church to really try to teach her everything that she needed to know. So we met with her on Tuesday and have a good lesson with her, however later the next day, she sends us a texts telling us that she is beginning to see that she doesn't quite know enough about the gospel yet and wants to delay the baptism to a little later.  Naturally we were a little bit sad about it, but we understood what she wanted, and so we visited her the next day and tried to firm up some of the doctrine for her, it was also a good lesson, however she has not quite set the new date for the baptism quite yet.  but I am hopeful that she will be ready for this by the 27th.

Other than that this week we had a bit of a funny story.  One of our biggest goals that we had this week was that we wanted to be doing a little bit better with our finding of new investigators, and so we were trying to think of good ways to find people, and we decided to do some music contacting.  It was kind of fun, however there weren't many people who really wanted anyone singing to them on the road, so we reevaluated and decided to try again on the beach, as there is a bit of a beach in our area with a lot of fishermen, so we head out there and are walking along talking to everyone that we pass or see, but we reach this stretch of beach with nobody there, however there were a bunch of palm trees... with some good ripe-ish coconuts (they were still green but everyone sells green coconuts here) hanging from the tree.  So my companion grabs a rock and chucks it at the tree and manages to knock one down, and so I follow suit and do the same.  afterwards we find ourselves a rock and break open the coconut for some delicious coconut water. It was a lot of fun, I'll send you pictures of it next week =)

Finally this week we were able to able to find a cool new investigator by the name of Amanda Chen, she is someone that we met through our English class and she was willing to meet with us later in the week about the gospel, it turns out that she is really interested in religion and that she is very wiling to learn more about us, so we will see what comes from that.

Well that's about it for this week, not super exciting but there was still some fun stuff that happened, hope that you all had a great week!

Love you all!!

12-8-2014

12-8-2014

Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2014 12:56:22 +0800
Subject: The Party and other things
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello the family!!

This week has gone by really well, we were able to work really hard but also able to have a lot of time to relax and to just be able to think of what we need to do.

The week started really on Tuesday where we were able to have our ZTM or zone training meeting, which means that we had to take a good couple of hours out of our day in order to be able to go to that, and afterwards the zone leaders wanted to go on exchanges with us which meant that the next day would have some time taken out of it in order to be able to accommodate for that, but it was really fun and I learned a lot about just making sure to talk to everyone no matter the situation or what they are doing, you never know when you will run into a prepared soul.

After that however my week jumps over to Thursday which we figured out was going to our Christmas party!!  We woke up early in the morning and headed out to a place called Fo Guang Shan or the Buddhist light mountain, if you translate it.  Its an interesting place, really just a giant Buddhist temple, but our mission president took us there for the day to tour it and to be able to just talk with all of the missionaries, it also gave me the chance to get some good presents for everyone so you can all look forward to that.  But it was lots of fun and I got to see most of the missionaries that I had been able to meet during the time that I have been out, and it was just a good chance to be able to relax.

Finally the coolest thing that we had happen this week was with one of our investigators, a Sister Wang, we have been working with her for a little bit, and lately had been trying to focus the teaching on Baptism, so we went up to her house on Friday and shared a good message on baptism and she mentioned that she was a little bit worried that her step parents would oppose her changing her religion, but then her son turns to her and just goes off on a shpeal saying that the worries that she has are mostly in her head and any of them that are real can easily be fixed if she just has enough faith and courage to take the next step and to "Give herself to Christ" it was a little shocking to me to see such boldness from him, but afterwards we asked her to set a baptismal date, she promised us that she would pray about it.  The following Sunday she comes up to us and says that she has gotten her answer and that she would like to be baptized on the 21st!! I can definitely say that it was an answer to both our prayer and hers that she got that answer and that I am totally excited to be able to keep working with her.  I love the gospel and how it can truly change peoples lives. 

That's about it for this week, I hope that you are all enjoying your time down there in the good old US of A and know that I'm doing good here as well.

Love you all!

12-1-2014

12-1-2014

Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2014 12:06:17 +0800
Subject: The tour of the mission and the invite to be Baptized!
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello the Family!

This week was really good, I have been having a good time with my new companion, and we have just been tearing it up here in Dong gang, the week has been kind of fun just traveling to and from some activities, but in the end we were sill able to get a lot of good work done.

Well the week started out with a Mission Tour where Elder Gong, one of the 70's who is president of the Asia Area came and visited our mission.  As part of his visit he invited every missionary in the mission to memorize the baptismal invite in PMG as well as the first vision, word for word, so I put a little more effort in really getting it down word for word and we had a really good meeting.  One of the biggest things that I got from the whole meeting was to make sure that everyone knows what our purpose is when we meet with them, and why we are in Taiwan, and so throughout the rest of the week we refocused and were more direct in inviting all to come unto Christ and to be Baptized!

After the mission tour things kind of continued as normal until we get to English class on Wednesday night, where we were able to have some new students arrive that were happy to be able to come and meet with us later in the week.  As it turns out one of the people that we talked to from the English class had been to Temple Square before and was really interested in learning more about the church, so we are now working with her to really get her to understand what the church is all about as well as to get her to really come to know Heavenly Father.

Finally the last big thing that happened this week was on Saturday.  Our branch president invited us to to up to Kaohsiung with him to participate in a Stake History Exhibit, it was kind of fun to be able to learn about the history of the Stake here in Taiwan and how before there was a temple in Taiwan people used to have to go to the Tokyo Japan temple in order to do all of those ordinances.  There was a man there who really liked to collect things, and he brought out a flier talking about how to get to the Temple there, it made me really grateful that I have always been able to have a temple really close to where I live as well as to be able to get their quite easily.

Well that's just about it for this week.  Hope that you are all having a great week! Know that I'm still sweating bullets out here. But it is truly the promised land for me and these people here, so I am having a great time.

Love you all!

11-24-2014

11-24-2014

Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 12:32:14 +0800
Subject: The blaze of a new companion
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello everybody!!

This week has gone by really well, it has been a little weird as we were able to kind of have 2 P-days this week which kind of threw everything here fora  little bit of a loop, but at the end of it I got a new companion, an Elder Teasdale or a 狄長老 (Di zhang lao) who is super funny, he is also from Utah, however his mother is from South America, so he has a little bit of those roots and speaks pretty good Spanish, which is fun to hear =)

Well this week went by pretty well, my old companion Elder Hansen spent most of the week just kind of trying to see those people that he would miss or that he wanted to see, so it was pretty fun just going around and saying hi to those people. so that was kind of going on throughout this whole week.

Other than that though is that right now in our mission I think I already mentioned is that we are doing a "Faith and Diligence week" to try to add more faith and power to the mission, last week the mission president invited everyone in the mission to get 6 people to come to church in this last Sunday, so me and Elder Hansen, and afterwards Elder Teasdale jumped on the invite and just started inviting everyone to come to church, which really started to help us find those people that were willing.  One person was this cool guy that Elder Hansen contacted, he is an insurance salesman and even though we had been keeping in contact with him we for the past 3 weeks were not able to get any time to meet with him, however this week, after constantly inviting him to come over to the church, we were finally able to give him a chapel tour, afterwards we shared a little bit with him about the gospel and even though he didn't really have time this week to come to church he said that he would work on finding time in the coming weeks.

The other big story that we have is there is a super cool member here by the name of Brother Xie （謝）he has been less active for a little bit because he had started smoking a little, and felt unworthy, so many elders had been working with him before, however we recently invited him to once again start trying to quite smoking and this last Tuesday he happily told us that he had finally gone 1 full week with out smoking at all.  It was a super cool experience, as I had not helped anyone up to this point to quit any addictions, but he was super excited and is now finally starting back on the path of progression!

Finally to end the week, our ward, to have more activities that people wanted to come to, decided that they wanted to have a thanksgiving activity, and so yesterday night (Sunday) the ward got together and figured out how to cook 2 turkeys (once again you have to realize that nobody in Taiwan really knows how to use an oven and many have never even seen one) and made mashed potatoes and gravy and just had a great time, so I was able to have a little bit of a thanks giving feast of some sort, we were also able to get one of our cool investigators there, a brother Chen who is really working hard on progressing in the gospel and trying to get to know Christ.

Sorry for the kind of crazy e-mail, not super organized this week, but things are going good.  Hope that you all had a great thanksgiving and that you are just all enjoying life!

加油！

11-17-2014

11-17-2014

Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 11:28:55 +0800
Subject: The Crazy Transfers
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello Family!

This week has gone by pretty well, we have been having fun and the work is going pretty well, so all in all its been a really good week!

This month, as we are having a mission tour soon and just to be able to improve morale and stuff in the mission, President Blickenstaff has decided that November would be "Faith and Diligence" month, with each week having a specific thing that he would want us to read during personal study, as well as having a specific goal that we would be trying to achieve, this week our goal was to get 50 "adds" or just to find 50 people that haven't set up a time with you, to set up a specific place and time to meet.  It was lots of fun and really got our contacting a lot more focused than it had been in awhile and I was able to enjoy a little more all of that time that we have to go outside and talk to people.  However by the end of the week we weren't able to find 50 people, but we found a good amount and I was happy with the effort =)

Here's a nice funny story from the week.  We have this investigator, she is super cool and her son is a member, she is progressing really well and her surname is Wang, the only problem that we have is that she lives in the furthest part of our area, in a secondary area called Fang shan.  Now we have already gone out there to visit her before, and it was a super cool trip that you were pretty much biking right next to the ocean and its just a super scenic bike ride, however the first time that we had done the trip it took us two and a half hours... but we were determined to keep visiting with her during the week, and so we set up a day to go out there to meet with her, and started going.  eventually we were starting to get close and were starting to see some of the land marks that we remembered from the first time that we had gone there, when suddenly we round a corner, and we had arrived, in half the amount of time that we had planned, meaning it only took us 1:15 to get there... so that left us a little bit of thinking time as we figured we didn't really need a good backup plan for travel time (bad idea) but that's kind of our funny story for the week.

Finally to explain the subject, lately the new missionaries that were going to come here to Taiwan have been having some troubles getting their visa's (not as bad as Brasil) and because of that our mission has not had new missionaries here for a good 3 months or 2 transfers or so.  But just this last week our mission president got a call that said that we would be getting missionaries on Saturday.  Now the new missionaries normally arrive on Tuesday, our president just happy that we have new missionaries decided that to best accommodate the new missionaries, he would change the transfer day from Monday to Friday, and also change P-day with it, but that we would still be e-mailing on Monday, so just to let you all know, its not my P-day right now (weird) but they did give us a little bit of notice and told us that my companion Elder Hansen would be moving, however where he is going and who my new companion is we still don't know.  but we will eventually find out.

Well that's just about it for this week, the weather is finally starting to cool off a little bit and maybe I might even start wearing a light jacket soon or long sleeve shirts, I don't know but until then keep cool!

Love you all

Elder Heaton

11-10-2014

11-10-2014

Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 11:54:56 +0800
Subject: Off to the beach!!
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello the family!!

This week has gone by pretty well, we were able to have some fun at ZTM and to be able to to off to Kaohsiung, later in the week there was some pretty crazy traveling which has left me sore up until now and to end it off we had a great Sunday, so lets start it off.

First off for some interesting Taiwanese culture, one of the more common of Taiwanese restaurants for a family to go eat at includes a biggish round table with a round part in the middle of the table that can spin, then each person would get a small bowl of usually white rice, and they would put everything else that will be eaten in the middle of the table then when you want to eat something you just turn the middle part of the table till the thing you want is in front of you and you would put it on your rice or on a small plate that you have.  This week we had a member treat us to one of these which is always kind of fun, and the member really loves to eat fish, and so he ordered a ton of fish including sashimi, which is just raw fish, really good, but that was just kind of a fun little thing that I ate this week.

The next day was our English class, and because this week was technically the last week of transfers, we had our Halloween English party, which was pretty fun, we put some members in the various classrooms in the church and had people go around and "trick or treat" and in each room there was a small game for them to play and some candy. Of course me and my companion had to dress up and so I found an old dirty white shirt in our apartment, ripped it up and was a zombie, while my companion found a cloak and was going to be Gandalf, but in the end I think he told everybody that he was Moses, (pictures are in dropbox) But it was a lot of fun and we are slowly starting to get the people that are attending English class to start meeting with us, woo!

finally I think the biggest thing that we did this week was our massive bike ride.  Last Sunday we had a new Member move in, and as he came to church last week he brought his mother with him who was a non-member, we talked with them and set up a time to meet with them, then we found out that they lived in the furthest part of our area.  So we found our most empty day (Thursday) and just started biking down there, it was a ton of fun, and that part of our area is pretty much nothing but beach, and so you just got to bike down starting out at the ocean.  When we finally got to their house we had a great lesson with her and got her to pray, which actually caused her to really feel the spirit, and to begin to cry.  It was truly the experience for me to see the spirit work on someone even during their first prayer.

Well that was just about it for this week, things are going well and we are working on finding fun ways of finding new people.  Hope that everyone is having a great week and is all getting over their colds! 

Love you all!

11-3-2014

11-3-2014

Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2014 11:57:55 +0800
Subject: The Holidays
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello the family!!

Well this week has gone by fairly well,  we were working hard to be able to keep in contact will all of our current investigators as well as trying to find some new ones that would have time to meet with us, all in all we were able to see a lot of people and a lot of success.  I have been pretty happy with the week and with how the area is progressing right now!

Well this week started off pretty good, lately we have really been working on improving the English class that we offer here in Donggang and so with that we have been really focused on trying to get more people to come and to make sure that we are both prepared with a good amount of material as well as a good spiritual share that would help people come to church.  And so as part of that we have been spending about an hour a week trying to get as many people to come to our English class as possible, and it paid off, this last week the class that I taught had around 20 people who are all trying to start learning English, to say I was a little nervous would be an understatement but it was lots of fun to be able to teach a little bit of English, and in the end I was able to have a good discussion about prayer and communicating with God, the people there loved it and we are starting to see a little bit of success because of it.

Later in the week, because we were able to see such a good turn out from the English class we decided to try to take the methods that we were using to advertise the English class and try to get some people excited to come and just tour the church, so we made a poster, asking some basic questions about the gospel and just started going to work, it was a little crazy and didn't work quite as I was imagining that it would work, however at the end of the time that we spent, we were able to find a couple of prepared people that said that they would try to find some time to meet with us. it was lots of fun and we were enjoying it.

Finally to end the week, as we were going to church on Sunday, we normally go about an hour early to start up the AC and to set up some of the chairs.  While we were doing this however, 2 people came into the chapel, a brother Li who was a member in Taichung city (or Taizhong city) but had moved to our little town because we was waiting to start his military service, (in Taiwan every male has to spend 1 year in military service as part of their laws, people normally do it right after highschool but you can wait till after you have graduated college if you want) but the really cool thing was that he also brought his mother with him, who happened to be a non-member, so we wasted no time in getting to know them both and giving the mother a basic introduction of the gospel and we were able to set up a time with them later in the week that we would go share more with them, so I am excited for that!

Well thats about all that happened this week, Hope that everyone else is having a great time

Elder Heaton

何長老

10-27-2014

10-27-2014

Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 11:47:41 +0800
Subject: 
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello the Family!!

I have been doing well this week, he were trying really hard to be able to share the gospel with as many as possible and we were able to find some really cool people because of it.

This week started off really great.  On Tuesday we were really pumped up and ready to go out and to preach the gospel.  And so most of our time on Tuesdaywas spent finding.  At the end of the day we had found a couple of potential people but no body who really seemed that they were truly prepared to hear the gospel.  I was getting a little bored of finding at that point but my companion suggested that we go do some tracting.  We go to a tiny little neighborhood that's just out in the country side, turn down a tiny little road and find a small group of about 6 houses that are all close together, so we stop there, and as I'm looking around I notice that all of the houses 2nd floor is glowing with the red light of a Taoist or a Buddhist altar, so I was a little skeptical that this would work but we prayed and started going at it.  The first 3 houses were all kind of a fail, but as we got to the 4th house. We start talking to a girl and one of the first things that she says to us was, "do you want to come in and sit down?" now in Taiwanese culture it's normally polite to invite people in, so you have to be careful, but we kept talking with her and asked if we could watch a short video with them called "Finding Happiness" The girl goes to the back of the house to ask her parents if it was OK and the parents come out and invite us in.  However because the parents were a little older, they didn't know how to play a DVD on their TV and I didn't see any DVD player, so that was a bust, but afterwards they said that we could come back and share a message with them.  It was a really cool miracle.

Later that week we had already gone through a couple of days that just had no lessons and we were a little down but on Saturday we had quite a few people lined up that we could meet with.  I think my favorite one though was there was a member in the branch that needed help moving, so the branch president invited us and some other people to come help (he wanted us because the member couldn't speak Chinese, but could speak English) so we get there and what occurred was super crazy, the moving part of it was pretty normal, however as we were helping move things along, the flurry of languages came about and the people around us were speaking about 5 different dialogues of the Phillipian language, as well as Taiwanese, which neither me or my companion can speak, and probably more that I didn't understand, but it was quite the crazy bit of work just listening to all of the different languages that were going around.

And finally the biggest miracle that I think happened this week was that we have an investigator who seems really interested in the church.  He is a former investigator that has met on and off with missionaries over the past 2 years.  One of the problems that we were having with him though was that he was not really willing to come to church with us.  and I felt like that was really stopping his progression.  But this week we very specifically invited him to come, to put aside other things and to make it to church, after telling him this though he didn't really seem like he would come.  However as sacrament started my companion was bearing his testimony, and in walks our investigator.  It was super cool to be able to see him, and I know that he was blessed for it.

Well that's just about it for the week.  Hope that you all are going to have a great week!!

Love you all!

10-20-2014

10-20-2014

Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 12:59:25 +0800
Subject: 
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello the family!!

This week has gone by fairly well, we have been working on trying to find more people to teach as our pool here has been a little small for a bit, but as we are going along, I am having fun just enjoying being with my companion and hearing all him and meeting new people.

This week started pretty good, here in our mission, in order to see what missionaries are doing here in the field for language study to improve the language program at the MTC, they are having us do a quick language survey every 3 months where we have to speak into a microphone and use Chinese to answer some random question or situation.  Its kind of weird, but as we were going to do it in the chapel, we discovered that the internet was down at the chapel, so we went to a nearby members house to do it and got to get to know them, the member family is really fun, the dad only has one arm and is quite the artist, while the wife is in a wheelchair, they are a super cool family and their kids are really fun, so as we were doing the survey I just kind of hung around their little kids and goofed off with them.

Later in the week, I think I had one of the more crazy experiences in Taiwan.  A couple of weeks ago we had gotten a referral from a Sister who had just barely gotten off of her mission in Taipei, however the problem was that when I called the number that she gave us a woman would answer that seemed to only speak Taiwanese, and so I had no idea what she was saying every time I called her until she would just get annoyed and just hang up on me.  So we asked this sister to set up the appointment for us as I was having the communication problem.  This week she called us up and asked us if we would be able to go to our furthest secondary area to go meet with this referral, of course we were willing and so when the day came, we hopped on the bus and took the 1.5 hour bus ride out to this tiny little town to visit this person.  When we got there, the Sister showed us to the house, and as I saw it, I was in a little bit of shock, mostly because it had a fence around it and within the fence was just tons and tons of barking, seemingly angry dogs.  It was a little dark at this time and she told us that her father would come and help us get through the gate and into the house.  When the dad arrived he was on a motor scooter and we just went in kind of a small circle, with dogs surrounding us and just barking at it.  It was super crazy, but when we got in the man was super cool, he had been christian all his life and was just kind of like a normal old guy, constantly telling you the same thing over and over again, and just having fun.  So it was totally worth it =)

And finally the last thing that happened this week was that this last Saturday, we had an appointment with one of our RC's at his house, so we were heading down to his house, about a 30 min bike ride away, and as we were about 10 minutes away from his house he calls us up and asks if he could reschedule to another day.  We talked a little bit and finally he canceled on us, and we decided that we would just head to a nearby town and just start tracting it up, so we start biking and not 10 seconds after we start heading out to the area, we head a loud popping noise and air leaking out of my companions tire... Lots of fun! So we started walking around and asking for the nearest bike shop that could help us fix the bike, which lead us to this old mans house who had a sign on his door that said "bike repairs." seeing as we didn't really have any other nearby option we had this man who couldn't really speak any Chinese start fixing my companions tire, in the end he got a new inner tube and a new outer tire, so we start heading back to our main area because we had a lesson at the church, and about 10 minutes later, my companion yells for me to stop, as his tire is flat again! Super crazy, so we walked back to our area and finally got the tire fixed at a little more professional place, but it was still quite the fun little walk =)

Well that's about it for this week, things are going well and the people that are willing to meet with us are still pretty cool.  Hope you are all having a great week!

Love you all!

Elder Heaton

10-13-2014

10-13-2014

Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 11:46:36 +0800
Subject: Running to and from Kaohsiung
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello the family!!!

Well this week has gone by really fast, I can hardly believe its already been a week, but we have been just kind of going all week, and with this week ending in conference (for me) I can't think of anything better to be doing! =)

Well looking up at the subject, this week we spent quite a lot of time just traveling up to our stake center in Kaohsiung (Gaoxiong) just because we had quite a lot of activities, starting on Tuesdaywhich was a Zone Training Meeting, so we took the hour bus ride to get down there and because we were down there we decided to find something interesting to eat that we couldn't really find in our area, which made us arrive a little late to the Meeting, however the thing that I didn't know was that our Mission President was going to be there, so I was a little put off by that, but it was a really good meeting.  But after that we went on exchanges with the Zone Leaders.

The next was really good, I was able to have some fun with the Zone Leader and we got to accomplish quite a lot, were able to find some new people to teach ect. but of course to end the exchange we had to go back to Kaohsiung, so that was a little more time out of our proselyting schedule.

Then of course we discovered on Monday that we would be having interviews with the mission president on Thursday, and so the next day after our exchanges, we went back up to Kaohsiung to the stake center to be able to do those interviews, which was ok but took a good amount of time out of our area, but we were able to get back early enough to be able to quickly refocus and to get back to work.

And finally the nail in the head for taking time out of our area was while we were watching General Conference, our branch president walked up to us and reminded us that the priesthood session of conference would be held up in Kaohsiung... so that was once again another trip up there...

But within all of that traveling we were still able to get quite a lot of work done and I was really pleased to be able to work with one of our really cool investigators.  He is a brother Chen who is a bit of a lazy guy, and so when we noticed that he didn't come to conference on Sunday we decided to go to his house and see why.  what came of it was a really cool lesson that we were able to have with him, to be able to really clearly invite him to come unto Christ, and we were able to get a real true and solid commitment out of him.  It was one of the better lessons that I have had on my mission and I can't wait to see what comes from it.

Well that's just about it for this week, hope that you are all having a great week, Love you all!!

Elder Heaton

10-6-2014

10-6-2014

Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 11:30:33 +0800
Subject: A week of efficiency!
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello family!

This week has gone by really well, me and my companion have been working hard and just having fun, enjoying the time that we have to spend here in Donggang and just smiling all the time.  We have been working hard to find new investigators as well as just to be able to keep this area going and it has been really fun =)

This last week was actually the first week of transfers although it didn't really feel like it to me or my companion because I moved halfway through last transfer, but during the beginning of the transfer we set some goals to try to be a bit more effective with our time and with what we were doing, and so we decided that we really wanted to try to not waste any time.  It has been quite the experience and rather tiring all at the same time, but I have found that there is so much more that you can accomplish when you are always trying to keep doing something rather than take a good 5 minutes after a lesson to just think before blazing back out into the heat again and we were able to see the blessings of doing so =)

One thing that we have really been working on improving this week has been our contacting skills, as we have been having a little bit of trouble lately finding some new people to teach we were trying to decide on something new to do, and what we ended up on was to do what we called power boarding, which is just that we made a sign that had 2 good thought provoking questions and we just went around one of the more populated streets in our area and just started asking everybody about it.  it was lots of fun and I found that it really made talking to people a lot more natural and a lot more fun, however I also realized that there were a ton of people who didn't really bother to read the sign and were just assuming that we were after money or something like that.  As we were doing it we walked up to some guy who was just relaxing in one of the super common blue Taiwanese trucks (I'll have to send you a picture of that someday) and we tried to ask him to read the question on the board and all he kept saying was "You should go talk to my boss over there, he's got more money, he's got time ect." it made me laugh a little bit just because that really is what most people think when someone that they haven't met just walks up and starts talking to them, they just want money, but we are trying to fix that =)

There have been a couple of people that we are really working with here now that are super cool, one of them is this really funny guy who is studying to become a nurse right now, it has been really cool to talk to him because he likes to just chat, but once you start talking about the gospel he listens super intently, and he is just super willing to believe what is being taught, unfortunately he doesn't really have too much time lately because as part of the whole nursing program here you have to spend most of your time in the hospital working with the doctors there, learning all that you can and you are always on call (like a normal doctor I guess) and so he has been having a lot of trouble finding time to meet with us or to come to church, but it's really cool to be able to see as we share about Christs atonement or as we share about Joseph Smith with him that you can truly see the spirit working in him and testifying to him, so I have been really enjoying the time that I have to meet with him.

Other than that though I don't really have too much to share about, this week has really just been normal missionary work, there wasn't really anything really special that happened this week or anything like that, just lots of hard work and trying to follow the spirit while doing so.  It has been really good and we have been having lots of fun! Hope that everyone else is doing great!

Love you all, have a good week!!

9-29-2014

9-29-2014

Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 11:57:11 +0800
Subject: If I could bike 100 Miles...
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello Family!!

Well this week has gone fairly well and I have been enjoying the time down here.  Sometime during the week I remember looking at my companion as we were biking down one of the long roads that are around here and just mentioning that it still feels like its pretty much summer here.  The heat here is still nice and warm and I am still sporting short sleeves and coming home covered in sweat every day, but its tons of fun and I enjoy being able to meet with all of the interesting people that are around here.

So this week was the last week of the Move call or transfers, and because of that we normally, for our English class, hold a small party, which we call an evaluation night.  We decided that this time we would have a small movie night, as well as make some cookies for all of the students, however, our English class in on Wednesday and we only really finalized our plans to actually have this party the day before.  So we had a fun time trying to find and prepare everything for the English party, which was quite interesting, and then as we get to the English class we realized that we hadn't really told anybody about the whole English party, so we just kind of told them as they walked in the door, and they just rolled with it, I thought it was really funny.

Well one thing about our area, or just most of the rural areas in the mission is that the boundaries are usually really big, so that you have more people that you can work with, so this week we had 3 lessons on 3 consecutive days all in one of our further away areas, that takes about an hour and a half to be able to bike to there.  So on Thursday we biked down there to be able to meet with a less active couple, who were both really cool but both had some reasons that they didn't really want to go to church.  So we shared some scriptures with them and then left. It was pretty fun and they were really nice.  But then the next day (Friday) we had another lesson with an investigator family, who just make me laugh every time I go there, the whole family is really fun and are really willing to sit down with us, however that also meant that we had another long bike ride way up there to be able to meet with them.  Then finally on Saturday we were set up with one of our RC's that lived in a different secondary area in the other direction so we biked down there which takes a good 45 minutes to get there and to be able to talk to him.  So that was my biking experience for the week =)

Finally to end the week we had church which always is a good time, however on Sunday morning we were spending a lot of time just trying to find someone who would be willing to go with us to Church, and even though we called everyone that we were meeting with we didn't get anyone to come.  I was feeling a little bit down about the whole thing, but after sacrament ended, I randomly got a call from one of our investigators that we hadn't really been able to meet with lately because he was working a lot and he said that he had made it to church.  It was super cool so see how all of the work that we had done paid off ad we were able to see a little success for the things that we were working for.

Well thats about it for this week, there wasn't really anything that was super special about it but I had fun. Things are going well here and I hope that the heat will quickly begin to fade away, but for now I'm still alright and we are doing well.  I know that this is the place that God wants me to be in right now and that this church is true.

Love you all, have a great week!!!