9-22-2014

9-22-2014

Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 11:38:44 +0800
Subject: The wise man built his house upon a rock
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello Family!!!

This went by really well, we were working hard were able to do some crazy traveling and biking and were just having fun talking to each other and doing the work.

This week started off pretty well, I e-mailed a little earlier last week because here in Donggang there is a small island that is in our area called xiao liu qiu or something like little flowing ball, but it is just a small island that we can go to, so we left the door a little early to head out to there.  We went there with a really cool member and were able to explore a lot of that, I'll put those pictures out in dropbox so you can all see them.  But once that was over it was time to jump into some real missionary work.

So this week really had about 3 really big events that happened, the first one being that this week was Zone Conference, which was really good.  Our Mission President wanted the Conference to be focused on the missionary purpose and why we are doing all the things that we do during our day.  I really liked from is was that the missionary purpose that is at the very beginning of PMG "Invite others to come unto Christ by helping them receive the restored gospel through faith in Jesus Christ and his atonement, Baptism, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost and enduring to the end" was just a summary of was we are trying to do, and with a little more study we can really learn what that truly means to us as missionaries as well as to everyone, which after telling us this he went on to say that everything that we do here in missionary work is all supposed to be a means to an end, we are contacting people not just so that we have a lot of people to teach but rather so that we can find those people that are prepared to come unto Christ.  We teach not to increase our numbers or so that people can learn about church, but rather so that people can come unto Christ and can change their lives.  It really got me thinking why I was here and why I was doing each of these activities, are they just the "end" for me, just finding so that I can say that I did or was I truly trying to bring people unto Christ. Things to think about.

But after that inspirational Zone Conference we also had the chance to have Stake Conference in our stake, which required an hour long bus drive out to Kaohsiung to be able to get to the stake center that is out there... or at least it would have required it if a Taiphoon didn't hit PingDong this week end which because of it they actually canceled stake conference and church for the day... super weird, but that was one of my special experiences this week was that for the first Sunday on my mission I was not able to go to church of any sort because they canceled it... But it was ok because we had a little more time to look through our records that we had at the house and were able to find some really cool people that we were able to set up with during this next week, so I was happy with it.

Finally I just want to mention one of our investigators here because it has been interesting to be able to see the change that is going on with him.  It is guy that my companion and the elder that I replaced found and had met with one time, he goes by the name of Brother Chen and is really cool, the first time that I met with him we had a plan that we wanted to share with him the Plan of Salvation, and just see what he thought of it, but as we were starting it off we realized that it was going to be a bit of an out of control lesson, he would make some random comment and go off on a tangent to the point that I think we ended our first meeting discussing with him weather or not Vampires existed ( not really sure how the topic got changed to that =/ ) but as we have continued meeting with him we have been able to see that he is slowly getting more focused in what we are teaching him and he seems to go on less and less tangents as we continue discussing the church with him and I am excited to be able to help him come unto Christ.

Well that is pretty much all for this week, hope that you are all having a great time and are planning on having a great week!

Love you all!