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