10/24/2016 P-Day #105...This is it!

10/24/2016

大家好!

Well it's over now... Crazy how soon it happened. Thankfully this was a really good last week!

Tuesday we spent basically the whole day at the mission office! We got a new car for my last week! We've been rolling around in a 2017 Chevy Malibu for the past few days and I have loved every minute of it! It comes with 4G LTE Wifi! What car needs wifi? Better question, what missionary needs a car with wifi?? We were stuck in the mission office all day because the had to switch the TIWI's, the obnoxious little box that tracks your driving, into the new cars. More importantly, we got to pick up Elder Willes from the mission office on Tuesday! He flew in from the MTC Tuesday morning and got to hang out in the office with us until around 3:00 pm! Poor kid! He was exhausted! I'm sad that I only got to serve with him for a week because he is an amazing missionary! He's got the fire and is excited to work. I'm excited to see what happens for him during the next two years!

While we were at UCR this week, we found a lot of really amazing people! I hope they will start to progress after I leave! On Friday, just Elder Willes and I went over the the campus because we wanted to see if we would have more success with just two people instead of three. It went really well! We found this one kid named Patrick, who actually lives in Eastvale by us! We had a pretty long conversation with him and Elder Willes just asks him if we can say a prayer with him right in the middle of the college campus! It went well and we sent the referral to the elders serving in the YSA ward! We also went to go check out the huge botanical garden at UCR and ran into a group of Chinese students over there! Unfortunately they go back to China this week, but all the girls were incredibly impressed with our Chinese skills and wanted to take about two billion pictures with us! Haha!

Sunday was a great last Sunday! I gave a talk in our Chinese sacrament meeting. My topic was "What have I learned as a missionary." I wasn't quite sure how to sum all that up into a ten minute talk, so I decided to share the message the we share the most: The Restoration! The speakers before me were "kind" enough to give me plenty of time to give my talk (about 20 minutes) and thankfully I know the Restoration well enough in Chinese to drag it out for a while! 

Well since I will be able to talk to most of you tomorrow, I'll keep this pretty short. I want to share my testimony that I know Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He is our Savior and Redeemer. Through Him we can become clean through repentance, obedience, and faithfully serving Him to the end. Then we have the promise that He will give us eternal life, the greatest of all the gifts of God. I can't express how grateful I am for the past two years and the experiences I have had. God has helped me learn how to rely on Him and His Son. 

I love and miss you all! See you soon :)

Elder Warren

吴长老

10/14/2016 P-Day #104

10/17/2016

大家好！

Thanks Tenley for the letter this week! 

Well this week went by incredibly fast! I probably say that every week, but whenever I sit down to write this email, my mind is just blown by how quickly it goes by! I feel like I was just writing last week's email!

We found an amazing family this week! We were visiting a less active family, the Pu's, and their friend asked us if they could come to church with us! They have gone to Christian churches in China and haven't been baptized yet! It's even funnier because this is the same house where we found the Li's and Liu Ting Ting! Hopefully things continue to go well with them!

I love when members make dumplings for dinner but the problem is that they make tooons of them and expect us to eat them all! I probably ate over 25 dumplings at one meal this week and felt like I was going to explode! Thankfully they taste delicious!

Moving apartments this week was quite stressful! The office elders were supposed to come bring us beds and all the other necessities, such as plates, silver ware, tables, chairs, desks, etc. When they showed up they had nothing with them. They thought they were just going to help move a bed from another apartment and that was it! So we had to wait a few more hours for them to come back and bring the stuff with them! We unloaded all the stuff into the apartment and started to organize all of it! Then we realized that they had forgotten to bring us some essentials, such as trash cans, shower curtains, and bath mats... So we ended up waiting another few hours for a senior couple to come and bring that stuff with them! They ended up not bringing it with them because the office elders said they could bring it to us that night... So long story not very short, last P-day was quite stressful! But we're settled in now and all is well :)

Saturday was a busy day for us! We had lunch with Brother Yang at a Vietnamese restaurant! It was quite good! He told us that he want to be baptized, but because his daughter disagrees and she is their translator and chauffeur, he doesn't want to rock the boat. Hopefully he will eventually be able to! We'll see what the Lord has in store. We also went and visited Sister Wang, and had a really good lesson with her. Unfortunately she is too "busy" to come to church and won't commit to coming. Oh well. It's going to be a slower process for her!

We also went to go help our zone leaders in their area because they have been struggling a little bit. I went with Elder Wood to go seeking with faith. We prayed before hand to set up return appointments with five people. As we were talking with people, nobody was very interested! It was a little bit frustrating! Before we even started talking to one man, he yelled out "I'm not interested!" Elder Wood responded with "I haven't even offered you anything!" It was pretty funny because the man didn't know how to respond! We talked to him and he told us about a neighbor that needs some help with service. Then we talked to one guy who lived down the street for almost an hour! He had so many good questions that the Plan of Salvation perfectly answers! He also had some crazy ideas where he believes the Jesus was just a magician and didn't actually perform miracle. He just fooled everyone.. But he was very willing to let us back into his home the following weekend! And guess how many people are in his family!? FIVE! It's funny how the Lord works some times. He always answers our prayers, but it may not be in the way that we expect it!

Well I love and miss all of you and am excited to see you all next week! Keep serving the Lord with your all and He will bless you!

Love,

Elder Warren
吴长老 

10/10/2016 P-Day #103

10/10/2016

大家好,

Hellooo everybody! Hope you all had an awesome week!

This week went by pretty well for us! We moved again this morning! Woohoo! We are moved to the building right next door to us! Since we will be in a trio the last week of this transfer and there will be three elders here after I leave, they wanted to give us an apartment with two bathrooms! We're just waiting for the office elders to come and bring all of our new furniture! So right now everything is sitting in a pile in our living room!

This week we had some really good days at the UCR campus! We talked to a lot of people and found some investigators that have a lot of good potential! 

Last week we had called a former investigator and she was super excited to have us come back and visit her! We drove 25 minutes over to her house in Corona and when she knocked on the door she looked really surprised! She told us "Oh, I thought you were Christian missionaries that were calling me.. Not Mormons!" We tried to explain that we are Christians, but she was not taking it! Haha so she gave us some water and then asked us to leave. She said we could try coming back in a few years because their opinions might have changed by then!

We also met this super cool family in the park and went to go see them on Saturday! The husband's younger sister went to school at USU and was baptized there! They said she's married now and is working/living in Salt Lake City! Small world! It's crazy to see how the Lord prepares His children to receive His gospel.

Things at UCR are going pretty well! We just walk on the campus and talk with people all day! It can get pretty monotonous, so we have to find ways to make it interesting! We're teaching two English classes now! We have one at UCR and one in Eastvale! The one at UCR is only on Fridays, so we have to split with other missionaries in order to teach both classes! It's pretty crazy! We have a couple students that come to the UCR  class, but hopefully we'll get more coming! I like the UCR English class a lot more! The students there already speak pretty good English, so we'll play games with them  and find ways to help them practice speaking. At Eastvale it's a lot of memorizing vocabulary which can be pretty boring at times! Last Friday we played Apples to Apples with our class and it was a lot of fun! Two of our students are a couple in their 70's from Taiwan! They are soooo funny! The husband worked as a professor at a bunch of different universities all around the world! So he speaks fluent Portugese, English, Chinese, and Taiwanese! The wife is still working on English, but she's doing very well!

Well that was the majority of our week! Love and miss all of you!

Love,

Elder Warren

吴长老

10/3/2016 P-Day #102

10/3/2016

大家好!

This week was soooo slow until the weekend! It seemed like nothing was working out for us. I can't count how many weeks happen like this, where the Lord waits until the very last minute to bless us! Maybe there's something I still need to learn!

As of this past week, we cover two proselyting areas! Due to a lack of Chinese-speaking missionaries, we cover both Eastvale and the UCR college campus areas! We spend 1.5 days over at the UCR campus and the rest of the week at Eastvale. It's been pretty slow since we're starting with absolutely nothing! They all just got back in school, so we have to find a lot of new investigators! Since Elder Zeng has served there before and will be coming back to Eastvale when I leave, we got to go on exchanges with him to start working in UCR! I went with him Wednesday and Thursday this week to go walk around on the campus. We also teach an English class there every Friday night, so Elder Yang and I will have to split up to teach that! 

This Friday was our multizone conference and it was sooo long! We had to be at the church at 7:00 am and we didn't leave until around 4:30 pm! It was a super spiritual experience, though! At the end, we had a testimony meeting and all the new missionaries and the ones that are leaving go up and bear their testimonies. It was a super weird feeling. My head knows that I only have a few weeks left, but it doesn't feel like it's happening yet. I also sang a musical number with a sister missionary who goes home next transfer. We sang "God Be With You 'Til We Meet Again". Quite a few people started crying! Haha

And then this weekend was General Conference! I loved it so much! I was thinking about what I wanted to share, but I couldn't pick a single talk that I liked the most. They were all amazing! The trending theme seemed to be true repentance and truly coming to know our Savior! I loved the member of the Seventy (his name was really long and Japanese so I don't remember it haha) that talked about being ambitious for Christ! I've been reading through Alma and it's amazing to see as the people were following Christ, giving their all, the Lord blessed them! He didn't just make the Lamanites *poof* and disappear, even though He could have, but He gave them the strength to keep going and keep fighting. I think of the stripling warriors, where none of them were killed in battle because of their strong faith, but all of them were wounded. We're going to receive our own wounds, physical and spiritual, but that's why we have the Atonement. There's no scar or wound that our Savior's sacrifice can't heal! I also loved the talks on the Book of Mormon. The stories inside it have come alive for me these past two years. I get excited when I get to read from it every morning. It's changed my life and I love sharing it with others because I know it will change their lives as well! I hope all of you will take some time every day, it doesn't have to be long, to strengthen or develop your testimony of the Book of Mormon. It's the word of God and has a power to help us face our lives towards the Savior.

When names are translated into Chinese, they often do the translation by sound. The word for Christ is 基督. Before a week or so ago, I hadn't really thought about what each individual character meant. 基 means a foundation, or base. 督 means a governor, or to oversee, to superintend. Christ is the foundation of all that we do, of everything we have, and of everything we are. It is through His sacrifice that we can become someone better. He is also the head of His church. He is watching over us and guiding His work on this earth. If we are built on His foundation then we have no need to fear because He will lead us. I love my Savior and His doctrine. I'm striving every day to apply the Atonment!

I love and miss you all!

Love,

Elder Warren

吴长老