9/12/2016 P-Day #99

9/12/2016

大家好!

This week has been another crazy one for us! I can't believe the first  transfer with Elder Yang went by that fast! 

Last Monday we went to lunch with the Miaos and the Lis at a really yummy salad/soup buffet in Rancho Cucamonga. It was Alice Li's seventh birthday this week, so the Lis invited all of us to go out to lunch with them! It's funny to see them argue over who is going to pay the bill. In the Chinese culture you can't just split the bill between everyone's families, that would be incredibly rude. One person has to pay for the whole thing! So they've argue back and forth until someone finally gives in and lets the other person pay! Monday night, we went on splits. I went with Daniel, who's getting ready to go on his mission, to visit our investigator Tang Chen. We met him at English class and went to teach about the restoration. It went really well! He's very humble and really wants to find the truth! Unfortunately, he has to go back to China for about two weeks, but he's working towards being baptized on October 22nd!

On Wednesday we went on exchanges with the zone leaders and Elder Yang had the opportunity to take over the area for the first time. I think it was a good experience for him. He was a little worried, but he did pretty well! 

Thursday we went and met with Lucy, a referral we received last week. She actually lives in the Lasselle ward boundaries, so it was exciting to go back to Moreno Valley! Haha! She is super busy! She works at a restaurant and only has Thursdays off! She said she wants to talk to her boss, though, to find out if she can get Sundays off as well! Our lesson got cut short because her son, who lives with family in Beverly Hills, showed up to spend some time with her and go shopping. We're going back tomorrow to give her a tour of the church!

Thursday night, we went and visited Li Feng and his son, Jerry. They're the father and son that we met last week when we knocked on a former investigator's door. We had a really spiritual lesson with them. We originally were planning on teaching the Restoration, but as we were walking up to the door, we felt that we needed to teach about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It went really well! We're trying to help him feel ready to be baptized on the 24th of this month, because he leaves to go back to China on the 30th... His concern is that he's worried there won't be any members or church meetings in the city where he lives. We went back on Sunday night and taught about the Restoration. He's still a little worried about the church/China situation, but we can see that he's made a lot of progress just within this past week.

Saturday we went on splits again! I went with Daniel to go visit some former investigators and referrals, but nobody was home. We met some really nice people in the parks that said they wanted to come to English class! On our way home, we made a quick stop at Sonic for some milkshakes because we worked hard and needed some kind of reward haha!

Sunday was another good day! A less active member showed up to church with her mom who isn't a member! The daughter wants to start coming back to church, and her mom will be staying here for about six months! We're going by on Wednesday to see them!

Today was pretty crazy! We had to swap apartments with the sisters who live in the same complex as us! They will have another set of sisters coming to live with them, so they needed our apartment which had two bedrooms and two bathrooms. I was a little upset, but after seeing how roomy their apartment is, I won't complain! Haha 

Well we've got to get going, but I hope you all have an awesome week! Remember that God loves you and is aware of your circumstances!

Much love,

Elder Wu

9/5/2016 P-Day #98

9/5/2016

大家好!

Thanks Omie and Papa for the package this week!

This week felt slower for some reason. The time still flew by, but it seemed like the work went by slower. We were working really hard and doing everything we could! But we received some really solid referrals last week that we're going to go and visit this week! I'm super excited!

We were trying to find new people to teach this past week, so we went knocking on some doors where we knew investigators used to live at. We knocked on one door and found this one dad and his son who were super excited to see us and let us in! They've been in America for a few months but go back to China at the end of September. The son has been going to a Catholic school while they've been here and they've attended a Christian church a few times! The son loves learning about the Bible stories and really believes in Jesus Christ. The Dad isn't opposed, but not necessarily interested in believing it! He does, however, firmly believe that if everybody believed in Christianity, the world would be a much better place! Haha they came to church on Sunday and it seemed like they enjoyed it! They only stayed for sacrament meeting, but said that next week they would come to all of the meetings. I'm excited to work with them, even if it's only for a few weeks! 

Umm.. what else happened this week... Honestly, this week was pretty boring haha we're really trying to move on and find people that are really prepared. Everyone we are working with right now are just not quite prepared. They aren't ready yet. 

We got a referral for a lady named Lucy this past week. She contacted missionaries in Arcadia and asked if she could meet with them and learn more about church. She went to church out there once and then she moved over here to Riverside. We got in contact with her and the only problem is that she is crazy busy! She works from 9:00-9:00 every day except Thursday! I'm not sure about the weekends.. When she called us she was talking really fast and the connection wasn't super good, so I handed Elder Yang the phone halfway through the conversation to see if he could understand what she was saying!哈哈! We're going to see her this Thursday and I'm excited!

We also have a new investigator named Chen Tang! He showed up to our English class and is a great guy! The first day at English class, we taught about prayer and how to pray. He didn't seem super into it, but the next English class, he was talking to one of the sister missionaries and telling them how he needs to pray to Jesus for help! Maybe he's the one that's ready? We'll see! He was supposed to come to church yesterday, but he didn't. We're going to stop by his house tonight!

Today I wanted to share the word for covenant in Chinese, which is 圣约 (sheng yue). 

圣 means sacred or holy

约 means an agreement

So a covenant is a sacred agreement between us and God. Both of us agree to do something. For example, the baptism covenant. We agree to take upon us the name of Christ, serve others around us, comfort them, keep the commandments, and stand as a witness of God. God promises us that He will forgive our sins as we repent, and bless us with His Spirit. I've been really trying to remember the covenants that I've made as I go throughout my day! They're so sacred and it's an opportunity for us to express our love to our Heavenly Father. It's a chance for us to receive blessings and exercise our faith as we remember and keep the promises we have made. 

I love you all and miss you tons!

Love,

Elder Warren

吴长老

This is a wedding gift Cole made for his cousin. It says Families are Eternal.

8/29/2016 P-Day #97

8/29/2016

Thanks Alison and Sage for the letters this week!

This week has been really good! Monday night we went on splits. Elder Yang went to go visit a member family and I went up to Rancho to go visit a referral we got from a member! It was a really good lesson. The spirit was really strong. We were teaching about the restoration, and she had a lot of good questions! She has been to a church before and really wants to follow Jesus Christ. When we invited her to be baptized, she accepted really fast! It was an amazing experience!

Thursday was our temple trip! I feel so blessed to be able to go to the temple once every three months! I just feel recharged and ready to keep going on afterwards! The Miaos took us up to the temple and then took us to In-N-Out to eat afterwards because Elder Yang still hadn't tried California's best hamburgers yet! Haha

Sunday was our Chinese sacrament meeting again! As I have said many times before, I love the opportunity to go to the full Chinese meeting! 

On Sunday, Brother Li had his interview with the stake president to receive the Melchezidek Priesthood! I got to go and help him translate! It's amazing to see their family progress within the gospel. Yoyo has started saying prayers in English and it's adorable!

Friday night, our Chinese group put on a fireside and invited any Chinese members that are living within the surrounding stakes. We were hoping more people would come than actually did, but it was still a pretty good turnout. They invited one of the first branch presidents of one of the Chinese wards in the area to come and speak. He talked about the history of Chinese members in southern California and his wife talked about eternal marriage. I got to translate the talks into English because our bishop and stake president were there. It was so much harder than translating from English into Chinese! It gave me a huge headache afterwards!

Saturday we went on exchanges with our zone leaders.I was with Elder Hale in Eastvale. Elder Yang got to spend a whole day in an English area, which he was pretty excited about! Our day in Eastvale was pretty crazy! We had a lot of good plans made, but other things kept coming up! We had to drive out to Riverside to go visit Q and translate some things for the members he's living with. We had dinner in Rancho Cucamonga with some members! They took us to a restaurant and all of the surrounding shops/businesses were all in Chinese! It was really funny! I didn't have my camera with me, otherwise I would have taken a picture!

Sunday night we also had a stake Priesthood training meeting that we weren't going to go to until they asked us to come and translate! Haha so we ended up spending our night over there! It was really good, though! One of my favorite talks was from the stake president's second counselor. He shared the story of Peter and the apostles returning to fishing after the Savior's death. He said that we will all have points in our lives when we are tired and it would be so much easier to return to our previous lives. But the Lord needs servants that are going to keep pushing even when they're tired, even when it's hard, even when all you want to do is stop and rest. His work isn't going to stop moving forward, so He needs us to keep moving forward with it.

I love you all and miss you lots!

Love,

Elder Warren

吴长老

8/25/2016 P-Day #96

8/25/2016

**P-Day on Thursday due to trip to the temple**

大家好,

Thanks Grandma Clark and Grandma/Grandpa Gray for the packages!

Since it's already Thursday, I'm trying really hard to separate what happened last week from what happened this week!

First off, I am very grateful for spellcheck, because as I am learning Chinese, my English is going slightly downhill. It's a real problem. The other day I was talking about a family that we haven't had dinner with for along time and the words I used were: "They haven't fedded us in a while." It's pretty bad. So as I am typing these emails, there are lots of words underlined in red that I have to go back and fix. Hopefully I can fix this problem before I go back to school! Haha

Last week we went by and saw the Zhang family one last time before they went back to China. It went really well. We read through some of the Book of Mormon with them to help them grasp the story a little bit better. We also found out that if we send the Church their address and contact information, they will contact the Church leaders in China who will reach out to them and invite them to attend church over there! Exciting!

Everyday Elder Yang and I have four hours of studies that we do in the mornings. Sometimes it seems like a reaaalllly long time, but it's amazing to see as we take the time to prepare in the morning, miracles happen! I was a little worried that as we were taking so much time to study, there wasn't going to be time to teach or do anything else! But surprisingly there is! We've been crazy busy!

We were out talking to people in the park last Saturday, and we've been working on helping Elder Yang feel more comfortable with talking to random strangers! So I felt like I would let him take the lead while talking to this one lady. As we were talking, we showed her the Hallelujah video and afterwards, Elder Yang just invited her to be baptized! The crazier part was that she said yes! And then we set a baptism goal right then and there! They Lord truly is preparing people everywhere to receive the gospel! My faith in this is strengthened every day!

Well we've got to get going to the temple! Have an awesome week! Love and miss all of you!

Love,

Elder Warren

8/15/2016 P-Day #95

8/15/2016

大家好!

I hope everyone had a good week! Thanks Mom, Maddy, and Tenley for the package/letters!

This week was really good! Both Elder Yang and I are super tired, but that just means that we've been working hard!

This week we went to go visit a referral from some sister missionaries in Lake Elsinore (which is about a 45 minute drive from Eastvale!). The family was really cool! We showed them the Hallelujah video and they loved it! There are five people that live there, Young, Michelle, their son Jayden, and Young's parents (Bro and Sis Wen). Michelle and Bro Wen are Christians already.  Young would go to church with them and their son Jayden loves church too! They loved the video and we invited them to be baptized. I don't think Brother Wen really understood what we were asking him to do, but before we could help answer his questions, Young basically did our job for us! He told Brother Wen that we were just asking them to learn more, and when they feel that what we've shared is true that's when they would be baptized. But other than that little confusion, the rest of the lesson went really well! They were supposed to come to church on Sunday, but they didn't show up. We'll be going back this week, though!

We got together with our zone this morning and played volleyball at the stake center! It was a lot of fun. Normally we get together with the La Sierra zone as well, but they had their temple trip this week, so their P-Day is a different day. 

On Thursday, we had a member of the stake presidency's son with us all day. He just submitted his papers, so he wanted to spend a whole day with the missionaries to see what it's like. Unfortunately, that day was pretty slow for us! We knocked on so many doors, but nobody answered! Haha but I think it was a good experience for him to see that missionary work has good days and slow days. I'm not sure if he enjoyed it or not, but we are going to set up another day for him to come with us when we will have a lot of set appointments!

Elder Yang is doing really well! He's really good at teaching and helping answer people's questions. He LOVES to share scriptures with people! His Book of Mormon is full of sticky notes, tabs, markings, etc. It's exciting to see how excited he is for the work! We're working on overcoming his nervousness of talking to people on the street, but that's normal! I was the same way! Haha

Today I wanted to share the word for convert, which is 归信 (Guī xìn). The first character, 归, means to return, or to come back to. The second character, 信, means to have faith, to trust, or to believe. So when we talk about our own personal conversion, it's not just a process or a checklist of things we need to do. It's a change, a turning back to our Heavenly Father. Putting our trust in Him by doing what He wants us to do. Reading His word every day, praying to Him every day, and attending church meetings to strengthen our relationship with Him. It's a really simple process of returning back to our Heavenly Father. I also think that if it's our goal after this life to return and stay with our Heavenly Father, we must become converted while here on this earth. We must do everything we can to show that we believe Him, that we trust Him, that we have faith in Him. I know that He is waiting for us to return to Him. During this life and in the life to come. As we turn towards our Heavenly Father and Savior, we feel their love and peace in our lives. We have the strength to overcome the trials that we face, the weakness we have. I am incredibly grateful for my Savior's atonement. Without it, there would be no way for me to improve, no way for me to have joy. I hope all of you will continue to work on you personal conversion. Strengthen your relationship with your Father, and become clean through His Son's atonement.

I love and miss you all!

Elder Warren

吴长老

8/8/2016 P-Day #94

8/8/2016

大家好，

This has been yet another crazy busy week for us!

I spent Monday night and Tuesday morning/afternoon with our zone leaders. They dropped me off at the mission office around1:00 when we had a training for all the missionaries who would be training. It was a lot of fun! That evening we ate dinner with all of the new missionaries. They made baked potatoes and chili (I thought the weather was a little too hot to be eating that!). Afterwards we found out who our new companions were going to be. Since there was only one Chinese elder coming in, it was a huge surprise for me! Haha but my new companion is Elder Yang, 杨长老. He's from Zhuhai, China (which is right next to Hong Kong). The AP's had told me that his English wasn't going to be good at all, but it's actually pretty good! He joined the church five years ago, when his aunt introduced his family to the church. She had joined when she a colleague at work had invited her to come to church. I'm really excited for these next two transfers with him!

When we talk to each other, it's all in Chinese, so my brain is really confused right now! Many many times this past week, I'll be talking to somebody in English and then all of a sudden I'll say something back to them in Chinese! Or I'll try and literally translate a phrase from Chinese to English and it just sounds really weird. Hopefully I'm not going to forget all my English over the next three months!

I was so excited to take Elder Yang to go and visit Brother Yang, because our last lesson with him had been so amazing. We went by last Friday and as we were talking with him, he told us that he had talked with his wife and they had decided that they didn't need to be baptized twice. Afterwards, I was really worried because he was the most solid person that was going to be baptized this month! We didn't have anybody else. So I decided that now was the time to continue working diligently and obediently to find somebody that was! We kept working and working but nobody seemed ready. So we were at church on Sunday and there were some investigators that we hadn't seen at church for about a month (Brother and Sis Zhang). They had been taught about two years before but went back to China and were never baptized. Now there were back in the US so the wife could have here baby. We met them a month or so earlier but never had a chance to go visit them because they were busy and we didn't have an address for them. So I thought, maybe they're the ones! So I went up to talk to them and found out they go back to China on the 20th of this month. I realized that there probably wasn't enough time for us to teach them everything and felt a little disheartened again. We had to leave the Eastvale ward early to go to a ward in Riverside for an investigator. After church, Brother Jiang called us and told us that we needed to get in contact with the Zhangs as soon as we could. They had apparently talked to the members after church asking if they could have a baby blessing for their son before they go back to China. The ward clerk said that one of them needed to have record number in order for them to do it, so the huband said "Perferct! I was wanting to join your church anyways!" We were both a little shocked when we heard this, but we got Bro Zhang's telephone number and gave him a call. We're going over tonight to visit the two of them with Brother Miao. I know without a doubt that the work we are involved in is the Lord's work. He is in the middle of it, working right alongside us. It's an exciting work to be a part of. I feel incredibly blessed to be able to participate in it! Pray that everything goes well tonight! It will be a tight squeeze, since they leave in less than two weeks!

I hope all of you have an amazing upcoming week! I love and miss you all! Look for the Lord in your life each and every day. I promise that He is there!

Much love,

Elder Warren 

 Elder Warren's Ward had a talent show and a thoughtful Sister in his ward sent this pictures to me.  He accompanied 4 of the 12 musical numbers. One he was handed the music minutes before the performance!