Apostasy of Investigators

Greetings from Taiwan! 

Well, as the subject line implies, we are still in a little rut of having very few investigators. What do we do with this? We take it from a sign from Heavenly Father to focus our efforts elsewhere. We were pretty dilligent in setting up appointments to get to better know some members in the ward yesterday, and this week we will be meeting with a member family everyday this week. YES! Even two on some days. I'm super excited. One member family somehow tricked me into agreeing to treat his whole family Pizza Hut... I say tricked, but the thought of eating Pizza Hut made me super excited, so everything happened exactly how I thought it would. Maybe i'll be able to baptize another pizza delivery man? Who knows. 

Tuesday was one of those ALL FINDING death days. We were seriously sitting on our bikes from 1:00-7:00 looking for people interested in the gospel. We even tried to find some that weren't so interested. haha. We got to meet with the Lin family that lives in our part of Gaoxiong. They were really fun to talk to and are super solid in the faith. We got down there a little early before meeting them and decided to go tracting. We prayerfully selected a house, and the guy answered and told us we could come back the next week! So, we'll see what happens with that. It should be this weekend. That's probably the first time somebody showed interest in the gospel in all my attempts at tracting. Wednesday, they decided to have me teach Children's class (because my district thinks I have the most patience in that area), so I took a stab at it... don't worry... only two children left crying. Haha. It was actually pretty fun. I was just exhausted after about an hour. I told the parents that brought their kids that I would work the kinks out and be better able to teach this week. And some kids can't eat candy. I'll try bribing them with Tomatoes because EVERYONE here loves eating tomatos plain. They think it's a fruit here. Yuck. Thursday was Zone Conference, which means I got to go back to my home in Shizhong! We got there early and visited Brother Li, the 1st counselor in the bishopbric there who has a super cool breakfast shop. Yeah! It was super fun to talk to him. Zone conference was great and got us pumped to find people, so we got back home, went crazy in talking to people and... saw no success. Haha. But, we know that this is just a cycle that missionaries go through. A ton of investigators, baptism, no investigators, search for hours, finally find, etc... 

I want to take a minute or two to talk about Saturday. We are working with our only investigator name Dylan Lin. He's pretty cool. We met with him once last week and he didn't seem promising then, but we managed to set another time with him for Saturday. In the afternoon, we got a call from a guy that said "Hey. We want to eat dinner with you. We'll be by the church to pick you up around 6." ... Who are you? I was asking who he was because I couldn't find his name on any of our investigator sheets. He told me who he was. Oh.. I remember. You're that Investigator we met with last week but ended up living in the other Elder's area. Well, we can, we just have to be back for an appointment at 8. "Oh. It doesn't start until 7 and it gets over at 9" Oh. Well we'll have to leave early. He told us that there was probably no way. Okay. after hanging up the phone, Elder Noll and I felt that we should move our appointment that night to another day so we could go to dinner and meet more people. So, we did, I called the investigator back (Name is Zhang), and said we could go as long as we were back to the church for our bikes at 8:40. He said okay. I asked him more about the dinner. He said it's his mom and dad making food for some people and we were invited. Oh great! A dinner party where we could meet a lot of people. We met with our investigator Dylan, who actually felt really good about prayer and how it is literally talking with Heavenly Father. We taught the Plan of Salvation and talked a little more about baptism. He said he would have to think about it, but he was super interested in the Plan of Salvation and how Heavenly Father gave us this plan so we can eventually return to his presence. He maybe even cried during his prayer when we finished the lesson? I don't know. He may have just been laughing. We waited for Zhang to get to the church. He said the car was full, but we could sit on his scooter... we'll ride our bikes. I asked him where it was. Over by the Carrefour (like Wal-Mart)... oh great. It's that far. I asked where we were meeting and a little more about where it was because he said it wasn't at his house. He said it was at a place where people get together and eat and talk. "Is this at a bar?" I asked. He responded with "Uh... Bu Suan" which is a way of saying "Uh... doesn't really count as a bar but very similar." I said okay, we'll go see and if it's sketchy, we'll leave. I'm sure it won't be because his parents are the ones that are cooking. But his mom might be like the mom on Mean Girls... who knows. He told us to meet him at a "Boat world" or what I took as a Boat yard by the Carrefour. We were laughing so hard the whole way over. "We're totally going to get mugged" Elder Noll told me. The whole thing really did sound shady. Zhang was being super weird about it all. But, we had faith and determination, and a little bit of hope that maybe, just maybe we could get a new investigator out of this. Well, we made the 20 minute bike ride to the carrefour and saw them across the street at a furniture store called "Bed World" I laughed at myself. Bed and Boat in chinese are very similar sounding, just different tones. Okay. So it's a little less shady. We got there and kept asking them where this place was. It's in a building where there a bunch of business offices and such. Okay. So it's not really a bar. It might be a club or KTV. "We're not getting off this elevator if the doors open into a club... no matter how much fun it looks." I told Elder Noll when we stepped inside. The doors opened and it was just what they said it was, an office building. Okay. Not bad. We noticed a few middle aged woman dressed nice in their pink suits and wearing "Fine" jewlery. So, it's not a hooker house. We can get off the elevator. We walked into an office and Zhang told us "Yeah. We pay this receptionist 50 cents to pay for the food that everybody eats." Not bad. 50 cent dinner is okay with me. They then motioned us into a room. We walked in and my heart dropped. As if the 200+ chairs facing the podium and microphone in the front didn't give it away, the Amas and fancy dressed people googling over some super shiny nice pots did. We had walked into a conference room to witness the demonstration of some new cookware. I would have taken the club over this. Elder Noll said "I'm gonna kill you." and we just started to laugh. We sat down by our friend and everybody was staring at us. Some people came and talked to us, handing us their business card. So, we did get a couple of people's information. The presentation started where some cook showed us how to make a variety of dishes. She started speaking in Taiwanese at one point, looked at the two of us and started making fun of us, asking if we understood what she was saying. We just looked at her with blank stares and everybody roared with laughter. We were definitely the center of attention for a minute. I took it as an opportunity to say "Jesus Loves You" and they kept on with their presentation, ignoring my loving comment. I guess I should have gone with the "Oh ye children of hell!" approach. It might have gotten more attention. At one point, the M.C. let me come and pick up the lid off a pot to see how heavy it was and how good it worked at staying on during cook mode. After about thirty minutes of us sitting there, and after our investigator gave us a pill, which very well may have been ecstasy for all I know (actually. He told us it's a pill that get's rid of the fat in your blood stream after I had thought it was a mint that just tasted like brown sugar), Elder Noll said "I don't think we're going to get any food here..." While they were doing another demonstration to show what happens when you put cold water inside the super hot pot or something like that, everybody jumped up front to see, and we slid out the back. Zhang tried telling us "Wait. You haven't even eaten yet!" We told him we had to go, and so we did. We laughed the entire way home about the whole thing. Did we really just take an hour of our saturday night watching a cooking show? It was pretty awesome. I don't know if any of you think this is funny, but just know I was laughing at how stupid the whole situation was. I'll send you the DVD they gave me and you can tell me what you think. 

We've started reading three pages of the Book of Mormon everyday as a mission, and it's going great! I'm really liking it because I just started over a month ago, so I'm reading what I just read and getting a lot out of it. I encourage everyone to do the same. Just try and take a few minutes of the day to read three pages and soak in what you can. If some goes over your head, that's okay. You don't have a read one time limit on the Book. It's not going anywhere, so you can re-read it later. Just show Heavenly Father your willing to read it. Don't believe in Heavenly Father? Read the book and think "A crazy man wrote a book on getting closer to God that I don't believe exists. Why would he do that? I'm going to read it to prove it." and see what feelings you get. You very well may be surprised at what feelings you get afterward. 

I love you all! 

Love, Elder Mitchell R. Sorensen

          Elder Noll and I riding brooms at a garden on P-Day.