Mission Backup

A spiritual hightlight for us was last Sunday's Stake Conference. The talks were well crafted and very inspirational. Afterward, some of the missionaries gathered for a photo: We had another busy week at the office. Which we don't mind, but, why, oh, why won't the petty cash balance?! *Sigh* I make so many mistakes! Which is alright, except it takes only a moment to make the mistake, but hours to figure out where I went wrong and fix the problem. Oh, well, such is life. On Thursday, we definitely needed a break, so we went for an evening walk around our neighborhood. Looked in shop windows, said "hello" to people (including a young child who looked up at us and loudly said, "Wai Guoren!" (Foreigners!) and enjoyed the cool night air. Glancing down a sidestreet, we saw something colorful and decided to check it out. Just a block or so away from the noisy street was a small Buddhist temple, beautifully decorated and well maintained. Incense was burning a...

Yesterday we administered the Michigan English test to Elders and Sisters in both Taichung and Kaosiung. That made for a very busy day! In the morning, we had six test takers in our own Wuchung chapel. No problem. But, then, we were off to Kaosiung, which is 200 km (125 miles) to the south. We already had our tickets, so all we had to do was head to the train station 4 but stops down the road and hop on, right? We took our time, doing a a couple of small tasks in the office after the first test, then made our way to the train station. The first bus went roaring by because he couldn't see us behind another bus that was pulling into our stop. That made us nervous, but we were able to catch another bus shortly thereafter. It didn't drop us as close to the station as we thought, and we were running the last couple of blocks! Finally, we were in the station, and headed to the gate. "You are in the wrong train station," the helpful attendant told us in Chinese. "You a...

The last month has brought us our "sea-legs," it seems. We're both more at ease with our roles and duties, meaning less panicked every day! We've done most things at least once (I think), although "you don't know what you don't know." Here's the sort of thing I'm up against every day: But, the work is exhausing! I'm probably repeating myself, but I'm working far harder here than I did when I was working for a living! I've learned how to convert Chinese street addresses to their English (Pinyin) equivalent, which is a big milestone for me. That's only about a half of one percent of what I need to know, but it's a start! We've been asked by our Ward Mission Leader to do a short video message each Sunday.Here is the second of three we've done so far: The love and kindness of the Taiwanese Church members towards us continues. Brother and Sister Yu invited us to dinner again, along with the office elders. Our good ...