La Cucaracha...and God's Signature

Dear Friends and Family,

Yet another week has passed me by in Chaiwan. I love the area but am ready to leave-- 7 months here is my self-set cap. However, it's not my will, it's Heavenly Father's. I think that His will is for me to stay longer. I say this because my Senior companion, Elder C, needs to train soon, but there are only 2 new missionaries coming into the mission this next week. He hasn't gotten a call from President Hawks telling him he will train, and he probably won't have another companion before he trains is my guess. To add on to this thought, transfers for as long as I have been here have been 6 weeks. This upcoming transfer will only be 4 weeks and then all transfers that follow will be 9. For these reasons I can very easily see myself staying for another 4 weeks. Who knows though. I'm not supposed to speculate anyway:) What's 4 more weeks after I've been here 30 anyway? I'll found out tomorrow during District Meeting...

I was here at the computer less than a week ago so I don't have a lot to update you on. Among some of the highlights were killing cockroaches in an investigator's apartment and an awesome new investigator!

Yikes!

I'll start with this cockroaches. I may or may not have told you that there are 2 Thai members who come to my ward. One of them, Sister C (her adopted Chinese name), has asked us to teach a friend of hers who is also Thai. Both have lived in Hong Kong for over 20 years so their Chinese is OK. I've learned how to teach very basic parts of some of the discussions in Thai though which is kinda fun:) It makes me think of some of my friends who are in Thailand serving right now.  The one we teach, Mrs. S, is a bit older and has a lot of health issues so we go to her apartment on the 40th floor and teach her with Sister C. It's a tiny, dirty, 1-room apartment and prone to have cockroaches I guess. During our latest meeting I saw one peek its ugly head out of the moulding on the door frame and took the liberty of trying to provoke it to come out with a broom. Well that was a bad idea since it didn't come out but it did sweep out 50 or so babies that I made a quick game of stomping (maybe kinda like this?). I stayed at it for 3 or 4 more minutes (this was all before we had started the lesson).

Besides just health problems this lady also has had a number of family problems and tragedies occur in her life recently-- a daughter in jail, a grand-daughter who died etc... These things make her obviously very sad and so we don't teach very much at all when we go over-- mostly it's a lot of comforting and trying to teach 1 principle per meeting or so. She's doing better little by little but after our most recent visit she informed us that the HaakSeiWui, (this is the pin-yam) or Hong Kong Triad is threatening her if she doesn't pay a certain amount of money! This poor woman... We're going over tonight to clean out her apartment and exterminate the pests:) 

The new awesome investigator that we have is named M. He's probably in his 40's and lives in TaiKoo (the richest part of our area; incidentally he is the only person I've ever been able to teach who lives within that area). We got his number from Mandarin missionaries who ran into him when he came to church in Kowloon Tong a few weeks ago. We scheduled him this week, taught him the 1st lesson and commited him to come to church with us this past Sunday. During our first meeting with him we got to know him and to understand his background better. Turns out he grew up as a Christian, and currently he has a co-worker who is a member of the church in a different ward. He also works closely with a company based out of Orem, Utah (they supplied him with a Book of Mormon and wrote key chapters he should read!!) Through numerous experiences with these people he has developed a greater interest. 

After church yesterday I sat down with him with the hopes of addressing any concerns he had with church, any questions he had about the Book of Mormon etc... Well, to my great surprise he told me he's been reading the Book of Mormon, prays beforehand, and feels the spirit as he ponders and reads it! I was floored! We're meeting with him later this week and hope to continue to teach him.

What I learn from this investigator is 1) the importance of member referrals-- they really are 100 million times better than street-contacts, and 2) there are prepared people everywhere! Even in the rich areas.

This past Saturday was just a good day! We managed to schedule a number of lessons and knew that we were going to be busy teaching people (obviously a missionary's dream). One of the people we had scheduled was a Mrs. G and her son that I had taught months ago before they got too busy to schedule or meet. They called us and scheduled us to help teach English to them and to some friends of theirs. We went to the appointment as expected and hoped to be able to share a gospel message as we taught English. To our great surprise we were actually greeted by another mom! She asked us to sit down and we used 45 minutes to answer her questions and teach the first lesson to them! As we were leaving she asked us in passing if we would be willing to come back, share more, and next time help a bit with English! So we're pretty excited about the potential there of 2 families.

Samuel

After church yesterday we had a lesson scheduled at the church to give a guy we contacted, K, a tour of the chapel. He's not sure about his beliefs exactly, but grew up in a Catholic school. We talked a lot about the Bible and he brought up an interesting concern which is that in the Old Testament God destroys a lot of people. He doesn't like that very much and for that reason he has a hard time accepting the reality of a loving Heavenly Father. It's caused me to think a lot and I'm still not exactly sure how to answer why the Old Testament has so much more godly anger, awhile the New Testament and Book of Mormon have comparatively much less. Any thoughts?

I've been reading recently in Helaman, specifically about Samuel the Lamanite. It's interesting to me that some people believed on his words and looked forward to the miracles that he prophesied, and then others were so hardened that when the miracles began to happen they said that the prophets 'guessed' right on some things, or the wicked people described it all as the the devil's power. I hope that I can continue to recognize the miracles in my life. I sometimes get caught up thinking about other things, wishing I were a better missionary, etc... But honestly, there are so many miracles in all of our lives if we will just stop for a moment and be grateful--if we can recognize that it's God's hand that is in these things. God's signature is on everything we see.

Anyway, hope y'all have a good week! Read, pray, recognize miracles and write them down somewhere!

Love,

Elder Siebach

P.S. I may or may not be just a bit jealous of Sterling and Dad's trip next week.

P.S.S. (for Dad) According to Brother Harshaw's definition you could call me fluent in Cantonese:)