Undeterred

My Dear Friends and Family,

Sounds like things were splendid back in the US this past week. Congratulations to Sterling for going to the temple and Michael for getting baptized!! What a great mile-mark and achievement in both of their lives! Keep going to the temple, Sterling, and you will understand more! I still don't feel like I have even scratched the surface of what there is to learn there. It's a great place to be though!

Sterling and Michael

This week was crunch time for two of our investigators. They're really striving to be baptized in March. One of them will depend on whether he comes out to church this next week... He is really accepting of the commandments and willing to do all that he is asked, but church attendance in lacking a little. We are still trying to help him in this aspect.

The other investigator is E. E is great. 25, almost 26 years old. He has been readily available to teach since he doesn't have a job, and has been looking to turn his life around. We met with him 2 or 3 times this past week to review some of the basics of the Restoration and Plan of Salvation as well as to help him with his Book of Mormon reading. He is really accepting of the commandments and gets answers to his prayers. This past Friday morning at 9:00 AM he met with President Kwok of the Mission Presidency who then conducted a baptismal interview with him! Everything was clear and he was signed off! That issued in about 2 days of madness as we called out correlator and tried to get all the fixings for a baptismal service in place. It came together in the end and it was a great, spiritually uplifting service. The Young Men's President and a former Bishop were the speakers and E asked that I be the one to baptize him. As I brought him down into the water I had a fleeting thought and remembrance of my own baptism and was so happy to see him come back out of the water and know that he was clean. He made a great step in the right direction! Now it will be even more important to review these same lessons and help him make friends and a have some responsibility in church.

The third noteworthy baptism this week was for an investigator of mine who moved to Utah for school in January. Since he has moved out there he has made tremendous leaps and bounds and was baptized this past Saturday up in Salt Lake City. I like to think that this young man, Ken, and Michael were getting baptized at the same time but a half hour drive apart! :)

Having E baptized is a great blessing from the Lord, but it gives our companionship one less person to work with... We had about 10 street lessons this past week. Lots of good street contacting and the Lord has been really good to us in helping us have opportunities to share. However, either we haven't been pushing hard enough, or these people are just busy, but they haven't rescheduled and become new investigators yet. You can bet we will be making a lot of calls this week.

On Thursday the Assistants met with us and we had an exchange. I stayed in Tuen Mun and Elder Brown who was one of my roommates in the MTC and I lived with when we both served Chaiwan came with me. We had gone on an exchange the 2nd week I was in Hong Kong and here we were again on an exchange while he has 4 weeks until he heads home! It was amazing to see how far we have both come and the different experiences we have both had. We did a lot of good work together and in the evening we courageously plowed up the side of the mountain giving no consideration to the 10-15 untethered dogs who snapped at our heels as we contacted the family that I found a few months back. The dogs were enough of a welcoming committee and so the homeowner was already standing beside his front door when we knocked on the iron gate. He graciously let us in and we met with him, his 21 year old son A-Fung, and his 14 year old nephew A-Ban whom I had given the Book of Mormon some 4 months ago. We shared a lesson on prayer, gave them a For Strength of Youth pamphlet and scheduled them for this next week! We're looking forward to going back up to share more! They don't have any Christian background and are fairly pious Buddhists, but that's not going to deter us nor the Spirit. We're excited.

Anyway, I'm going to send out a few pics so I'm keeping this letter a little short :)

Love,

Elder Siebach

P.S. Last P-Day we hiked up to Castle Peak Mountain. I thought I was going to die. However, the company was good! Elder Beal was there as was Leo!