Picnic and Day Trip to Cham Tower Temple Complex (Week 16)

Date: Sun, Jan 21, 2018

Hello everyone!

Wow, I have already gone through another week. Time really does fly by here. Things are starting to get really exciting here, with everyone preparing for Tet next month. For those of you who don't know, Tet is the Vietnamese New Year, and is by far the biggest holiday of the year here in Vietnam. People prepare for it a month in advance, and pretty much everyone takes off about a week to celebrate it. From what I hear, things will be pretty slow for us during Tet as everyone travels back to their home town, but leading up to it we are trying to get in some extra service by helping people clean their homes and prepare for Tet. We have one member we are helping this Saturday, and we are advertising our help for Tet in self-reliance class. We are always happy to help whoever we can!

So things are going quite well. I am happy to report that Elder Danh is no longer on crutches. He still has to wear a cast on his leg, but he seems well on the way to recovery. As for our investigators, Em Thanh is still doing great! He currently has a baptismal date set for the tenth! He is super excited about learning the gospel, and always tries his best to follow our commitments. We are still meeting with our other investigators, and they are all doing well. In fact, we think we may be able to get three more people learning the gospel soon! We have three people we have been learning English with, and they have all shown interest in learning more about the church. On Saturday, we even gave one of them a copy of the Book of Mormon, and she is going to start reading it! Seriously, the Lord prepares people to receive the gospel and puts them in the right circumstances to receive it!

This week has also been great in that the weather is getting better! It is starting to warm up again, so I don't always have to wear my coat. And on top of that, we had two blue sky days this week! In winter here, most days are foggy and white, so it was nice when on Friday and Saturday, you could actually see the sky. Oh, and on Saturday, my branch had a picnic. It was nice to go to, and we invited a few nonmembers to attend. It was quite a nice experience. And I really enjoyed the food they had. It actually reminded me of the US a bit, as we had sandwiches with grilled corn and sweet potatoes. On top of that, the picnic was at a campsite which also reminded me of the US. The other American missionary in my branch also commented on it reminding him a bit of home. Overall, it was really neat to just hang out with the members and get to know them better.

I guess one other thing I should mention is self reliance. This week, we didn't have as many students, at a total of nine, but three of them were new, two of which I had contacted in the last two weeks. I think they all had a really good time, and in my opinion, I think we had the best spiritual thought we have had yet in the class! We shared a video about the importance of having a Messiah, and then all testified. I could feel the Spirit really strongly in the room. Of course we always have a good spiritual thought, but we usually try to be a little more subtle with our message so as not to scare people away. Actually, those there seemed to take it quite well! We will see if any of them were touched and may want to learn more in the upcoming weeks...

Alright, well I think that about covers it again for this week. I will write again next week. Until then!

Elder Watson/ Nghiem