Two Weeks?! (Week 42 and 43)

Monday July 30^th, 2018

Hello everyone!

How have things been going? Things have been very good here, and a lot has happened, it has been two weeks since I emailed after all! I don't have tons of time to email though, so I will try to be brief in what I share. So one cool thing is that we now have a new investigator! His name is Tony. He is 12 and his grandmother, Co Ngoc Thanh is a member. His parents are good with us teaching him the gospel. We use activities to teach him since he is still very young. We had him run messages between the two of us to show prayer, and then had him draw a person to teach how we are in God's image, so he looks like we do. He is really cool, and enjoys our activities! We also had been meeting him before to help him practice English, so we know him pretty well. Co Ngoc, the person I mentioned I had contacted the other week, came to church yesterday! And I think she liked it pretty well! She seems interested in having us come over to teach more, so we will see if we can set that up this week.

 

So we met President Chiles a few times this week, both for zone P Day, and zone conference. It was cool getting to know him better. He is definitely very relaxed when on zone P Day... He even let us go to the beach! And we got to put our feet in the water! But no more than ankle deep of course! 

 

We went to Vung Tau, and it was a lot of fun! We first went to see a giant Jesus Christ statue, apparently the second biggest statue of Christ in the world! You even get to climb up to his shoulders! I can now say I have been on the right hand (or shoulder) of Christ! Not the left, good thing, right?

 

We also got to see the White Palace, where the French built a home for the regions governor at one point, and it later became famous as the location of house arrest for a later Vietnamese king. It had cool history to it, and I could actually understand a good bit of what the tour guide was saying in Vietnamese! We did also have a member who came as an acting tour guide for the whole trip, and she shared in English, particularly since the Chiles do not fully know Vietnamese yet, and it helped those of us who haven't studied history or related terms to that in Vietnamese yet... And then we got to see the Whale Temple, with some real whale bones in it, which was pretty cool. It was a lot of fun. And zone conference was great! We learned a lot of things! The Chiles had a training on what it means to really repent. And we had a large focus on trying to find more people, so we are going to try to do more with that. Hopefully we will talk to a lot more people and find those ready to come unto Christ!

 

Also, when we had interviews with President Chiles a few weeks ago, he told us to focus on getting members to their next saving ordinance. We gave some thought to that and applied it last week. We met President Khanh, and asked him what his thoughts were on getting his endowments. He has been less active lately, so we weren't sure how he would respond, but he knows we have good intents, and we have been visiting him for a while, and love to do so! He always shares fun stories and tells us what is going on in life, as well as we discuss the gospel a bit. Well, his response was better than we could have imagined! He told us he is getting ready to go to the temple next year with his kids so they can be sealed! So now we are trying to help him work towards that! Just by asking him that question, he showed us his real desire, and now we know how to further help him on his gospel path!

Our other activities are still going well. We are getting ready for our time travel English event next week! That should be a lot of fun! I had a cool idea on our future floor to have an "ancient artifact" museum making fun of things we currently use. We will see how it goes then!

 

 

Oh, and I learned some really good news today! Chi Uyen, an investigator I had taught in Ha Dong, just got baptized! That is awesome! I am super excited for her.

And I think that about does it. I can not think of anything else at the moment, but if I remember anything else, I will let you know next week. We had district P Day and ate Mexican and American food at Al Fresco's and afterwards played some games, such as Spot It, Exploding Kittens (a Vietnamese favorite), and Uno. It was pretty fun. Well, I will write again next week!

 

 

Elder Watson/ Nghiêm

P.S. My hair has been falling out a bit lately. No bald patches yet. My family and I have researched a bit, and think it is probably just a phase being in a different climate, but I guess only time will tell... I may end up bald for all I know! I would not like that! You can ask my parents if you would like to know more...