More Than Turkey

I hope you all had a great holiday and were able to express some gratitude! Heavenly Father truly gives us so many blessings! I’m so grateful to be able to serve Him with my whole heart as a missionary.

I read a great [General] Conference address by Elder [Dieter F.] Uchtdorf from April 2014 called “Grateful In Any Circumstances.“ I encourage you all to go read it! I know that amidst challenges that we may be in, in our life we can show our gratitude to God by putting our full faith and trust in the Lord to get us through. Gratitude is an enabling power to get us through challenges.

This may be cheesy, but this week I was grateful for Thanksgiving feasts. We had a mission wide conference on Wednesday. [Our] Mission President talked to us about faith and rejoicing. He said that our faith is in the doing and not in the results. Therefore, if we continue to have faith daily we have the right to rejoice at the end of the day in what we were able to do, and not get upset about what we couldn’t. After this message from him, we had a real Thanksgiving feast! Our mission President’s wife, as well as his parents, prepared Thanksgiving [dinner] for us, complete with all the essentials including turkey, mashed potatoes, rolls, and pumpkin pie. It was amazing!

And then on Thursday we had another Thanksgiving feast with all the youth in our [congregation]. It was so fun as we all shared American foods with them and shared what we were most grateful for. SO GOOD!

One other amazing experience this week [occurred during] our [congregation] sacrament meeting. We had the primary program. Now, there’s approximately 8 kids in our [children’s] Primary but they have the passion for singing like no other kids I’ve ever seen. It was so cute and powerful! They had a part in the program where their entire families went up and sang with them. They sang “A Child’s Prayer” and “Families Can Be Together Forever”. The Spirit you could feel was so strong! I am so happy to be able to share the message that we, right now in our life, can communicate with our Father in Heaven and He has prepared a way that we can be with our families forever! I love my family, and I couldn’t imagine forever without them!

So the things I’m most grateful for this Thanksgiving is my family, the opportunity to serve a mission, and my nametag. Let me explain the nametag a little bit. This nametag means I’m a set apart missionary. My soul purpose right now is to share the Gospel. It also has Jesus Christ’s name on it. (and His name is bigger than mine) I am a representative of Christ. Christ came to Earth and sacrificed so that we could all return home to our Father in Heaven. Right now, I get to be like Christ and help all the people of Taiwan do what they need to do so they can return home and be with their families for forever. I love it!

Funny things that happened this week:

1. We went to take a member fruit and a thank you card for inviting one of the friend’s we are teaching to family home evening. However here’s the catch…their elevator was broken haha. So we had already biked 45 minutes to get there and then realized that we got to climb the stairs to get [to their residence]. They live on the 29th floor. Yep you read that right…we climbed 29 flights of stairs to deliver [our gift] Haha. I literally laughed all the way up the stairs and my trainer was like why are you laughing this isn’t funny. I just couldn’t stop laughing though hahaha.

2. The youth at our Thanksgiving feast hadn’t eaten most of this [type of] food ever before. But the best food by far to watch them experience was whipped cream. I don’t even know how to explain the joy that was on their faces when they watched it being sprayed out of the can. It was like Buddy the Elf experiencing everything in New York for the first time. It was amazing!

3. We lip-synced to Aladdin that was randomly playing in a 7/11 (sadly the video is too large to send) so you’ll just have to imagine it hahaha.

4. One day we were sitting in a 7/11 doing some studies, and my trainer pointed to a person sitting (nearby) on their phone and said [to reach out to] them and set up a lesson. So I walked over and asked her how her day was and she just kind of like picked her phone up and nodded her head like she didn’t really want to talk. So instead of leaving I asked her what her favorite app was. Haha she said Line (which is like their texting app). And then I proceeded to share my favorite app which is the Gospel Library App. Haha I told her about how it had the Book of Mormon. Then I shared what that is and had her read one of my favorite scriptures. I asked her if we could set up another time to share more and she said yes Haha so that’s awesome!

That’s about it for me! I hope you all have a great week!

I love you all so so so much!!!

安姐妹