Happy Easter!

HAPPY EASTER!!!

I hope you are all having a great Easter Sunday! I know I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to remember all the blessings that come from Christ, His sacrifice, and His resurrection. I’m grateful to know that He lives, and because He lives there are so many eternal truths that I can be grateful for. I’m grateful that because he lives, I can have hope. Hope when things might be hard. Hope that someone always understands perfectly what we are going through, so we are never alone. Hope for new beginnings and fresh starts. Hope for our families. Hope for our imperfections. Hope for the ability to feel God’s love.

This week as I studied more about the Savior and drew closer to Him, I was definitely able to see God’s hand working in my life.

It started with my new companion. Her name is Sister Ashlee Johnson. She is from Hattiesburg, Mississippi and has been on her mission since January 2018. She is an amazing missionary and knows how to get things done! We have only been together for a few days her in Taídong, but it’s been great!

Since we were in a trio last transfer that mainly covered the 1st ward, we have basically “white-washed” into the 2nd ward after diffusing the trio. This means when we started we only had 2 friends to teach and didn’t know the members very well. But we have already made strides in changing that and have definitely been able to see that this is God’s work.

Another Sister missionary had called a while back and asked about a family she had taught when she was here about 8 months ago. They were progressing really well, but they had to stop teaching them because the family was too busy to try and find a time to meet. Well, we decided to go back and try and find this family again. When we got there, they were super excited to see us! The 9 year old boy had read the entire Children’s Book of Mormon and loved it. We were able to set up a time to go back and teach them, so hopefully they will continue to progress! Fun fact is that morning, Sister Johnson had said, “let’s find a solid new friend to teach”. Prayers were answered, and friends were found.

Sister Johnson and I had also set goals of trying to meet more of our Relief Society Sisters. Sadly we weren’t having much luck in finding anyone to go visit. Well it turned out to be someone’s birthday. So we decided to take them some pineapple, a card, and sing happy birthday. Little did we know we were going to meet the most talented artist I’ve ever met who has an even cooler mom! So she takes care of her 90-something-year-old mom. And she told us that her mom only sleeps about 3 hours a day. So we asked her what she does all day and she goes, “I’ll show you.” She pulls out one of these calendars that you can tear pages off from. The pages have yellowed over time, but there’s this handwriting all over it. This grandma spends all day rewriting the Book of Mormon in ENGLISH! Apparently she’s done it over 5 times! I was so impressed! It was so cool!

We also were able to go hold Family Home Evening over with the Wang family. We asked what words came their heads when they thought of Easter, which in Chinese directly translated to Resurrection Holiday. After hearing answers ranging from colored eggs and bunnies to hope and eternal families, we were able to share a great message about the blessings we receive through Christ.

Bonus Feature (other random things that happened this week):

1. There was a level 7 earthquake whose center was two hours by train away from me. Luckily, there was nothing felt over where I’m serving. It just delayed my new companions arrival by 2 hours Haha.

2. Last P-day we went to San Xian Tai. It is this super cool 8 arc bridge that leads over to an island that you can hike around. It was gorgeous! I have 100s of pics! Haha

3. We call and read scriptures every night with a cute old lady in our ward named Mei Jin. Haha she’s so sassy, and I love her!

Funny thing that happened this week:

1. A member taught us the “pig Latin” of Chinese. You add a specific sound after every word and if you don’t know what the specifi sound is it becomes impossible to understand anything Haha

That’s about it from me!

I’ll send a lot of pictures later today!

I love you all so so so much!!!

安姐妹