Howdy Friends,
This is a long one folks. Ethan is being stretched on the home stretch. :) Since he has a Thai companion he probably enjoyed speaking English for a bit, even if it was just into his phone. :) I'm being stretched with these Thai words I can't spell. Hahahaha! It's funny to hear him struggle to find the English translation for what he wants to say sometimes, he'll mumble things like, how do you say that in English?? And then after a minute he'll say, oh yeah! Thanks to all of you who support him!
Hello Everyone,
The weeks are flying by, kind of. I'm really tired this week. Last p-day we got up and played some basketball with a member who is the EQ president and he's way cool and his English is way good. He's an English tutor and he's a really good baller. He plays at the park all the time. It was really fun. Then we had some breakfast, went over to the computer lab for a little bit, had lunch and then came home. We did some laundry and spent like three hours cleaning up our house because it was super dirty and we had a lot of work to do. After dinner we headed out and had intended to go visit a less active, recent convert who is having some struggles because she works on Sundays because she's afraid of losing her salary. But she owns her own shop so she could totally close on Sundays but she's afraid that she won't be able to provide for her five little kids at home. So we intended to go over there right at six when she was closing, so we could help clean up. But we got there a little bit late, like 6:20 or so and she's like, uh, we're all done and out. It was one of those things where we came unannounced and we weren't sure what to do and they weren't sure what to have us do. So we looked at the map and it looked like there was a big open space about two kilometers down the road. We thought it could be a park where we could do some inviting. So we biked down there, get down there and it's just a bunch of fields. It’s like, open government space. We're kind of out in the boonies a little bit outside of the city and about five kilometers or six kilometers from our house. We had two and a half hours before we had to be home so we biked home and took this out of the way route and talked to a lot of people along the way. We found some cool people. We found a guy that caught this cool lizard. In Thailand there's this lizard that’s called "Docay" (??) and you can hear it cause it makes a really loud noise. That sounds like "insert loud lizard noise". So you're always going to hear them and they're way scary. But not because they're poisonous. They look really cool. They're blue and they have orange spots in their back and they’re scary because if they bite anything they don't let go. So if you get your finger in there they don't let go of your finger. So this guy had caught one and it’s one of those things in Thailand that's just... you're a cool kid if you can catch them. And so this guy had caught one of them and we took a picture of it and he was cool. Then we met a taxi driver and he was just sitting on the side of the road. After we biked past him I just couldn't get him out of my mind. And so we turned around, went back and talked to him. There's been a lot of people like that this week where I look at them on the street as we go by, and then I just can't stop thinking about them. And so we'd have to turn around and go talk to them. Not all of them are interested, in fact, most of them are not. But I guess in the end it's all about following the spirit. We talked to him and we shared a scripture, Mosiah 2:41 and we promised him these blessings (if you keep the commandments you will be blessed). And he was like, all right, well when do you guys have church and stuff? We gave him our phone number, got his phone number, and went home. We called him Tuesday night and he was like, I'm drunk, don't talk to me. Call me tomorrow. So we called him the next day and he just has never been free. We'll give him a call this week and see if we can meet him again.
Tuesday we got up, studied, tried to visit an investigator, did some inviting, more studies, lunch with the district and district meeting. Later we planned to go out to a member's house and serve her. Her house is pretty far away. We biked all the way out there and she's not there. Way sad.
So we biked back and invited on the way, had dinner and made some phone calls. We met an RC that had moved to Ubon from Bangkhen and we got to know him a little bit at English class. He's way, way cool. We're going to try and meet his family this week. English class is always fun.
Wednesday I was looking at this day and I was thinking, I don't know what we're going to do today because I don't know how many appointments were going to have, but somehow we got it filled up. We met with a recent convert and his mom. This recent convert has fallen back into smoking, so he's struggling with the word of wisdom. His mom isn't really into things. She's cool but not really interested. As we were talking she's like, I can't come to church unless my son takes me because I don't know how to drive a car and he has a car and I'm not going to walk there because it's too far. Fast forward to the end of the week, Saturday evening. The RC calls me and he's like, Hey, I'm not going to go to a church tomorrow, I have work. I can't make it. So I'm said, well shoot, now his mom's not going to come either. Sunday morning she comes! She made it, she got a taxi or something. It was a miracle and it was way cool.
Then we taught this other guy named Doh for a long, long time and we talked about a lot of stuff. After lunch we met with a less active named Olay. His wife is way cool. She cuts ties and gives them to the elders. She's just not a member and we really feel like if he would get his act together, she would be a member too. We finished the night at the house of a member who is the manager of the soccer team here in, Ubon. He's very cool. Then we invited all the way home, talking to a lot of people. No one's really interested here like they were in Chiang Mai. It's kind of disheartening.
Thursday morning we got up and visited an RC. It was good. Something I've learned on my mission is it's best to love people into the gospel. That's the way I learned to teach and what I've had success with. People need love. Anyways we left and went to visit an investigator. In Thailand it's a big thing to yell when you see a white person to ask them if they have a Thai girlfriend yet. I don't know why, but wherever I go, that's one of the first questions that I get asked. And it's even worse now that I'm with a Thai companion cause they don't care what he thinks or does. So our investigator said she wasn't free to talk but there's some teenage girls there and one yells out, Do you have a Thai girlfriend yet? You speak Thai really good. So they all start joking about that and then the investigator we are trying to teach starts laughing about it too. And we laughed, but I was just like, yeah, if this is what it’s coming down to we got to go We did some studies and weekly planning and had an appointment with an 11 year old girl and a 14 year old girl who we need to help get to church. The problem is their mom doesn't care about church. She's not into anything. She doesn't care and the Dad's less active. We're going to keep working with them. We had English class again on Thursday and before English class we met this RC named Pom. I love this guy. He's a way funny and so cool. He's just like his own personality. I feel like if I had to be his coworker it'd be tough. But just hanging out with him at church way fun. He's so funny. After English class we locked up the church and we came home and called a bunch of people trying to get more appointments. Not much happened. :(
Friday after personal study we ran over to a big mall called central and invited there for a little bit. We found this cool guy and are trying to get in touch with him on Facebook. Later we met with a less active member who has a mental handicap. It's really sad because I feel like he'd be a really good member but he just struggles. It’s like some kind of autism and he just doesn't understand things very well. But he has a desire to keep the commandments! His parents don't like him coming to church and it's really hard on him. I feel so bad for this guy though. I love him. We asked him to help us this week (he actually offered); to find some other less active people that he knows. Several people weren't home but then someone was home! This LA is an old guy, a convert of about three years. He's very smart, has a master's degree. He seems to have used logic to come to church to be baptized, but that logic just doesn't last very long. We talked with him about how he wasn't really satisfied with some of the things at church because he felt like he was way smarter than everybody else, which is probably true? And he said well I don't agree with some of the things that church does, but I don't want to voice those disagreements. There's some doctrine that he doesn't necessarily agree with and he feels like people would get mad at him if he says anything. But he's really cool. And he actually did the end up coming to church on Sunday! So that was really good.
After that we visited a 17 year old kid who's really cool. He draws awesome pictures! He doesn't come to church because his mom isn’t super supportive and he has to stay at home and watch their shop. Then we met with this really cool referral from Salt Lake. Side note, in Thailand if there's any time that people are talking about Korean missionaries or any other Asian country missionaries, it's always Jehovah's witnesses. So this guy's story is there was these 'Korean people' (JW's) that came to his house one day and they're knocking on the door and they wanted to talk to him about Jesus. And he was like, I'm not free. Like, "Jing Jing," In English it's like truthfully, I'm really not free today. And so he couldn't meet with them but he said he couldn't stop thinking about them. So he goes to the Internet and he just searches for some stuff and he finds our church. So we made an appointment him, got his phone number, taught him the restoration and gave him a Book of Mormon!
Here's an interesting thing. My companion feels like we shouldn't be giving people Book of Mormons very often because people use their tithing money to make those BoMs.
He feels like it's a waste if we just hand them out. I feel like I would gladly sacrifice a lot of tithing money to get those BoMs out there because I know they're way better in the hands of other people, even if those people don't read them. There's so many stories of nephews or grand kids that look in their grandma's attic, find this book and they want to be baptized cause they read the book. Or someone finds one at an old shop and they're converted. I feel like Heavenly Father has a way of making things happen. But if those books sit on a shelf at the elder's house and they never get out, those things don't happen. In previous areas we would , hand them out when we met someone that wanted to learn. We would give it to them right then and we'd say, Take it. It's yours. We'll talk later about it. My companion has a hard time with this. Anyway, we taught this guy the restoration and he's way sick.
Later we taught another guy the plan of salvation. It was a good lesson. That evening we played some sports with the members and had spiritual thought because we were there trying to teach this investigator. This investigator has been to the church a couple times but it was like three years ago. The first time he came for English class and there was a note in the phone that was like, he's read the entire book of Mormon, give him a call later and see if he wants to meet. So we sat him down and had some small talk. And then I just asked him, I've heard you've read the Book of Mormon, is that true? He's like, Yeah, I read it like three or four times. I'm a really good reader so these books of scripture, I can just blow right through them in a couple of hours. And I was like, Really? That's impressive. What do you think about the Book of Mormon? He said, oh yeah, that's good! So I got right to the point and said, Well, you met with the elders before about this kind of stuff, right?. And he said yes. I asked if they talked about baptism. He said Yes, I have been taught about baptism. I said, You know about who Jesus Christ, right? And he said yes. We talked with him about Jesus Christ and his role and I then I said, Do you want to be cleansed of your sins and be baptized? You've read about it in the Book of Mormon, the elders have talked about it before, is this what you want? And he said No, there's a problem. I'm Buddhist. the problem is I'm Buddhist. That was a bummer and kind of nuts to me.
Saturday morning we headed out and invited all morning because we had no appointments. We followed up with someone from earlier in the week who is no longer interested, saw people making cool clay pots and watched a chicken fight. In Thailand cockfighting is really big and there was a practice fight so we saw their training, which was kind of fun. We tried to visit some LA's before lunch and studies but they weren't home. After lunch we had an appointment with this less active member who has really gone off the wrong side of the boat. Her story is she was meeting with the missionaries and she was learning all this stuff and she was just like, I just can't agree with this. I don't want to be baptized. She had a date for baptism and she said, I went in that day and I was going to tell them I did not want to be baptized. But when she went in, it was the day after the super big cleaning day and so they had cleaned up the entire church and it was really nice and pretty and they'd got out all the baptismal suits and cleaned them, they're fresh and dry. She saw all this and she's like, oh, well, dang it. I can't say no, now what do I do? So she felt that she got pushed into being baptized and she just doesn't agree. All right so I asked, well what do you believe in? Is there something we teach that you don't believe in?She said, Well God "insert Thai phrase", which in Thai basically means doesn't have a physical body, doesn't have a physical presence or resemblance. She believes that God is the light of the sun and it's called the solar empire. She believes that God is light that touches our hearts. And she said, Joseph Smith... what he saw was this weird light thing that happened from the sun that I can't explain but it was like some kind of miracle. My companion and I were like, Oh. So my companion is very confident and he doesn't mind arguing or trying to get people to see his point of view. And at that point he was getting ready to launch into this big super explanation/argument and I was like, no. We need to go. Let's get out of here. I have found that there's no point in arguing with people like street contacts or less active members who have their mind made up. Arguing does nothing. The spirit leaves when you argue. The people that we have to teach and talk to are the ones that are willing to receive it. It's in the Doctrine and Covenants. I've that the people that want to talk with us and are willing to sit and chat with us, those are people to start with. If they don't even want to talk to us, we're not here to force them to talk to us. That's easy to avoid. Also if they are interesting in talking about religion, that's awesome. If they are intent on telling us what we are saying is wrong, Just leave. Don't worry. Don't argue.
Then we came back to the church and did our language study and then taught another salt lake referral, who's way cool! She had an experience and now she believes in God. She got in contact with the temple square sister missionaries and now she is now learning. She's really cool. In the middle of our lesson with her I was like, all right, here's this book of Mormon you can have it and read it. My companion stopped me and he said, No we can't give that to you. And I was like, what are you talking about? I said it's ok, you can have this. And she said oh well, that's okay. My companion said, Well, the thing is this book has been printed from the donations of the church. Church members have sacrificed to make this book for us and If you don't read it all the way through, you can't have it." So this was crazy and I was like, no you can have it. Then she said, Oh, can I donate too? I want to donate. She's such a nice, cool lady. I said no, not you're not a member, don't worry about tithing. I said just please take this book and read it. So she took it and said yes she would read it and my companion said, you have to promise to read it. She said, I promise, I promise! So that was interesting.
My companion is really fun and really fun to talk to, even if he has a different view about handing out BoMs. He's really smart and knows the gospel. He's really good inviting. It's nice to have someone that can speak the language as well. I've learned a lot about the things wrong that I say. :)
On Sunday at church we had some miracle people come to church! Earlier this week I had set a goal, we didn't talk about it and I feel really bad, but we were in a rush to set goals and so I just set a couple for our key indicators. I set a goal for four new investigators, two people at Church and one dater. By Saturday night we had found four new investigators. And so the miracle that I was praying for already happened. And I was like, all right, let's get two people at Church. And two people came to church! 1- is this old grandma that won't let us go to her house and I don't think she's a member. 2- is a recent convert that I was talking about earlier. It was so cool. And all these LA people that we had met with this last week? A bunch of them came to church. The Ubon soccer team manager, the old guy that we had met earlier (logic), the sister of the RC LA, Tepe, that sells noodles, the LA kid that we met this week... They all came to church and it was way cool even if they didn't even stay after sacrament meeting. Just seeing them walk in made me so happy. It was really good.
The YSA here is way fun. I have a friend here who was a missionary in one of my districts, but she's returned from her mission and this is her home ward. It's been fun to see some old friends. After lunch we went home to do some of our studies. For language study, normally we would study Thai of course. Maybe I'm lazy, I don't know? I'm nearing the end of my mission and I'm feeling like I'm not gonna learn a whole lot more Thai. And I've learned a lot more Thai anyway just living with him. So all of our language study is dedicated to helping Elder Milang speak better English. He really wants to learn conversational English so he asked would it be okay if we read texts that you send back and forth with your friend or family on p-day. I said yeah, sure fine. So he read some of the messages that Kate and I are sending back and forth One of the messages was, "Guess what I got asked to prom." And so this is the kind of stuff he wants to learn, like these of idioms, these sayings like, 'Hey, guess what?' That was really fun to talk about how to translate that cause it's wicked hard to try and translate 'guess what' into Thai. We got onto this huge tangent about what prom is because Thailand doesn't have prom. So I'm talking about all these prom things, like you dress nice- nice dresses, nice suits and you go eat fancy food. Then you go to this huge dance,pictures, it's a way fun night, He was just like, "whoa, I've seen this in the movies before but I had no idea it was this big!" And I told him that to ask someone to prom, you have to be creative. I told him about how Nolan Molt, a kid at my high school that I played basketball with, asked a girl to prom on a Facebook Live video at school and how it went viral. It was way fun.
After our studies we left the house to visit an older lady and then the Relief Society president. The RS president is the ex wife of a member in Chiang Mai that I know. He told me to go visit their family and say hi for him, because he misses his son. Then we had an appointment to teach this older man that we were trying to talk to, do more inviting and come home. What actually happened is we went to the older lady's house and she's not interested. So we invited a lot and found some cool people. Also I found the place to fix my shirt that I ripped. One person we found is this cool uncle, I'm sorry, in Thai it's called "loom," which means older gentlemen, but it also translates to uncle. It's this older man. We talked to him, gave him a book of Mormon and continued on our way to the relief society president's house. We were having a hard time so I called her and said, Hey, we are struggling to find your house. And she said, uh, I am not in the house right now.. And I was like, oh wait, what happened? She said, well you didn't confirm the appointment with me, earlier at church and I forgot about it. And I thought, come on. We called you last night..... I don't know. In Thailand they don't really use calendars. If I ask can we go to your house at five o'clock on Friday? They think, ah, let's see. I get off work at four, yeah, I'll probably be home by then. Yeah, that's fine. And they don't write it down or anything. In America, I feel like someone would pull out their phone and put it on their agenda... So we left and run over this old man's house and teach the plan of salvation. This was an intense lesson. He told us he wasn't interested at the beginning of the lesson but we taught him the lesson. I asked him if He believes in God. He said, well, there is no god. There's no creator. It's all just nature. It all just happened. My companion was having none of that and it's launching into an argument. I said we don't want to argue about religion. We can leave, it's fine. Both the man and my companion were like, no, we're not arguing. And then they just went at it back and forth. It was nuts. We're not here to convince people. We're here to find people.
Sunday night the other elders came over and stayed the night because for p-day we are going to go fishing at five in the morning and so we all stayed the night at the same place. That was really fun. It's kind of nice to talk in English in the apartment.
My spiritual thought comes from Preach My Gospel, chapter nine, "How do I find people to teach?" This has honestly been the biggest struggle of my mission. For the past two years, the hardest thing I've had to do is find people to teach. At first it was because I didn't like to talk to strangers. Now that's not a problem and I honestly feel fearless talking to people. Sometimes I don't present the message in the right way or sometimes people just aren't interested. So I love this scripture in Doctrine and Covenants 42:8. It's in a section called, "Find them that will receive you.," It says, "You are to build up the church by finding them that will receive you(D&C 42:8). This scripture says, "And from this place, he shall go forth into the regions westward and inasmuch as you shall find them that will receive you, you shall build up my church in every region." And then it says, "Such people will recognize that you are the Lord’s servants. They will be willing to act on your message. Many of these people have been kept from the truth [only] because they know not where to find it." Usually you do not know who it is, who these people are. They may not immediately recognize that you are the Lord's servants. They may not understand that greater peace, direction and purpose in life will come through the restored gospel than from anything else. In the very bottom of my heart I know that there are people out there, I know that there are people that are ready for the Gospel. They are looking for it. I just know they're out there. I've had some opportunities to find some very cool people on my mission. There was one man in Bangnaa that was baptized last week and I found him back in October. In Bangnaa there's this mall and there was a bus station out in front of the mall with a bunch of benches where you can sit and wait for your ride. At that time I was in a trio with Elder Suki and Elder Halverson. One day we're sitting there talking to people. We're all like split up in different areas. And I sit down and I talked to this guy and his name is Po Joi. He was just a really nice man. I didn't say anything about religion or anything. I kind of just sat down and talked to him. I asked him what he does for work, where he's from, where his family is from. He's from Chiang Mai or somewhere up north, I don't remember exactly. And his line of work is he sells these little Buddhist statues that are meant for worship. They're called praup and people wear them on their neck. After I heard about that I felt like, it's nice to talk to him but I didn't think it would go anywhere. I've found that older people who have been interested in Buddhist things their whole lives, they're not really interested in changing religions or learning about anything else. So I was like, well, I'll just talk to this guy and it'll be nice and then we'll go to our next appointment. So we talk for maybe five or ten minutes and at the end I was like, well, I'll just go for it. So I was said something like, well, we got to go, but I'm a missionary and we teach people about Jesus Christ. Would you be interested? I might've said something like, we teach how to be better people or something like that, would you be interested if we came back and taught you more? He's said, yeah, I'd be interested. I got his phone number and we started teaching him. He had some real big struggles because he'd grown up in Buddhism and he had these traditions and way of thinking that made it hard for him. We taught him the restoration like seven times and he just did not get it. But he loved reading the Book of Mormon. He had read like 200 pages by the time I left Bangnaa and he just loved reading about it. So he just would read every day. He kept reading and he still kept selling this Buddhist stuff and I didn't have the heart to teach him the 10 commands and be like, look, you can't do this anymore. We talked about in correlation meeting and the ward mission said, well actually, like if he sells it, it's fine. He just can't worship it. So all right, that's fine. He comes to church and he liked it. He was just a way sweet, way nice man. We gave him a couple baptismal days and he never quite made it. I was like, oh, come on, he's gotta make it! And then I left. I left Bangnaa and went to Chiang Mai as a zone leader for four months, and no I'm in Ubon. I got a text from the missionary that replaced me there, he's still there and he's said, Hey, I forgot to send you this the other week, but we baptized this guy. Wow! There's two people in Bangnaa that I taught that I just thought, there's no way they're going to get baptized, and they did and they're way, way strong. I know the elect are out there, they're out there waiting for us. We just have to be good messengers and look for them. And that's my spiritual thought this week, it was really long. Kudos to you if you read listened (read) to this whole thing. Huge podcast. :) Over and out, Elder Ellsworth
This is a long one folks. Ethan is being stretched on the home stretch. :) Since he has a Thai companion he probably enjoyed speaking English for a bit, even if it was just into his phone. :) I'm being stretched with these Thai words I can't spell. Hahahaha! It's funny to hear him struggle to find the English translation for what he wants to say sometimes, he'll mumble things like, how do you say that in English?? And then after a minute he'll say, oh yeah! Thanks to all of you who support him!
Hello Everyone,
The weeks are flying by, kind of. I'm really tired this week. Last p-day we got up and played some basketball with a member who is the EQ president and he's way cool and his English is way good. He's an English tutor and he's a really good baller. He plays at the park all the time. It was really fun. Then we had some breakfast, went over to the computer lab for a little bit, had lunch and then came home. We did some laundry and spent like three hours cleaning up our house because it was super dirty and we had a lot of work to do. After dinner we headed out and had intended to go visit a less active, recent convert who is having some struggles because she works on Sundays because she's afraid of losing her salary. But she owns her own shop so she could totally close on Sundays but she's afraid that she won't be able to provide for her five little kids at home. So we intended to go over there right at six when she was closing, so we could help clean up. But we got there a little bit late, like 6:20 or so and she's like, uh, we're all done and out. It was one of those things where we came unannounced and we weren't sure what to do and they weren't sure what to have us do. So we looked at the map and it looked like there was a big open space about two kilometers down the road. We thought it could be a park where we could do some inviting. So we biked down there, get down there and it's just a bunch of fields. It’s like, open government space. We're kind of out in the boonies a little bit outside of the city and about five kilometers or six kilometers from our house. We had two and a half hours before we had to be home so we biked home and took this out of the way route and talked to a lot of people along the way. We found some cool people. We found a guy that caught this cool lizard. In Thailand there's this lizard that’s called "Docay" (??) and you can hear it cause it makes a really loud noise. That sounds like "insert loud lizard noise". So you're always going to hear them and they're way scary. But not because they're poisonous. They look really cool. They're blue and they have orange spots in their back and they’re scary because if they bite anything they don't let go. So if you get your finger in there they don't let go of your finger. So this guy had caught one and it’s one of those things in Thailand that's just... you're a cool kid if you can catch them. And so this guy had caught one of them and we took a picture of it and he was cool. Then we met a taxi driver and he was just sitting on the side of the road. After we biked past him I just couldn't get him out of my mind. And so we turned around, went back and talked to him. There's been a lot of people like that this week where I look at them on the street as we go by, and then I just can't stop thinking about them. And so we'd have to turn around and go talk to them. Not all of them are interested, in fact, most of them are not. But I guess in the end it's all about following the spirit. We talked to him and we shared a scripture, Mosiah 2:41 and we promised him these blessings (if you keep the commandments you will be blessed). And he was like, all right, well when do you guys have church and stuff? We gave him our phone number, got his phone number, and went home. We called him Tuesday night and he was like, I'm drunk, don't talk to me. Call me tomorrow. So we called him the next day and he just has never been free. We'll give him a call this week and see if we can meet him again.
Tuesday we got up, studied, tried to visit an investigator, did some inviting, more studies, lunch with the district and district meeting. Later we planned to go out to a member's house and serve her. Her house is pretty far away. We biked all the way out there and she's not there. Way sad.
So we biked back and invited on the way, had dinner and made some phone calls. We met an RC that had moved to Ubon from Bangkhen and we got to know him a little bit at English class. He's way, way cool. We're going to try and meet his family this week. English class is always fun.
Wednesday I was looking at this day and I was thinking, I don't know what we're going to do today because I don't know how many appointments were going to have, but somehow we got it filled up. We met with a recent convert and his mom. This recent convert has fallen back into smoking, so he's struggling with the word of wisdom. His mom isn't really into things. She's cool but not really interested. As we were talking she's like, I can't come to church unless my son takes me because I don't know how to drive a car and he has a car and I'm not going to walk there because it's too far. Fast forward to the end of the week, Saturday evening. The RC calls me and he's like, Hey, I'm not going to go to a church tomorrow, I have work. I can't make it. So I'm said, well shoot, now his mom's not going to come either. Sunday morning she comes! She made it, she got a taxi or something. It was a miracle and it was way cool.
Then we taught this other guy named Doh for a long, long time and we talked about a lot of stuff. After lunch we met with a less active named Olay. His wife is way cool. She cuts ties and gives them to the elders. She's just not a member and we really feel like if he would get his act together, she would be a member too. We finished the night at the house of a member who is the manager of the soccer team here in, Ubon. He's very cool. Then we invited all the way home, talking to a lot of people. No one's really interested here like they were in Chiang Mai. It's kind of disheartening.
Thursday morning we got up and visited an RC. It was good. Something I've learned on my mission is it's best to love people into the gospel. That's the way I learned to teach and what I've had success with. People need love. Anyways we left and went to visit an investigator. In Thailand it's a big thing to yell when you see a white person to ask them if they have a Thai girlfriend yet. I don't know why, but wherever I go, that's one of the first questions that I get asked. And it's even worse now that I'm with a Thai companion cause they don't care what he thinks or does. So our investigator said she wasn't free to talk but there's some teenage girls there and one yells out, Do you have a Thai girlfriend yet? You speak Thai really good. So they all start joking about that and then the investigator we are trying to teach starts laughing about it too. And we laughed, but I was just like, yeah, if this is what it’s coming down to we got to go We did some studies and weekly planning and had an appointment with an 11 year old girl and a 14 year old girl who we need to help get to church. The problem is their mom doesn't care about church. She's not into anything. She doesn't care and the Dad's less active. We're going to keep working with them. We had English class again on Thursday and before English class we met this RC named Pom. I love this guy. He's a way funny and so cool. He's just like his own personality. I feel like if I had to be his coworker it'd be tough. But just hanging out with him at church way fun. He's so funny. After English class we locked up the church and we came home and called a bunch of people trying to get more appointments. Not much happened. :(
Friday after personal study we ran over to a big mall called central and invited there for a little bit. We found this cool guy and are trying to get in touch with him on Facebook. Later we met with a less active member who has a mental handicap. It's really sad because I feel like he'd be a really good member but he just struggles. It’s like some kind of autism and he just doesn't understand things very well. But he has a desire to keep the commandments! His parents don't like him coming to church and it's really hard on him. I feel so bad for this guy though. I love him. We asked him to help us this week (he actually offered); to find some other less active people that he knows. Several people weren't home but then someone was home! This LA is an old guy, a convert of about three years. He's very smart, has a master's degree. He seems to have used logic to come to church to be baptized, but that logic just doesn't last very long. We talked with him about how he wasn't really satisfied with some of the things at church because he felt like he was way smarter than everybody else, which is probably true? And he said well I don't agree with some of the things that church does, but I don't want to voice those disagreements. There's some doctrine that he doesn't necessarily agree with and he feels like people would get mad at him if he says anything. But he's really cool. And he actually did the end up coming to church on Sunday! So that was really good.
After that we visited a 17 year old kid who's really cool. He draws awesome pictures! He doesn't come to church because his mom isn’t super supportive and he has to stay at home and watch their shop. Then we met with this really cool referral from Salt Lake. Side note, in Thailand if there's any time that people are talking about Korean missionaries or any other Asian country missionaries, it's always Jehovah's witnesses. So this guy's story is there was these 'Korean people' (JW's) that came to his house one day and they're knocking on the door and they wanted to talk to him about Jesus. And he was like, I'm not free. Like, "Jing Jing," In English it's like truthfully, I'm really not free today. And so he couldn't meet with them but he said he couldn't stop thinking about them. So he goes to the Internet and he just searches for some stuff and he finds our church. So we made an appointment him, got his phone number, taught him the restoration and gave him a Book of Mormon!
Here's an interesting thing. My companion feels like we shouldn't be giving people Book of Mormons very often because people use their tithing money to make those BoMs.
He feels like it's a waste if we just hand them out. I feel like I would gladly sacrifice a lot of tithing money to get those BoMs out there because I know they're way better in the hands of other people, even if those people don't read them. There's so many stories of nephews or grand kids that look in their grandma's attic, find this book and they want to be baptized cause they read the book. Or someone finds one at an old shop and they're converted. I feel like Heavenly Father has a way of making things happen. But if those books sit on a shelf at the elder's house and they never get out, those things don't happen. In previous areas we would , hand them out when we met someone that wanted to learn. We would give it to them right then and we'd say, Take it. It's yours. We'll talk later about it. My companion has a hard time with this. Anyway, we taught this guy the restoration and he's way sick.
Later we taught another guy the plan of salvation. It was a good lesson. That evening we played some sports with the members and had spiritual thought because we were there trying to teach this investigator. This investigator has been to the church a couple times but it was like three years ago. The first time he came for English class and there was a note in the phone that was like, he's read the entire book of Mormon, give him a call later and see if he wants to meet. So we sat him down and had some small talk. And then I just asked him, I've heard you've read the Book of Mormon, is that true? He's like, Yeah, I read it like three or four times. I'm a really good reader so these books of scripture, I can just blow right through them in a couple of hours. And I was like, Really? That's impressive. What do you think about the Book of Mormon? He said, oh yeah, that's good! So I got right to the point and said, Well, you met with the elders before about this kind of stuff, right?. And he said yes. I asked if they talked about baptism. He said Yes, I have been taught about baptism. I said, You know about who Jesus Christ, right? And he said yes. We talked with him about Jesus Christ and his role and I then I said, Do you want to be cleansed of your sins and be baptized? You've read about it in the Book of Mormon, the elders have talked about it before, is this what you want? And he said No, there's a problem. I'm Buddhist. the problem is I'm Buddhist. That was a bummer and kind of nuts to me.
Saturday morning we headed out and invited all morning because we had no appointments. We followed up with someone from earlier in the week who is no longer interested, saw people making cool clay pots and watched a chicken fight. In Thailand cockfighting is really big and there was a practice fight so we saw their training, which was kind of fun. We tried to visit some LA's before lunch and studies but they weren't home. After lunch we had an appointment with this less active member who has really gone off the wrong side of the boat. Her story is she was meeting with the missionaries and she was learning all this stuff and she was just like, I just can't agree with this. I don't want to be baptized. She had a date for baptism and she said, I went in that day and I was going to tell them I did not want to be baptized. But when she went in, it was the day after the super big cleaning day and so they had cleaned up the entire church and it was really nice and pretty and they'd got out all the baptismal suits and cleaned them, they're fresh and dry. She saw all this and she's like, oh, well, dang it. I can't say no, now what do I do? So she felt that she got pushed into being baptized and she just doesn't agree. All right so I asked, well what do you believe in? Is there something we teach that you don't believe in?She said, Well God "insert Thai phrase", which in Thai basically means doesn't have a physical body, doesn't have a physical presence or resemblance. She believes that God is the light of the sun and it's called the solar empire. She believes that God is light that touches our hearts. And she said, Joseph Smith... what he saw was this weird light thing that happened from the sun that I can't explain but it was like some kind of miracle. My companion and I were like, Oh. So my companion is very confident and he doesn't mind arguing or trying to get people to see his point of view. And at that point he was getting ready to launch into this big super explanation/argument and I was like, no. We need to go. Let's get out of here. I have found that there's no point in arguing with people like street contacts or less active members who have their mind made up. Arguing does nothing. The spirit leaves when you argue. The people that we have to teach and talk to are the ones that are willing to receive it. It's in the Doctrine and Covenants. I've that the people that want to talk with us and are willing to sit and chat with us, those are people to start with. If they don't even want to talk to us, we're not here to force them to talk to us. That's easy to avoid. Also if they are interesting in talking about religion, that's awesome. If they are intent on telling us what we are saying is wrong, Just leave. Don't worry. Don't argue.
Then we came back to the church and did our language study and then taught another salt lake referral, who's way cool! She had an experience and now she believes in God. She got in contact with the temple square sister missionaries and now she is now learning. She's really cool. In the middle of our lesson with her I was like, all right, here's this book of Mormon you can have it and read it. My companion stopped me and he said, No we can't give that to you. And I was like, what are you talking about? I said it's ok, you can have this. And she said oh well, that's okay. My companion said, Well, the thing is this book has been printed from the donations of the church. Church members have sacrificed to make this book for us and If you don't read it all the way through, you can't have it." So this was crazy and I was like, no you can have it. Then she said, Oh, can I donate too? I want to donate. She's such a nice, cool lady. I said no, not you're not a member, don't worry about tithing. I said just please take this book and read it. So she took it and said yes she would read it and my companion said, you have to promise to read it. She said, I promise, I promise! So that was interesting.
My companion is really fun and really fun to talk to, even if he has a different view about handing out BoMs. He's really smart and knows the gospel. He's really good inviting. It's nice to have someone that can speak the language as well. I've learned a lot about the things wrong that I say. :)
On Sunday at church we had some miracle people come to church! Earlier this week I had set a goal, we didn't talk about it and I feel really bad, but we were in a rush to set goals and so I just set a couple for our key indicators. I set a goal for four new investigators, two people at Church and one dater. By Saturday night we had found four new investigators. And so the miracle that I was praying for already happened. And I was like, all right, let's get two people at Church. And two people came to church! 1- is this old grandma that won't let us go to her house and I don't think she's a member. 2- is a recent convert that I was talking about earlier. It was so cool. And all these LA people that we had met with this last week? A bunch of them came to church. The Ubon soccer team manager, the old guy that we had met earlier (logic), the sister of the RC LA, Tepe, that sells noodles, the LA kid that we met this week... They all came to church and it was way cool even if they didn't even stay after sacrament meeting. Just seeing them walk in made me so happy. It was really good.
The YSA here is way fun. I have a friend here who was a missionary in one of my districts, but she's returned from her mission and this is her home ward. It's been fun to see some old friends. After lunch we went home to do some of our studies. For language study, normally we would study Thai of course. Maybe I'm lazy, I don't know? I'm nearing the end of my mission and I'm feeling like I'm not gonna learn a whole lot more Thai. And I've learned a lot more Thai anyway just living with him. So all of our language study is dedicated to helping Elder Milang speak better English. He really wants to learn conversational English so he asked would it be okay if we read texts that you send back and forth with your friend or family on p-day. I said yeah, sure fine. So he read some of the messages that Kate and I are sending back and forth One of the messages was, "Guess what I got asked to prom." And so this is the kind of stuff he wants to learn, like these of idioms, these sayings like, 'Hey, guess what?' That was really fun to talk about how to translate that cause it's wicked hard to try and translate 'guess what' into Thai. We got onto this huge tangent about what prom is because Thailand doesn't have prom. So I'm talking about all these prom things, like you dress nice- nice dresses, nice suits and you go eat fancy food. Then you go to this huge dance,pictures, it's a way fun night, He was just like, "whoa, I've seen this in the movies before but I had no idea it was this big!" And I told him that to ask someone to prom, you have to be creative. I told him about how Nolan Molt, a kid at my high school that I played basketball with, asked a girl to prom on a Facebook Live video at school and how it went viral. It was way fun.
After our studies we left the house to visit an older lady and then the Relief Society president. The RS president is the ex wife of a member in Chiang Mai that I know. He told me to go visit their family and say hi for him, because he misses his son. Then we had an appointment to teach this older man that we were trying to talk to, do more inviting and come home. What actually happened is we went to the older lady's house and she's not interested. So we invited a lot and found some cool people. Also I found the place to fix my shirt that I ripped. One person we found is this cool uncle, I'm sorry, in Thai it's called "loom," which means older gentlemen, but it also translates to uncle. It's this older man. We talked to him, gave him a book of Mormon and continued on our way to the relief society president's house. We were having a hard time so I called her and said, Hey, we are struggling to find your house. And she said, uh, I am not in the house right now.. And I was like, oh wait, what happened? She said, well you didn't confirm the appointment with me, earlier at church and I forgot about it. And I thought, come on. We called you last night..... I don't know. In Thailand they don't really use calendars. If I ask can we go to your house at five o'clock on Friday? They think, ah, let's see. I get off work at four, yeah, I'll probably be home by then. Yeah, that's fine. And they don't write it down or anything. In America, I feel like someone would pull out their phone and put it on their agenda... So we left and run over this old man's house and teach the plan of salvation. This was an intense lesson. He told us he wasn't interested at the beginning of the lesson but we taught him the lesson. I asked him if He believes in God. He said, well, there is no god. There's no creator. It's all just nature. It all just happened. My companion was having none of that and it's launching into an argument. I said we don't want to argue about religion. We can leave, it's fine. Both the man and my companion were like, no, we're not arguing. And then they just went at it back and forth. It was nuts. We're not here to convince people. We're here to find people.
Sunday night the other elders came over and stayed the night because for p-day we are going to go fishing at five in the morning and so we all stayed the night at the same place. That was really fun. It's kind of nice to talk in English in the apartment.
My spiritual thought comes from Preach My Gospel, chapter nine, "How do I find people to teach?" This has honestly been the biggest struggle of my mission. For the past two years, the hardest thing I've had to do is find people to teach. At first it was because I didn't like to talk to strangers. Now that's not a problem and I honestly feel fearless talking to people. Sometimes I don't present the message in the right way or sometimes people just aren't interested. So I love this scripture in Doctrine and Covenants 42:8. It's in a section called, "Find them that will receive you.," It says, "You are to build up the church by finding them that will receive you(D&C 42:8). This scripture says, "And from this place, he shall go forth into the regions westward and inasmuch as you shall find them that will receive you, you shall build up my church in every region." And then it says, "Such people will recognize that you are the Lord’s servants. They will be willing to act on your message. Many of these people have been kept from the truth [only] because they know not where to find it." Usually you do not know who it is, who these people are. They may not immediately recognize that you are the Lord's servants. They may not understand that greater peace, direction and purpose in life will come through the restored gospel than from anything else. In the very bottom of my heart I know that there are people out there, I know that there are people that are ready for the Gospel. They are looking for it. I just know they're out there. I've had some opportunities to find some very cool people on my mission. There was one man in Bangnaa that was baptized last week and I found him back in October. In Bangnaa there's this mall and there was a bus station out in front of the mall with a bunch of benches where you can sit and wait for your ride. At that time I was in a trio with Elder Suki and Elder Halverson. One day we're sitting there talking to people. We're all like split up in different areas. And I sit down and I talked to this guy and his name is Po Joi. He was just a really nice man. I didn't say anything about religion or anything. I kind of just sat down and talked to him. I asked him what he does for work, where he's from, where his family is from. He's from Chiang Mai or somewhere up north, I don't remember exactly. And his line of work is he sells these little Buddhist statues that are meant for worship. They're called praup and people wear them on their neck. After I heard about that I felt like, it's nice to talk to him but I didn't think it would go anywhere. I've found that older people who have been interested in Buddhist things their whole lives, they're not really interested in changing religions or learning about anything else. So I was like, well, I'll just talk to this guy and it'll be nice and then we'll go to our next appointment. So we talk for maybe five or ten minutes and at the end I was like, well, I'll just go for it. So I was said something like, well, we got to go, but I'm a missionary and we teach people about Jesus Christ. Would you be interested? I might've said something like, we teach how to be better people or something like that, would you be interested if we came back and taught you more? He's said, yeah, I'd be interested. I got his phone number and we started teaching him. He had some real big struggles because he'd grown up in Buddhism and he had these traditions and way of thinking that made it hard for him. We taught him the restoration like seven times and he just did not get it. But he loved reading the Book of Mormon. He had read like 200 pages by the time I left Bangnaa and he just loved reading about it. So he just would read every day. He kept reading and he still kept selling this Buddhist stuff and I didn't have the heart to teach him the 10 commands and be like, look, you can't do this anymore. We talked about in correlation meeting and the ward mission said, well actually, like if he sells it, it's fine. He just can't worship it. So all right, that's fine. He comes to church and he liked it. He was just a way sweet, way nice man. We gave him a couple baptismal days and he never quite made it. I was like, oh, come on, he's gotta make it! And then I left. I left Bangnaa and went to Chiang Mai as a zone leader for four months, and no I'm in Ubon. I got a text from the missionary that replaced me there, he's still there and he's said, Hey, I forgot to send you this the other week, but we baptized this guy. Wow! There's two people in Bangnaa that I taught that I just thought, there's no way they're going to get baptized, and they did and they're way, way strong. I know the elect are out there, they're out there waiting for us. We just have to be good messengers and look for them. And that's my spiritual thought this week, it was really long. Kudos to you if you read listened (read) to this whole thing. Huge podcast. :) Over and out, Elder Ellsworth
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