To Chill is God's Will

P.S.  If you haven't heard, Daniel Meeks will be serving in the Korea, Seoul mission.  He will enter the MTC on December 4th.

Ward Talent Show.  Andrew starts playing at about 9 minutes in....

What a great week it was. We started off the week visiting W-- D--. He is such an incredible man. He is willing to read as much in the Book of Mormon as we assign him every week. We talked about the tree of life this week and he had so many questions. We shared some scriptures about how God answers prayers and he said he related with it. He is super intelligent and has a book being published this week. He has this uncanny ability to pick out parts that he reads in the BOM and apply it to his life. It's really impressive and he is a good example to me of how the BOM should be studied. We also got a chance to meet with him yesterday and had a great lesson/ping pong session. He read 2nd Nephi 31 through Jacob 2 which provides a lot of topics to talk about. He was really interested in repentance. He thinks it is really important. He hasn't quite grasped the spiritual nature of things but he really thinks the BOM has so much good information and reminders that he can apply to his life. The Lord is helping him become a better person through the Spirit and through the BOM. If he reads the whole thing I know he will receive a testimony of it's truthfulness.

We met with L-- B--an older man in our ward who is super legit. He spent quite a while teaching us how to do a Rubik's cube which was fun. We shared a message with him about charity which prompted a long discussion. He told us about his conversion story (about 3 years ago) and how the scripture we shared was the first one that the missionary that contacted him shared. It was really cool. He also invited us to do some service for a neighbor of his. Great opportunity. He was incredibly grateful we came and visited him. Members need help too!!

W-- D-- was not quite ready for baptism. He had an interview and it went really well but he still needed to stop drinking coffee. But he hasn't since last Sunday! Woohoo! This is awesome. We met with him again this week and discussed his baptismal interview. He said it went well and we set a new baptismal date with him. August 3rd, my birthday! My first baptism is going to be on my birthday. I'm so excited for him. We're going to this great restaurant afterwards with him to celebrate. He is excited and has been to church consistently for almost 3 months. Such a great guy. Street contacting can see miracles!

I passed off phase 1 this week and am looking forward to starting phase 2! 

We had an English class party about American culture this week. It was so much fun! So many people came and a bunch of ward members provided food for it. So nice of them. There is a guy in our class who is so awesome. We had a few minutes to chat alone and he was so curious about the church. He is really sincere and wants to know more. English class is a great opportunity to open people to the gospel. We are going to start trying to teach him after English class. So excited!

We have a basketball night every Thursday night. It's a great opportunity to contact and meet new people. We met a Z-- X-- and he is so cool. He is actually an aborigine and Christian. We had a lesson with him after and he was more than willing to meet again. The Lord is constantly preparing people to hear the gospel! 

There was a time while I was riding my bike this week that an overwhelming feeling of happiness came over me. I was pondering about some of the investigators that we teach and was so grateful for the opportunities that we have already had. My companion and I have the opportunity to meet with people so much and no matter what their future is in the church they benefit from our message and our friendship. A lot of missionary work is planting seeds. Our goal is to never have someone have a bad impression of us. To always go away with a positive experience and view about the missionaries. I think this is really good. 

Alright now for some interesting/funny stuff. We went to this different church this week. We have 4 investigators who go to the true Jesus church. Talk about an interesting experience. They are all incredibly nice and welcoming. So we had a Bible study in the morning with them and it was really good. They had a lot of great insights and definitely interpreted things different than us but hey it's all good. So we went into their service and the start they had us all pray. THEY PRAY IN TONGUES! HOLY SMOKES IT WAS SO CREEPY! All of a sudden it sounded like a scene from a torture movie. Just imagine the most horrendous sound of wailing and screaming of 100 people and you might know the experience was like. Elder Nelson and I were so incredible shocked. We started laughing and had to hide it super quick. People were seriously convulsing. It was so eerie. After that was all over it was an incredible service. Seriously good information. Then at the end to end the meeting they did the same thing. After that they treated us like royalty. We were guests of honor and sat at the table of the Elders and important people. They were so nice to us and gave us so much food. If only we were as good at welcoming people as they are. We'd have so many more people join our church. I seriously felt genuine interest and love from them. 

We ate the breakfast from HELL this week. The older convert I talked about earlier was so grateful for our lesson he wanted to feed us. We went and had breakfast from him and man it was the hardest thing I've ever had to put down. It was egg like 5 different ways. Here in Taiwan they have this egg called 1000 year old egg and it's basically a rotted egg. They love it. He put it in what we were eating and it was soooooooooooooo horrible. He also had like 5 other things that were just horribly horrible. UGH! It's all good though. I didn't puke and this is success. 

Well I could keep on writing but this is a super long on this week so I don't want to overload ya'll. You're always in my prayers and I hope you all know that I am here to help people improve their lives whatever way that may be. Not everybody well mostly everybody we teach will not join the church at this point in time but I can give them my love and hopefully provide some hope/direction in their life. 

I love the work and I love ya'll

Elder Meeks

P.S. I miss Bradley Aaron and CJ so freakin much. So crazy that ya'll are home together now. :P  

Don't rain on my parade.

He experienced his first typhoon this past week thus the title of this post.

Sorry no pics this week.

Hey ya'll

This week was great! The temple provided an incredible opportunity to really ponder and pray about the feelings in my heart. There are many people that we are teaching right now who are incredible people. I truly care about all of them. The temple is an incredible experience and being on my mission has helped me better realize the importance of the temple. Not only is it the source of ultimate inner peace it is the Holy place where we may bind ourselves together as families forever. Such wonderful promises and ordinances to be learned from. 

We have the opportunity to teach English class every week. It is a wonderful time for people to come and have an incredible experience with the missionaries. My companion and I really focus on getting them to laugh and love the time they spend with us. We make lots of jokes and just help people realize how normal of people we are. Our spiritual thought and invite this week provided an opportunity for people to think about a question that they had about our church. Most were superficial and goofy but two of the individuals actually had very good questions. The first one being, "How can a person, who feels like God has forsaken them, not for guilty for the bad things he's done?" Wow! What a needful and thought provoking question. I was shocked by the question and had the opportunity to share the plan of salvation in just a few minutes. We sat down and talked about the Book of Mormon and how it would specifically answer that question for him. He was very appreciated and agreed to start meeting with the missionaries in his area! Woohoo! 

We have a basketball night every Thursday night. The primary purpose being to relate with people our age and be able to start meeting with them. This week we got a ton of phone #'s and are excited to start meeting with these people. Being a good example and having fun with people are amazing ways of helping people realize you are just normal people who really want to help them improve. :)

The typhoon this week was interesting. We were inside for a few hours but the Lord still gave us the opportunity to keep our number of people we met with pretty high. I don't know how we did it but we had 23 lessons and found 9 people. Such a blessing. The Lord is preparing people to hear this gospel. So wonderful! 

It is so important for new members, recently moved in members, Less Actives, and investigators to have a friend at church. I can't stress how important this is. We had the opportunity to meet with an LA that previously has not been contacted in our area. He told us that the main reason he stopped going to church was because when he moved to Xindian not one person in the new ward came up and talked to him the first two weeks he attended. He felt like no one was welcoming and so he started going with his friends to a different church. So sad! We really need to make sure to guanxi the people that need it. 

We set up a dinner appointment with a kid we met on the street. We were so happy and surprised when he brought his mother and two other friends to the dinner as well. They were such a great time. They had many questions about our church and were willing to listen to what we had to say. They were eager to share their beliefs as well. Their church believes in the gift of tongues. So, when they pray, they speak with the gift of tongues. We haven't had an opportunity to hear it yet but we're going to trade churches next week. They'll come to ours and we'll go to theirs. It will be an interesting experience!

We are continuing to work with a young man in our ward who is not sure if he will serve a mission. We learned more about his situation from his mother this week. The ward members mean well but they constantly ask him why he hasn't gone or when he is going to go. This really irritates him. I know the feeling and so I feel bad for him. Some people take longer than others and there is nothing wrong with this. We just need to be patient and be good examples. I hope the ward members will be more sensitive to his situation because it most definitely is a delicate time for him. 

Elder Nelson and I continue to get along as always. We've never had any problems and definitely won't in the future. We seriously love the people we meet with and thank God everyday for how much we are blessed in our companionship. We have very little time for finding because of how many people we meet with throughout the week. We did not have 1 scheduled finding time this week but still found 9 people to teach! Such a miracle. The key is just talking to and loving everybody that you come in contact with. Be real with them, have fun, make them laugh and bear a spiritual witness of your message's importance. When you do this they can't help but want to meet with you. 

These next four things are my personal key indicators for success:

CHILL

When I am doing these things I am happy. When I am happy we find new people to teach. 

Love

Work Hard

Have Fun

W-- D-- did not quite pass his baptismal interview. He is still having some issues with tea and coffee but he is determined to be ready for another interview next Saturday and to be baptized the following Saturday. He's so solid and comes to church nearly every week. The members are so good at guanxiing him and he will definitely be alright when we don't have the opportunity to meet with him every week anymore.

The work goes on and I love it. 1 whole transfer finished. Holy smokes! Where did the time go? I can't believe I've already been here for 6 weeks. Time flies when you are having fun is definitely true.

Elder Meeks

Love you all the way up to the moon....

This is the saying I use to end every letter!  Yes there was a tear in my eye when I saw it.  

Hey Ya'll!

This week was great. Saw many wonderful things happen. This week we had the opportunity to meet with many LA's, members and investigators. I truly believe that the best way to do missionary work is through the members. We also saw many contacting miracles! We are continuing to meet with a Lin Dixiong. I believe we have had 3 lessons with him. He is 17 years old and super mature. HE really has a desire to learn about what we have to say. Up to this point he has been really reluctant to pray and such but this time we really pushed it and he prayed for us. His prayer was great. I can't wait to keep meeting with him. 

We had such a spiritual experience with one of our investigators Brian. Our lessons are sometimes hard to focus in because he is just really funny and we chat a lot. But at the end of the lesson he told us that the real reason why he started meeting with us was so he could practice his English. But he now considers us to be his true friends. He then opened up and started telling us about some deep concerns he had in his life. This year he has to decide what career path he wants to take in his Law profession and he is really nervous about it. We began to share about how God can truly help him overcome these feelings and help us choose what to do. We just told him that the things we have been inviting him to do are the things he needs to do in order to have this blessing. At the end I asked him if I could say a prayer. While I was praying I had the strong impression to just tell him that God knew how he felt and was eagerly waiting for him to ask for his help. I told him how much my companion and I cared about him and that what we were teaching him was because we truly believe it will change his life. He said at the end of the prayer he was fighting bursting into tears. 25 year old guy feeling the Spirit for the first time. Wonderful experience. He came to church, is hopefully reading, and prays everyday. He is trying to quit smoking and I really believe he'll come around. He might take a while but I know that if I had to leave my mission right now I would feel like I accomplished a lot. 

I went on exchanges with an Elder You in Banqiao. It was great. I really got to use my Chinese as a for of everyday communication because he is a Taiwanese Elder. I loved it. It was cool to see that if I really had to I could get around and be okay.

We had tracting miracles this week! One of them was on the way to tracting. We talked to a kid on the bus and he had some interest. We are hopefully going to set up with him soon. Then, on the first door we knocked, the person was like, "okay, come in." We had an awesome lesson together. Mars (cool name) was totally willing to pray and read the Book of Mormon. Super cool person! 

We had dinner with a less active family this week. The father was in the bishopric previously but because of being offended has stopped coming to church. Super sad. They are an incredible family and still read the Book of Mormon and pray. They are so great towards the missionaries. Every time we go over they give us fruit or food of some sort and are excited about the message we have to share with them. They will eventually come back to church but right now they are just being stubborn. They have super strong testimonies just not strong enough to come back to church. They think they ward members don't like them which is super sad. I hope that we can help them come back. We are going to start inviting families to start to reach out to them. 

There is this older gentlemen we meet with. Wu Dixiong. He is so intelligent. He has written 36 textbooks and read 10 chapters of the Book of Mormon while completely understanding it. He pulled out so many personal meanings and applied them in his life. He doesn't really have that much religious background so we are taking a slow approach to teaching him. Right now we are just discussing the Book of Mormon and sharing short messages with him. We are trying to help him realize God wants to have a relationship and that he can use his intelligence to bless others because God gave him this incredible talent. 

Our investigator Wei Dixiong's baptismal interview is this week! Woohoo. I'm so excited for him. He is really prepared to be baptized. We taught him the Law of Tithing and without hesitation was completely willing. He has been to church at least 7 or 8 times and is just a great guy. We love meeting with him and are excited to help him to make this first covenant with God.

Now for some funny stuff. We have a guy that we meet with . His name is Leo and he is literally crazy. He is a major alcoholic and smokes every 30 seconds or so. We invited him to church just praying that it would be okay.........yea........ He started smoking in the church! Got really mad because people got mad at him and kinda stormed out. He called back later and apologized but yea. Crazy stuff. We went to his house and I played the piano for him. He started crying. He has had had a rough life. I hope we can help him to some degree. 

Sometimes I feel like we are like the tri-cycle kid in the Incredibles. We have this amazing experience where we see something impossible happen. We are sometimes just in the right place at the right time. (When Mr. Incredible lifts the car over his head and the little kid in the trike sees him). I would liken this to God blessing us or him giving us a witness of truth. The next time the kid comes to the same spot expecting to see a "miracle". Mr. Incredible asks him, "Well, what are you waiting for?" The kid replies, "I don't know something amazing I guess." Sometimes God just gives us blessings. He gives us these great experiences that we don't even ask for. The trick is not getting into the habit of expecting him to continue to give these witnesses without work. We cannot expect to keep receiving the same witness over and over again while doing nothing. We have to go out and search for it. (My prophetic attempt at a parable). 

So there is this man in the mission known as underground Frank. He literally knows everything about all the missionaries. Really cool guy but a stalker. He's a less active and just loves spending times with missionaries. He is a great guy to have on your good side. My companion and I got to meet him this week and because we were so chill with him he decided to bring us costco muffins and peanut butter. Woohoo!

Did you know Taiwanese people are obsessed with talking about poop? Random Fact

Last week for P-Day I got to go to Taibei 101. It is the second tallest building in the world. Cool place. You should google it. I'll attach some pictures. But ya you can see all of Taibei from the top. Are area is like a half an hour away and you can see it just fine. So tall. An LA we do a lot of stuff with paid for 4 of us to go. So nice of him. About 80 u.s. dollars. 

Well this is about all for this week. My P-Day is regular day next week so you'll be gettin a letter from me Sunday. :) If ya'll have any questions please feel free to ask. Don't be afraid to send pictures. Seriously though.. I love pictures. It's kinda like the only attachment to the outside world. Also, is their any breaking news lately? Except for the plane crash? 

Love ya'll and the Lord does too!

Elder Meeks

Don't play with fire/Ice Skating with Asians

This was a great week. We had the opportunity to see many wonderful things happen here in AnKang. I just feel like I have been so blessed to be here in this area. We've had many focuses recently but we have really started to focus on using the members. This week it really paid off. We have a young man who is 16 that is just fired up about missionary work. His name is B-- and he really wants to bring the gospel to his friends. We've been playing basketball every saturday morning with them and have found this to be a great guanxi activity. They have become comfortable around us. This week B-- invited two of them to church with us and they both came! They both thought it was boring but they said it was a good place. The sisters will start meeting with one of them and we will continue to meet with the other. 

This work isn't just about those people that are not members of the church. It is also about saving the souls of the members. There is an 18 year old kid (who happens to be B--'s older brother) who is struggling right now. He is a really good kid and I can tell he wants to do good things but is in a rut as far as his testimony goes. He doesn't really thinks he wants to go on a mission. His mother has so much faith. We have been doing FHE with them every Sunday night in order to try to help him. This week we shared a message about why we decided to come on missions. I believe that a lot of the time people think missionaries have been these perfect people there whole life and never had doubts. Which is 100% not true. We both shared some of the difficulties we faced as we decided to come on missions. I can't help but feel this kids pain. I really relate with his situation and REALLY want to stop him from making the huge mistake of deciding not to go. We talked about prayer and how it can help us receive answers from God. I felt the Spirit and got semi-emotional as I talked about receiving my answer if I should come on a mission. We invited his whole family to pray everyday in order to receive comfort from God and receive an answer to his question. He said that he was willing. Pray for him. 

I went on exchanges this week with Elder Robinson. Such a great missionary. Really just loves the people and wants to help others. He goes home in 3 weeks. Some of the things I learned from him were:

-When you start having your focus be the number that's when you start failing.

-If you work hard, love, and obey you WILL see baptisms.

-Christ is Mercy.

-The purpose of service is helping people and planting seeds about the church and gospel.

-Just work and love.

We have so many progressing investigators and many more who are so great. We will continue to meet with them all and work hard to help them make that first step towards baptism. No effort is wasted. If one person receives the gospel because of the work you do it is all worth it in the end! "...And if ye shall bring one soul unto me how great will be your joy with him in the kingdom of my father."

The key to having the Spirit with you is controlling your thoughts, where my eyes wander, and obedience.

My companion is awesome. We have already seen so much success together and have/will never have any problems. God definitely knows my personality and wants me to be happy. He is a great example of just loving the people and really helping people know that God loves them. I really want to become more like him. 

Well I have a ton more to say and if I think of anything in the next half hour I'll send a separate email. But, I want ya'll to know I miss you all and love ya like crazy. This experience is hard but so rewarding. The mission is cool. It is living the law of consecration for 2 years. Cool to think about eh? You get to put your own personal needs on hold and only think about others. Huge blessing. 

Until next time. Stay strong, don't play with fire(I burned myself this week) and think of ways you can serve others.

Love,

Elder Meeks