Letter #23

Hey Hey Hey!!

How is everybody doing?! I had a pretty awesome week not going to lie!! I am really starting to feel like there is going to be some big things happening in china town! All of the companionships in my district are working so hard, and as a result we are starting to see success!! This weekend the sister missionaries are having a baptism and the other elder companionship are having two!! I am so excited! I love going to baptisms they are so awesome!

I am still doing my 40-day fast, and oh my goodness it is SO hard! I have been marking my hand whenever I mess up! I still have not had one perfect day! Right when things are starting to go good, we will walk by a store playing the little mermaid song, and it will get stuck in my head. Then the whole day I have an urge to start singing! Then right when I am not paying attention the words will sneak out of my mouth! Or I will say some thing sarcastic to my companion! As for today though I am still perfect I really hope that I can keep it up! I have been getting so close the last few days! My companion is doing the same thing with me now too, and it is helping a lot! I just got to mark his hand because he called me Frodo. (The Hobbit from Lord of the Rings!) When we come to this place to write e-mails we have to hit a button that rings the inside. Eventually, someone will answer and ask who it is, then let us come inside. Well my companion said hey it is elder Near and Frodo Baggins! I made sure to press down on his hand really hard with the pen! haha!

As for this week, it was awesome! Elder Near and I worked our tails off. We were still really trying to focus on lessons because that is what all of our investigators need to progress! It is so hard to get lessons with these people though because they are always busy!! And I mean always! Some times they work every day of the week for 12-hour shifts! That was what mainly happened this week! A lot of them were working this week! We were very thankful that heavenly father still helped us to get in some good ones! And is still blessing us with finding new awesome people!

Fan Xiao jie came to church this last Sunday, and brought two of her boys!! I was so happy!! None of our investigators have been able to make it to church for like three weeks in a row now!! It was really cool because the night before, I prayed really hard that we would have 3 of our investigators at church, because I was really getting discouraged from not having any one come! We had one investigator come, and she brought her two boys who we had never met before!! Although this is a small miracle it meant the world to me!! Prayer is amazing we are so lucky that we are given the opportunity to do it whenever we want!! They seemed to like church! Now they just need to keep on coming! We are scheduled to play ping-pong and teach a lesson with them all this Saturday, so I will let you know how that goes! I ALSO had to translate this week for some one who decided to visit our ward! Oh my goodness that was very hard! I had such a headache after! There are so many words I don't know how to say in English any more!! But I think that he got the general gist of the meeting so I was happy about that!

My comp and me started trying restaurant contacting! It seems to be working really well! You walk in grab a menu start talking to them about what their favorite thing is on the menu, and then you start to talk to them about church! It seems to be working pretty well! It works better when there is not a lot of people in the restaurant or no one.. We had one really cool experience doing that in this amazing Taiwanese soup place! It is seriously amazing! You can’t call it soup because it is so full of goods! There are more goods then there is broth if you get my gist! And at the and it is really fun to try to drink the broth because it is so hot! And we only had the medium hot sauce with it! But of course I got it all of it down because that is how I roll.. Any ways, I ordered what I wanted in Chinese and the girl looked like she saw a ghost!! And really wanted to know why I spoke Chinese!! She then saw my tag and really wanted to learn about the church, AND BE BAPTIZED!! It was crazy! But she is always working, and never really has time to meet with us!! She had just moved here from china too, which is really cool! I wrote my testimony inside of a book of Mormon and gave it to her though while she was at work yesterday!! She was so happy, and couldn't believe that we did that just for her! Definitely a miracle!

We also had our big Chinese new years celebration, which ended up being huge!! So many people came!! Not all of Chinese but still a few. Well two came... that was a little hard for us because us missionary's had been passing out cards for that thing for probably about a month! But I was still happy we had at least two come! One of them I think we are going to meet with soon! We are going to stop by his work I think tonight! But the performance went great! Elder Near and I did the voice over and it was really fun! People said that our performance was the best part! I personally thought the lion dance was awesome! It looks so cool! I was actually getting kind of scared when the lion jumped of the stage! (It is the costume thing that looks like a dragon, and a bunch of guys get inside!) They guys were very good! They did a lot of cool tricks with it! Chinese New Years is crazy! The celebration is still going on! We already went through the biggest day, but are supposed to continue for about 3 weeks!

Oh and another funny investigator story! Do you remember Ruby and Xia? The ones that Elder Near and I played in ping-pong for a lesson?! Well it happened again, but this time we lost.. I don't want to talk about that too much.. But as a result I had to tell them a story in English and they wanted to try translating it! I told the story of Goldy Locks and they loved it...They thought it was hilarious! When I said the word oatmeal, they thought I said old meal, and started explaining it to me as old food! It was really funny!

Well I think that pretty much wraps up the week here! I hope to have good news for you next week about our investigators! I love you all so much!

Love,

Elder Barton