Elder Mark Ensign: Week 20: November 26, 2019

随便吃！

This past week has pretty much been the longest week ever. It was transfers again too! I'm staying in the Manchester YSA ward again with Elder Chen again. It's gonna be the 3rd transfer here but I'm really glad cause the YSA ward is pretty much the best area in the mission (its nickname is the Promised Land), and I actually get to use my Chinese here too! I'm gonna be here a long time too based off of what I've heard haha. Also! We got our friend Jeremy on date for baptism! I'll talk about him in a second!

So what the week it's been! We went finding a lot because we had a bunch of lessons cancel, and we weren't able to set up as much appointments as we wanted. On Tuesday I accidentally left my coat at the flat, so I was literally freezing! It got to -10°C that night (14°F)! By the time we finished finding I literally couldnt feel anything. At the end I was showing a random man some things from the BoM and my voice was literally shaking. It was a great time haha. On Wednesday we went street contacting for 6 hours! Sooooo long, it was a throwback to my second week in England, freshers week. My feet weren't happy from walking around all day haha. And the worst part is that we didn't really have any success with all of our finding efforts. We had lots of good conversations but nobody really interested.

On tuesday one of our friends invited us to this Taiwanese/Chinese socializing activity at night. It was basically just a bunch of people talking in Chinese. But it was way fun, there was a bunch of people trying to learn chinese there too. I had some good conversations and got someone's WhatsApp! It was a good finding opportunity, we're probably gonna go next month too!

Thursday is where things picked up! We had a lesson with Jeremy early in the afternoon. We taught him the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It went really well and we invited him to be baptized! He's on date for December 12th! We have a bunch of things to teach him, but we've found time this week to meet him a bunch. And finding from that point went a little better! We ended up getting 2 new friends which isn't a ton, but it's kinda been the average for the past couple weeks. One of them was a referral from a nonmember! Nobody even asked, she just invited her friends to come to church with her haha. She's amazing!

We got fed 3 times this week! Technically twice but we also had family home evening at the YSA ward so 3 times. Just in time for Thanksgiving! We got fed on Saturday by one of our nonmember friends - HouLin. She made us dumplings which were soooo good. She's an older Chinese lady. There's actually a bunch of older Chinese people that live in England. And all of them speak little to no english. It's not what I expected at all, but we're gonna try to find some for the chinese group! And then hopefully we'll be able to change the chinese group into a chinese branch!! We also got fed on sunday by a member, Jonah. He's super nice, he went on a mission to the Phillipines so he made us some filipino food. Then on Monday the FHE activity was a thanksgiving feast. Which was actually so good. The Manchester YSA ward is actually sooo good with activities. Its every monday, they always have a bunch of food, and it's super fun. We can only go if we have friends going, but we pretty much always do so we always go. Its super nice.

On a separate note, the new missionary standards let us read emails all week long now! So send all the emails you want haha

-Elder Ensign