Elder Mark Ensign: Week 23: December 16, 2019

Hey all!

Really quick, the next 3 weeks are gonna be a little different in terms of pday with the holidays and also transfers. So heres a list of my pdays for the rest of the transfer really quick

Today (16th Dec)

26th Dec

1st Jan

7th Jan

So this week was quite the week! The adventure really started Tuesday night when as we were cooking our tea, there was this loud pop and then everything went dark. The power went out haha. Elder Chen and I must have stared at each other in the dark in complete silence for a solid 30 seconds haha. But after we got ourselves collected, we went to the breaker box and turned them all off and on like 3 times but nothing happened. So we went and talked to like all our neighbors and called pretty much every phone number we could find in our flat in addition to a bunch of senior couples. And nothing ended up working. So we ended up staying in our zone leaders flat that night so we didnt freeze haha. The senior couple in charge of housing had no chill haha, here's a couple quick examples of what he said:

1. In response to us saying the heaters wouldnt work cause there was no power “Well I used to be a scoutmaster in Idaho...” (you can probably tell where that went)

2. When we said our water heater was probably about to run out of warm water “yeah lots of people go several days without taking showers”

3. And my personal favorite: “try to figure things out and let me know how it goes in the morning”

So after a peaceful, warm night in the zone leaders flat, and after a nice warm shower too, we headed to the Christmas Conference! Which was like zone conference except christmas, and we also had it at the temple! It was nice! The Preston temple is super nice, we were able to go through a session. Then we had a christmas lunch featuring a whole cooked pig and like a million desserts, and then a variety show with a bunch of acts by missionaries. My district sang “I will go and do” (the new youth song), in both english and Chinese. It was amazing, you could feel the Spirit so strongly!

And on Thursday, Jeremy got baptized! Wow I'm so excited for him. He bore his testimony afterwards and it was so powerful. He mentioned how he knows Heavenly Father loves him and also that even though he hasn't learned about Jesus Christ for very long, he really has such a desire to keep following him! I'm so excited to see how he continues in the church!

Friday we spent pretty much all day finding. And it was absolutely pouring rain outside. It was kinda horrible haha. But one of the chinese members, Godfrey, took us out to eat at a buffet haha. So pretty good day. And on saturday, we had the chinese Christmas party! Which was pretty fun, we had a bunch of people come, pretty much all of which were just friends.

Guess what happened last night again? We were making tea and the power went out againnnnn. So yeah basically our flat is broken and we've had to sleep at the zone leaders flat pretty often recently haha

-Elder Ensign