A New Year

Hey all,

Been a pretty good week

Elder Merrill hit his year mark on his mission on the 31st of January so we went to go get some shaved ice in celebration. 

Wtih the new year heppening this week, Monday is kind of like the "Christmas eve" of Chinese new year. Speaking of the New Year, members tend to feed the missionaries a lot during this week, and dinners are allowed to be 1.5 hours instead of just an hour. Going in to Sunday we had about one dinner set up and we're ready for a pretty so so week, but by Sunday night, we had an appointment for lunch and dinner basically every day this week! On Friday we were talking with our ward mission leader and he said that Taiwanese people like to plan things last minute. I guess he is right!

In other news today we spent the whole pday cleaning our apartment as it is new years spring cleaning. I'm pretty happy about it. Our apartment went from pretty clean to really clean in a matter of hours! Hopefully it will stay this way for at least as long as I am here. Haha. I also got to replace the toilet flushing handle which I have wanted to do for some time. The old one has been broken since I arrived and so the top of the toilet was never on and you had to pull the broken flushing rod up to flush. Now we have a fancy new one that even has both a large and small flush function so we have a real toilet again! Picture below. The only thing we were not willing to clean was the one cupboard above the stove that has a bunch of dead cockroaches and probably a lot of cockroach poop. Picture of that below as well. (I promise the rest of the apartment is clean😅) I'll probably get to that one later in the week but after a few hours of cleaning I wasn't up for it.

This week I was working on allowing the Lord to work through me as a missionary. After reading this quote from Gordon B. Hinckley in Preach My Gospel, 

“Every morning … , missionaries should get on their knees and plead with the Lord to loosen their tongues and speak through them to the blessing of those they will be teaching. If they will do this, a new light will come into their lives. There will be greater enthusiasm for the work. They will come to know that in a very real sense, they are servants of the Lord speaking in His behalf. They will find a different response from those they teach. As they do so by the Spirit, [the people they are teaching] will respond under the influence of the same Spirit.”

I have seen some real miracles this week where I could feel my abilities as a missionary performing at a higher level than I could ever achieve on my own. It's still been a slow week as not a lot of people are willing to meet with the holiday so close, but to see the Lord carrying me through has been a great blessing. 

Have a Happy New Year!

新年快樂！

Elder Neilson

倪長老

Not a lot of photos this week unfortunately...

Elder Merrill and I eating our shaved ice and Family Mart sweet potatoes on his year mark

We got my fancy new toilet

The horrifying Cockroach black hole

Finally our apartment before new years photo to see if we gain any weight by the end of the week. Some people are known to put on a lot with all the huge meals! Will send the after photo next week.