Elder Tustin Neilson: $1,000,000 and a Race Track

Two weeks in one...

4/1/19
Hey everyone,

Kind of a boring week to be honest. Just the missionary grind. We did get to meet with this one returning member in the other ward that we ran into on the street the other day. He is kind of crazy but wants us to teach basically everyone he has ever met so hopefully he will be a great source of referals for the missionaries in Taiwan! He also wants to give the church over $1,000,000 to build a church closer to his house!

We had interviews with President this week and it sounds like Elder Vernon will be moving this transfer. Looks like I have about two weeks left to figure out this area! Hahaha.

Today we biked up to Costco again with the Zone Leaders because I wanted to get more peanut butter and we like eating there for lunch but when we went shopping I made the silly autopilot decision to grab a cart even though I knew all we were getting was my peanut butter. Then we ended up spending much longer that expected exploring the store untill finally we realized none of us were actually looking for anything on that level and went down stairs to grab my peanut butter and leave. But that just meant I spent a ridiculous amount of time walking around Costco with a huge empty Costco cart like a total fool! We had a good laugh about that.

Oh! Also this week we went to a wedding for a member because they said that they were bringing a cousin or something who was really interested that they wanted to have us meet at the wedding. But the cousin never actually came! 😭 So it was kind of a waste of time but we did get to have some good dinner and weddings are pretty fun.

Have a great week everyone!

Elder Neilson

4/8/19

We had a kind of weird day on Tuesday this week when the Zone Leaders asked us to go teach a lesson for them right after District Council. We had to bike over to a college way outside our area to teach this guy who originally met the missionaries around Christmas and set up for this Tuesday. But then the lesson actually happened! And it was way cool. We taught this college professor who spoke really good English (he actually liked reading the Book of Mormon in English and then checking the Chinese to make sure he understood. Pretty impressive). He is super busy though. He's actually going on a trip to New York for a few weeks to help out some exchange students at West Point! So he might not be able to meet with the elders again for a few weeks but he seems pretty reliable to meet with. The nicest thing about teaching him was he really understood how to ask questions to clear up his understanding. We didn't have to ask him anything. Most of the time he just brought up his concerns. Probably comes with being a teacher.

We also had a really cool coordination meeting with the ward missionary force to learn about their vision and plan and such. The new ward is really hyped about missionary work which is super exciting. They have set a pretty high goal of 21 baptisms this year. Including our 3 we already got so that's 18 more! I like those lofty goals. Requires us to increase our faith!

Today for P-day we went hiking with a 75 year old man who comes to English class. He is a pretty funny dude so it was a good time. While hiking he showed us the biking race track in the park. You are allowed to just go bike on it if you want and we thought that sounded like fun so later today we went back with the Zone Leaders and did a few laps to see how fast we could do it. We all ended up getting under 30 seconds. Not to shabby if I do say so myself. We were all pretty tired afterwards though. The track had really steep banked turns so you had to be biking with everything you had to get around them. Major respect for those olympic athletes.

Hope you all have a great week!

Elder Neilson