Preparing for Baptisms in a New Area

Hey mama!

Sorry for taking so long to answer your emails. I truly dislike writing. I've learned that I really need to get better at keeping in touch with people, but I haven't quite gotten the motivation to do so 🤣

JB is awesome. Smaller than Cheras, but it seems a bit more self-sustaining because the branch leadership is pretty strong.

We've got a huge list of "friends", but most of them haven't been taught in over a month or two, so we'll probably stop teaching most of them. But, we probably have five that we will meet with consitently. Stephen, Hyrum, Lucas, Mei Yun, and Jeanette. In the last two weeks we actually put Mei Yun and Hyrum on date to be baptized, and Lucas and Stephen were on date before I got here.

Stephen and Hyrum should get baptized this Saturday. Lucas was supposed to, but he hasn't been coming to church, so it'll have to be postponed. This week we put Mei Yun on date for January 7th, but there's a lot of work to do before then and my Chinese will need to improve if she's going to understand everything. Jeanette's a little odd sometimes, but I think she has a lot of potential.

This last week we only had Stephen, Beatrice, and Mei Yun at church, but last week we had Jeanette and her sister Renee. In terms of members there are usually about 20 each week.

I love Elder Johnny. He's quite hilarious. He's also a very good teacher. His English is really good, but it's definitely not perfect. Sometimes he mis-interprets texts, which leads to some funny conversations or him accidently thinking we have a lesson when we don't or that someone canceled when they're actually still planning on us. We also both have to repeat ourselves quite often. Overall, it's pretty fun though. Not always fully understanding each other keeps the mood pretty light.

Miracle:

Yesterday, Elder Johnny and I were going out to find people to teach. As we pulled up to an intersection,

Elder Johnny asked, "Elder, should we go right or left."

I responded, "We were planning to go right, right?"

He says, "yes, so which way?"

I go, "Well, now that you mention it, left does sound good."

Him, "It sounds good to me too."

So, we switch directions while waiting for the light and pull up to the next house that we pass. The house we pullled up to had two super nice girls, one of which had recently been attending church with her Aunt and has been interested in learning more about Christianity. We got to teach them a bit right then, and plan to go back and teach the family this Tuesday, it was pretty cool. God is good, Elder Johnny is inspired.

Challenge:

We honestly have a fair amount of youth/YSA that would probably be fairly active if their parents would take them to church, so that's been a bit frustrating.

Good News:

We visited some more youth and YSA with Elder Lai of the area seventy again, and I think one of the families we visited will start to come back to church now. Also, I'll be getting an additional companion on Wednesday. He's actually from the same hometown as Elder Johnny.

Love,

Elder Jaxon Wardle