Elder Gerritt Vander Linden III

大家好!  I got my visa!!! I am off to Taiwan tonight. So the flight plan is that we leave LAX at 11:40 tonight! Then it is a 15 and a half hour flight to Hong Kong. After that, we get on a plane for about an hour and a half to go to Taiwan! The plan is to stay up for the first 8 hours of the flight to Hong Kong then sleep. So I have 25 hours of staying awake ahead of me. I will be flying with Elder Harmon, Elder Peterson, and we believe that Sister Player will be with us as well! It is super awesome and I am super excited to fly with them. Hopefully they can help keep me awake though lol.  Also before I start the rest of the email, I am so sorry if I don't respond to you guys this week. I don't have a ton of time and I have to pack today. So I will try and respond to you all, however, if I don't respond to your email this week, I promise that I will respond next week.  This week was pretty good. I went on two exchanges this week. One was with Elder Gardner, who is...

大家好! So this week was pretty uneventful overall, I think there are only three quick things I want to talk about this week. So first and foremost, Qianqian's confirmation! It was super awesome. Yesterday, she came to church like fifteen minutes early (thank goodness because she is almost always late because she lives very far away haha) and she got confirmed in Sacrament meeting! It was super awesome to stand in the circle and then when the blessing was finished to see the huge smile on her face. She went around and gave everyone in the circle handshakes and you could tell just how appreciative she was to have the gift of the Holy Ghost. It was super awesome to be a part of. Alex, a guy in our ward, gave the blessing and he gave an awesome blessing. Him and his wife have really helped Qianqian, and in fact his wife, Brynn, is one of her ministering sisters. It is super, super awesome and I am so excited for Qianqian. The second thing. We had a lesson with Mike again this w...

Alright so this week was pretty good. We taught a few good lessons, and then had Qianqian's baptism! However, I am not in a writing mood today, so I apologize for that up front. But, to make up for that, I am going to try and attach some pictures because apparently it isn't clear how to see all of the pictures on the blog. And my missionary friends can't see the blog. So yeah.  Alright! So first Mike. Do you guys all remember who Mike is? He is the one who has been having a hard time understanding the Book of Mormon. Turns out, he totally understands it he just waaay over thinks it. In our lesson with him, we read a scripture with him, then Kerry (A guy in our ward who went to Boston Chinese speaking, apparently he is a legend from what I hear from the guys in Boston) asked him, "Do you understand?" "No" "Try to explain it" Then Mike explained it perfectly. It was kind of a funny moment. However, that is not the main point I wanted to point...

Alright so this week was pretty good, however, I first want to point out that I totally called the fact that there were 12 temples. And it is so cool that there are 12! That is so many. The church really is true and I can truly testify  that when President Russell M. Nelson says that spending time in the temple will change your life, it truly will.  I challenge all of you to try and go to the temple regularly, in fact I would go so far to even say go at least once  a week! It really will change your life. I can speak from experience that it truly will. Especially if you do work for your ancestors. But anyways, I will get off my soapbox about temples. They truly are amazing though. By the way,  in case you were wondering, once all of the temples that have been announced are built, there will be 201 temples.  That is so cool!!! Alright sorry. This week was pretty good. The entire week I was super pumped for conference haha. I am sure my roomm...

Alright mom, I am going to try and write a longer email this time. I am putting some effort into it.  Hello everyone! I hope you all had fantastic weeks. Mine was pretty good. So one sad story. I don't remember which day it was, but we had 3 appointments and we were pretty excited for all of them. But then, all three of them except for one cancelled. However, the last one was pretty awesome. It was with a mom named Yuki and her daughter named Elena. So typically I guess we just normally give Yuki one on one English class (this was my first time teaching her), but this time, we moved it to gospel topics. It was really awesome. It was funny though because her daughter understands more about our church for some reason so she would take the words we were saying and expain it to her mom really fast cuz she could talk faster than us. It was really funny. The only problem is, she does it in a way that it seems like she is mocking her mom for not being able to understand the princi...