GROUP EMAIL 12/2/2018 Just your weekly email from your favorite elder in Taiwan

Hey everyone! This week was great! Man, missions are great. If any of you were considering it, do it!

Anyways, this week was great. Taiwan is great. Miracles happen all the time.

We were able to go to the temple this week which was so great. I love the temple so much. The Taiwan temple is actually pretty small relatively, but it's super cool. One thing that's kind of cool that's different than America is that you take your shoes off before going in. It's culture here to take your shoes off before going into a house, and since it's the Lord's house, we take our shoes off. So that's kind of cool. 

This week I went on exchanges with Elder Liu and Elder Davies. So we got a new elder in our district this week, and that Elda is Elder Davies. He's super cool, we were in the MTC together for a little bit and he is an awesome missionary. It was pretty awesome, we learned a ton. We are actually all in training right now so it was cool to see how their training is going.

Other than that, everything is going on as normal! Missionary work is awesome, I love it so much. This week I've been studying the differences made in Preach My Gospel. For those of you who don't know, Preach My Gospel is basically a missionary handbook and they recently updated it. So what I've been doing is going through and marking all of the changes that they made in the update. Basically those changes represent what they want missionaries to be doing but they haven't been doing. One thing I've noticed is how much this gospel is for the one. Heavenly Father seriously cares about every single one of us and He wants what's best for us, just like any other Father. When Jesus Christ visited the Americas it says in 3 Nephi 11:15 "15 And it came to pass that the multitude went forth, and thrust their hands into his side, and did feel the prints of the nails in his hands and in his feet; and this they did do, going forth one by one until they had all gone forth, and did see with their eyes and did feel with their hands, and did know of a surety and did bear record, that it was he, of whom it was written by the prophets, that should come." Every single person went and Jesus Christ ministered to each one of them. You guys wanna know how many people were there? In 3 Nephi 17:25 it says "25 And the multitude did see and hear and bear record; and they know that their record is true for they all of them did see and hear, every man for himself; and they were in number about two thousand and five hundred souls; and they did consist of men, women, and children." So if we assume that it took 10 seconds for each person, that's 25,000 seconds. Which ends up being about 7 hours. And that's the first thing He did! This gospel is truly about individuals and helping people realize we are all a part of God's family. He truly loves each of us more than we could possibly imagine. If you don't believe me, go and pray and ask God. I promise He will let you know. God knows each of us individually and if we are going through something, He can help us and wants to help us, we just have to go to Him. I've seen this in my life, and I know you all can too. 

Love and miss you all! 

Elder Vander Linden

林長老