Elder Brennan McEwan

 Monday, September 29, 2014 12:35 AM

 Miles and Miles

Hey family!

This week was fairly good, but it was honestly pretty slow. We were able to meet with a few of our investigators, but the bad part was that the streets were really rough this week. I really, really want to find some more people to teach, but so far we just haven't had much luck. Actually, I'll rephrase that and say that we haven't had much luck for ourselves. We tried banner finding for the first time in Tai Po since I've been here, and we got some awesome results. We ended up finding a family for the Mandarin Elders, and we also found this one less active or long-time former investigator that seems ready to meet with us. Anyway, I'm pretty excited about banner finding, and I think we're definitely going to be trying to use that a bit more. 

Thinking of the Mandarin Elders, they've been killing it at church lately. I think they may have had more than twenty people in their Gospel Principles class at church this week. I felt a little bit bad when meanwhile we only had two investigators in ours, one of which is more or less one of the Mandarin sisters investigators, and is also mildly crazy. Anyway, I'm really happy to see the Mandarin Elders doing so well though. I also may or may not have made a bad joke about us being like John the Baptist yesterday.

As for investigators, A, our high school student that's waiting until he's eighteen to get baptized, is still doing well. Sounds like he's heard some anti by now - some that's actually credible, and some of the stupid kind. Fortunately, he's got enough of a testimony by now that it doesn't really phase him. I'm glad to see that he's progressing like that. E, our twenty-six year old, is still about the same. In other words, is completely depressing and seems to have absolutely nothing going on in his life. We basically just talked to him about setting goals this week - not even so much in the Gospel as much as having goals in life at all. Unfortunately, he still just seems happy to waste his life sleeping all day. We're going to keep working with him, but it's probably going to be a long road. We've stopped counting his baptismal date because there's no way he's going to be ready to get baptized next week.
Brother L, our middle-aged man, is doing okay. He made it to church, a baptismal meeting, and the recent convert fireside. Unfortunately, he also is probably not going to be ready for his baptismal date next week. He just really doesn't have any particular desire to be baptized right now. We also still have to teach him some of the commandments. Mostly, I think we're just going to need to be able to communicate with him better if much is going to happen with him. He did make progress on that front though. I asked him if anything interesting happened at work, and after saying "nope" he asked me "How about you?" Woo! A conversation that made it further than "pretty good!" Woo! 

Oh yeah, thinking of which, my response was that this angry old guy slapped my hand on the street when I tried to shake his hand and he walked into it after doing his best to ignore me. That happened. Don't worry, I'm perfectly okay (old people don't pack much of a punch) but I was pretty shocked to see someone actually get bold enough to actually hit me. That was a first, for sure.

Brother L... is also pretty set where he is. He didn't make it to church this week, but he did go to the recent convert fireside, and we met with him after that. The lesson was really long, and not a lot was accomplished. He really wanted "historical evidence" to prove the Book of Mormon was true, so we showed him a video in the church called "Ancient America Speaks." He thought it was interesting, but after that he started going off on a million crazy tangents. About an hour into the lesson, Stake President Cheng came in and sat down with us. (President Cheng has met Brother L twice after meetings and agreed to talk to him.) Brother L started asking him a bunch of questions, and after another half hour, E showed up for his lesson. After some quick discussion, we ended up leaving President Cheng and Brother H (the normal fellowhshipper we scheduled) with Brother Land taught E. An hour later, we waved goodbye to E, but then were horrified to see that President Cheng was still there with Brother L. We decided to sit back in on the lesson, and it ended up going for about an hour after that (right around three hours altogether.) Brother L is still pretty fixed on his views, regardless of some amazing questions and powerful testimonies from President Cheng. We're probably going to call President Cheng tonight and apologize for eating up so much time and ask for his opinion on what we should do with Brother L.

Honestly, I felt kind of bad that President Cheng ended up getting dragged into that mess. He's a really great guy, and he's really deserving of respect. I feel like maybe he should have tried to escape when he wandered into the room, assessed the situation, and said "We're not talking about the gospel?" Sigh. I guess sometimes there's only so much we can do.

We were also able to meet with a new less active this week - A-M. He's a really nice guy, but it kind of looks like he was baptized more because the missionaries were cool and played lots of sports and stuff with him rather than real testimony. He's got a lot of interest to hang out with us, but it's probably going to take some careful work to get him to have some real spiritual interest. 

In other news, like Dad mentioned, there's some political protests going on on Hong Kong island and some of the areas near it. I honestly don't know a ton about them because we're not allowed to talk about politics with people. (it's a white handbook rule) Two of our college age investigators said they were going to join the protests in Central though. Sounds like it's related to something like Mainland China basically wants to replace primary elections with appointees of their choice - but like I said, I don't know much. I did see some news footage of the police popping tear gas cans into crowds while I was riding the MTR though. Don't worry though, Tai Po is still nice and calm and doesn't have enough student age people to really care about anything.

That's most of what I can think of for this week. We found for most of the week, so there's not really that much interesting stuff to talk about.

Love you guys lots,

Elder Brennan McEwan

We found the door up in the crazy mountain-ghettos and thought it was funny.

Check out all the detail in the architecture!!!  Beautiful!!