24 Jan 2011

One of our investigators right now who is progressing nicely is Gao Dixiong. He just showed up at church one day, and said he was a former investigator from a year ago. He's a great guy. But he's a little bit weird. I think he has psychological problems, or maybe just paranoia. He tells us he can predict earthquakes, and that random women with children follow him on their scooters. And he also is really nervous because on the street he sees children, and he doesn't know if those children are his or not!
Anyways, we went and visited the bishop (I love my bishop here, he's the greatest ever) and explained to him that we had a weird investigator coming to church tomorrow. (I finally completed that part of step 4 in the planning session "plan to inform the bishop" !!!! yay ). Anyways, the bishop interviewed with Brother Gao, and confirmed to us that he was probably crazy. But we'll continue working with the ward, and with brother Gao and see what happens. He's a great guy and I do hope that he'll be able to get baptized and be a productive active member of the ward.
Our other crazy investigator is named Xie Chong De.
We have a super active 90 year old bei bei in our ward named Xie bei bei. We go and pull weeds in his garden every wednesday, afterwards eat lunch with him. Then one day when I was with Elder Chen I said, "I love serving this old man, but it doesn't add to our key indicators. (at that time our district leader said sit downs with active members don't count) So the next wednesday we went and woke up xie bei bei's son, who is a bit crazy, and only smokes, sleeps, and meditates, and reads buddhist books all day. At first he didn't want to hear anything we had to say, and just argued with us about buddhism. But he's gotten better every week since. Until we realized, hey, it doesn't have to be a wednesday to come teach this guy. we've come and visited more and more often. He's started reading and praying, and now we're working on getting him to the church. I can already see a big difference in the guy. His countenance just looks a lot more pleasant than before. Xie bei bei's wife, who is a devout buddhist, is much more friendly to missionaries now, and loves to give us little gifts of oranges or pineapple cakes. We don't have anything against that. Xie bei bei is usually a pretty good pei ke. Hahahaha, last time he got mad at his son and said, "If you would have just read the Book of Mormon, you wouldn't be sick in the first place! but you had to go and study buddhism, and then your brain exploded!"

well, sorry to write such a long letter.
Things are great! Elder Mitchell is wonderful. My favorite thing about him is that he'll sing hymns randomly. We've started the habit that when we go visit less actives or knock doors, if at first they don't come to the door when we knock, we just sing a hymn really really loud until they come out. It works sometimes. People are less likely to get angry at you singing obnoxiously loud, than pounding on their door obnoxiously loud.
Elder Vernon