It's not just raining cats and dogs... It's raining MIRACLES. January 18, 2016

It rained a ton this week. I still don't have good rain gear.... Lol, but the rain doesn't stop us from preaching the gospel!!!!! The rain also helps a ton with the pollution which is terrible in the Minxiong/Jiayi area. If you were to use the scale that is used back home for pollution, the pollution here would probably be ranked "quadruple red death". Anyways, the Taiwanese presidential election was also going on this week. That means that there were parades and there are campaign cars driving around 24/7 with ridiculously loud speakers blazing, "VOTE VOTE VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!". Lots of things in the campaigning process here would never fly in the U.S. The work is super interesting in Minxiong right now. Elder Mitton and I are working pretty dang hard. Probably the hardest either of us have worked in our lives. However, we have 0 progressing investigators. We've taken a step back and looked at how we are doing things and decided that much like sports, we don't have to switch up the entire starting line-up (we don't have to make drastic changes), but there are small things that we could really focus on to do better! We got a lot of insight from our interviews this week with President Blickenstaff. He counseled me to make my personal study as effective as possible and really use that time to "put on the armor of God". President Blickenstaff is the man! Oh, and we found out that in July we will be getting out NEW mission president. President Teh! You can go look him up. I'm pretty sure he's serving as a seventy right now... Anyways, even though we don't have an progressing investigators, we have still seen a TON of miracles this week. The biggest one is perhaps this:  We walked into Costco on Saturday night and there were a gajillion people in there, we had like 10 minutes before dinner so we decided to talk to a few people. The VERY FIRST people we talked to were super cool. It was a guy and a girl (cousins) and they spoke English super well. We talked to them for 10 minutes and then exchanged contact information. Anyways, we went back to the food court to eat and then right when our dinner ended those same people came and offered to buy us pizza (obvi we weren't gonna refuse that). We then got invited to go over to their apartment and we found out that they had met with missionaries 6 years ago, but for some reasons lost contact. They expressed that recently they have been feeling a lot of distress with things that are happening in the world and were "seeking peace". Elder Mitton and I couldn't believe how golden these people are! They also expressed how they felt like it was a miracle and was God sending us to them. I couldn't agree more! We're meeting with them again tonight, I'll let you guys know how it goes!

-Elder Poon

oh, and I got pooped on by a bird last night while I was riding my bike lol