My Burden Is Light January 11, 2016

The mission just gets better and better! Taiwan is the bomb.com I really need to invest in some good rain gear though. Last Sunday it was basically a torrential downpour. The rain gear that I have currently was not built for the Taiwanese acid rain I guess so all my clothes still got soaked. I brought an extra pair of pants, but I spent all of church with a soaked shirt and tie... But besides that the weather has been pretty much perfect this week. The weather has been so good that even though we spent one day pretty much biking the entire day, it wasn't too bad!  Minxiong is super cool because there's 5 different colleges/universities in our area and so there are surprisingly a lot of foreigners. We've met a ton of Indians, a ton of Indonesians, a few folks from the states, some Europeans, and even a black guy from Idaho! It's been great being able to see people that don't look exactly like me! The work in Minxiong has been a little slow lately and we're having some struggles getting real solid investigators, but the work is still super fun and we try not to get too down on ourselves when we bike an hour to an appointment and the guy doesn't show (or when that happens four times in one day lol). We also had a great ZTM this week about how each missionary has responsibility to "be the light of the area". After ZTM I got to go on exchanges with one of the Zone leaders, Elder Nipper. Exchanges are one of my favorite times as a missionary because there are a lot of incredible missionaries out here and there's a ridiculous amount that can be learned from each one of them. Anyways, Elder Nipper is a stud. A convert from Oklahoma. One of the most Christ-like dudes I've ever met. Well, we were talking in comp study and we read a scripture, Matthew 11:30 which states that "...my yoke is easy, and my burden is light". We took this to literally means that our burden is LIGHT. We are called to carry this "light", the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to wherever we are called to serve. As David A. Bednar says in 'Becoming a PMG Missionary' (paraphrasing), "Missionaries are the conduits of light". Now all Elder Mitton and I have to do is go out and be the lights of Minxiong!

Love each and every one of you!

-潘長老

I need to get better at taking more pics but here's one of this super vast field of flowers we found!