Happiness? or LIES???? June 5, 2016

Apologies for not being on the ball with emailing this last little while. Many people have remarked that I have probably doing really fun things on the last few P-days but we actually have not done anything that interesting.  Our district here in Zhang Hua is super tight and we all are homies so we just always end up playing basketball or going to the church and playing ping pong. For the last 3 P-days we've gone to Mr. Steak for lunch which has been awesome. Anyways, this past week was a very successful week with Elder Chen. A busy week. Busy weeks are the best. Right now we are working with a few college students and 1 really cool couple who has a 2 year old kid. Elder Chen is still a boss. I am still amazed at the amount of humility and patience he has. Also, his English has gotten a lot better! He can now say 'Rules' without a super strong accent! Wow! . Neither us or the sisters (we got sister missionaries in our area btw) had any investigators at church (rain). So we attended the English Sunday school class which was taught by a young white couple that are teaching English here in Taiwan. It was super cool. Anyways we talked about how there are a lot of things in life that makes us happy. However, only some things give us REAL happiness. Most of the things that give us REAL happiness are things that we can do every day and not get sick of. . So we can look at our lives and see what really makes us happy. This can be applied to everything. For example the food we eat. Some people feel the need to diet but if you just look at what you're eating and say to yourself, "If I ate this every day would I feel good about myself". Healthy foods tend to be foods that we can eat a lot of on a regular basis and not feel bad afterwards. Rather than being a test of good/bad or healthy/unhealthy it's more of a test of whether these things help you have REAL happiness or not. If not, then it's a LIE!!!! That's why the gospel is so awesome. We can pray, read scriptures, and follow the rest of the commandments every day and we will just continue gaining more and more happiness. The gospel is indeed the 'Happy Message' as it's Hebrew translation denotes. So if you read this email, I invite you to look at your life for a second and see what things really make you happy and what things are just LIES!

-Elder Poon