新年快樂 January 30, 2017

Another Happy Chinese New Year to all y'all!Chinese New Year is a very special time here in the Taiwan Taichung Mission. It is a time where finding through our own efforts (i.e. street contacting, tracting) becomes incredibly difficult. Elder Moody likened it to a Jew trying to proselyte on Christmas. That being said, we have had meal appointments with members for lunch and dinner for the last 3 days and we will be continuing this schedule until Thursday. Nice! Besides being able to eat delicious food, this is also a great opportunity to build relationships with members and help build their faith and desire to do missionary work. We've had a lot of fun so far and it's been nice for me to be able to get to know so many of the members here in Daya on my first week. 

In other news, we had a multi-zone conference this past Saturday where we watched the World-wide Missionary Broadcast for this year. BIG CHANGES. For those of you who have served missions before this news will probably be very interesting for you. The church is giving a lot of control to mission presidents and missionaries over the missionary schedule from now on. The schedule, which was previously fairly fixed for most of the world, is now able to be almost completely customized by mission presidents around the world based off the culture and society of a mission. This is our new schedule here in the Taiwan Taichung Mission:

NEW DAILY SCHEDULE

6:30 AM- Arise

6:30-10:30 AM- Pray, Exercise (30 Mins), Shower, Eat Breakfast, Prepare for the day, Plan (30 Minutes), Personal Study (60 Minutes)


10:00 AM- 9:00 PM - Proselyte, Companionship Study (30-60 Mins), Language Study (60 Mins), First Twelve Weeks (30 Mins), Lunch (30 Mins) Dinner (60 Mins)


9:00 PM - Return to Apartment

9:00 PM- 9:30 PM- Write in your Journal, Prepare for Bed, Pray

9:30 PM- 10:30 PM- Retire to Bed

I think the biggest changes are that we plan in the morning instead of night now and that we have more of a choice of when we want to do studies. The leaders of the church have informed us that this change is to allow us missionaries to be able to exercise righteous agency and be more effective.

Oh... I forgot one thing...

The new Preparation Day schedule: 

8:00 AM- 6:00 PM- Preparation Day activities, including:

Laundry, Grocery shopping, Cleaning of Apartment, Communicating with family, Letter to Mission President/Key Indicators, Lunch and Dinner, Study, Recreation and Exercise, Prepare to proselyte

6:00 PM- 9:00 PM- Proselyte

Nice! 2 extra hours on P-day! 

Well, Elder Moody and I are having a lot of fun together already. We hope that this week after New Years we will be able to meet with more of our investigators and go find the prepared souls of Daya!

Love you all,

Elder Poon

PS Oh, and everyone's release date in the entire world got moved earlier one week so I'm going to be leaving Taiwan on May 26th now.