Monday, February 16, 2015

Gong Xi Fa Cai!! In other words...Happy Chinese New Year. I've said that to so many people, and they get super excited when I say it. They seem to really like that I know the culture here! Which, after 9 months, I understand relatively well. And, I will tell you about Chinese New Year! It's basically a normal day, but we get to deliver 2 mandarins to people, and ang pau envelopes with scriptures.

This week was full of so many ups and downs! We had a couple sick days this week, but overall, it was good. I was able to really enjoy Valentine's Day, and celebrated by getting a card with little flowers shaped into a heart from Sister Reach. She knows I love flowers....so, she did it for me! She's so thoughtful and nice. Besides that...I enjoyed going around an entire University campus by bus on a way to a member's house! It took about an hour, and by the time we got to the member's house, we thought we probably should head back since it took an hour to get there, and would take an hour to get back. Little did we know, it only took 10 minutes to get back. So, our whole night was thrown off! (reading between the lines, we think they probably didn't know how to get there and ended up taking the long way).

We're still waiting for a date with the part member daughter, but we are hoping it'll be the 28th. Elder M. Russell Ballard is coming to Singapore to speak, and if she can be baptized that date, the apostle will be there for it. That would be exciting, right?

This week, we were able to have a really cool lesson with our investigator J! We had a good talk about reading the Book of Mormon and 3 Nephi 11. We felt the spirit, and know he did too. It was really cool too, because he said he really wants to get baptized, he just needs to figure out the right church. So, we encouraged him to read and pray. I was able to promise him (based on a prompting of the spirt of course!) that if he comes and sees Elder Ballard, he will get his answer. So, I really hope he comes! We are going to do everything we can to get him to be there.

Also, we were able to teach our Indian investigator, and after we taught, the member took us out for a huge Indian buffet. It was so good. I love Indian food! Also, I was really craving spicy food this week. Asian food is the best. Really. I also got to enjoy hotpot this week with the Relief Society in honor of CNY (Chinese New Year), and it was really fun. I thought of you Mom and Dad!!

We also had a great experience when we were finding a former. We were in an elevator, and I was frantically flipping through the ward directory to find the floor we needed to go to. As I was flipping, Sister Reach talked to this wonderful girl. She was saying that she loved Jesus, and that she is free every Sunday, and that we can easily meet up and that she would love to come to church! We got her number, and it was such a tender mercy.

There are so many miracles right now, and we are really focused on finding prepared people. We have some really good options of people to teach, and hope that they will make the time to meet with us. The spirtual highlight of the week for me this week was our zone meeting. We were able to go and talk about how it takes faith to find. So, why aren't we finding? Because we have some sort of fear, and it's rooted in pleasing man. We are scared because we don't want to offend. We don't want to follow up because we don't want to annoy, etc. So, we talked about how we need to root out fear with faith, and that perfect love can do it! We can experience miracles every single day, if we only have faith.

So, my thought to you is look inside yourself and see what fear is holding you back from having perfect faith in a loving Heavenly Father. Everyone has some, and we all need to get rid of it in order to experience more miracles in our lives! The only person that inhibits us from getting where God wants us to be is ourselves. We hold God back from doing what He needs to by not having perfect faith in Him. Fear is not a characteristic worthy of a child of God, and honestly, we have nothing to fear, because everyday is a New Start "Because of Him" if we only apply the Atonement and the beautiful gospel.

If you have time, look up Mormon 9: 15-22.

Love you all!!
Love,
Sister Crabb