November 9 2014

Well how many people can say they spent their 21st birthday on the other side of the world playing basketball and baptizing people! On Saturday we played basketball with some investigators and of course I got hurt, jammed my hand/wrist on an Elders leg and bruised it pretty good. I still made the shot so it was ok, right dad? Then at night sister Huang got baptized and bore one of the most powerful testimonies I have ever heard from someone that just got baptized, it was really cool! She asked me to baptize her and so that was really cool. She also told me before that she wanted me to hold her under for 5 seconds, as she counted on her fingers to show me how long. haha I just laughed and said probably not. When I baptized her I found out she was serious because I had to completely lift her out of the water and stand her on her feet!!! Then, after, they through a big party for me and bought TONS of food and two cakes!!! She gave me a present, it was a light up glass picture of me her and Elder Shelton on it!! She is so crazy and awesome! My Birthday was really good!

Not too much happened this week other than that. We did have a cool experience while contacting. I am pretty sure the guy was Atheist but he was willing to listen. We started talking about prayer. He brought up "how is got supposed to answer EVERYONE'S prayers, there are probably at least 100 people that are all praying at the same time how does he answer all of them?" I have thought about that as well but the spirit put the answer in my mind at the time I needed it!!! I said "well don't you think that someone that has enough power to create the world and all of us would be able to answer someone’s simple prayer?" It hit him and he was like oh I guess he could. Then he told us he was going to talk to his girlfriend and hopefully meet with us so we will see what happens.

Sister Lin or Lin mama (the mom of the sister missionary in our district) now has a baptismal goal for the 29th of this month! SWEET!  She is so ready and is coming to church now so she should hit it as long as she doesn't get cold feet!!! What an awesome day that will be!

I hope all of you have a great week and thank you all for the packages and birthday wishes they mean so much!!! I don't think you understand how much they mean!!! They make us missionaries’ day!

Here is a quote that I read in a LIahona this week it says "Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the things you don’t want to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not."

Love you all have a great week!

Love Elder Roberts

November 3 2014

This week we had some pretty cool lessons. First off DTM went really good it was awesome! I taught about diligence and we discussed things that have happened from talking with everyone and bore testimony of it, the spirit got super strong and then we did a practice that was so fun! We had a companionship go out of the room and picked someone to be the person that would accept then the companionship had to find the person. I also had everyone act like a special person, like a drunk person, parents, and stuff like that. The last companionship was the sister training leaders and we all acted like we were a family and the dad was the one that would accept when they would contact him we would call him over to help us and so they couldn’t really talk to him. By the end of it the sister training leaders were doing the "Kamie squat" trying not to pee their pants because they were laughing so hard! It was super fun!

This week at English class we had an awesome spiritual share. We chose to do it on Life’s purpose and the Atonement. We asked them what things helped them be happy and what things made them sad then what things they needed.  We watched a Mormon message called "what matters most" and talked a little about that then talked about putting others first and serving others. We said Christ was a perfect example of this and if you really want true happiness you could get it through following him, we watched a video on his Atonement and at the end shared more testimony and by the end almost everyone's eyes were filled with tears trying not to cry! That is the first time the spirit has ever been that strong at an English class it was so cool and really helped strengthen my testimony on the Savior! I truly Love the spirit!

We are teaching a sisters mom! She is in our district and her mom is meeting with us how weird is that!!! Sister Lin is from where I am serving but went to Taipei for school and turned her papers in up there and then got called down to the Taichung mission and her mom has investigated the church but never got baptized because of the Sabbath day and her work. She owns a fruit stand and Sundays are the busiest day of the week so it is really hard for her to not work. This Friday I was planning for her and I wasn’t really sure what to teach her and what to share so I prayed and when I finished I thought of a story that I had not ever read before but I knew it was in a liahona (I know, kind of weird but that’s the spirit haha) so I grabbed a couple Liahona's and started reading where I thought it would be. The first one had a story that was on the Sabbath but it wasn’t the right one so I grabbed the next one and found a story on working on Sunday and opening his candy store for a Holiday so I was pretty impressed but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for so I grabbed another one and this story was exactly what came to my mind when I was praying!!! It was so cool! It was exactly like Lin mama's life and story! Then in the lesson she shared an experience, last week she prayed about working on Sunday and then went to work. At work 3 people asked her about her religion and she said I guess I am Christian" and then her customers got mad at her for working on Sunday because they knew Christians don't do that! SO COOL!!! This Sunday she was at church and stayed for the whole thing! Pray for her and that she will be able to receive the blessings from keeping the Sabbath and trusting in the Lord!!!

Love you all and hope you have a great week!

Love Elder Roberts

October 26 2014

This was another awesome week!

It started off awesome and crazy and didn't stop through the whole week! The title of my email is how an old guy started a conversation with us this week while we were sitting at the park doing language study! Also I was contacting a guy and asked him to pull over but he said he didn't have time so I got his number in the middle of the intersection and then he took off.... about three hundred yards down the road a car turned right in front of him and he slammed into the side of the car....  I didn't know what to do and I still don't know what to write about it besides he should have pulled over and talked to me...

Friday we had weekly planning. Thursday they came and readied our house because it is going to be a 4 man house in two weeks. So they brought a lot of new stuff so most of our hour planning was spent taking all the new stuff for ourselves and putting it together (hehe)! The problem was we didn’t have most of the tools we needed so we had to use what we had and I ended up pounding 1 inch long nails into the back of a shelf with a dumb bell handle! Haha. Elder Ng was using a wrench! It was a pretty fun day!

Saturday I got to go to the Temple with Elder Shelton and our ward because Elder Shelton had a family that was getting sealed! It was such a cool experiences to see them get married for time and all eternity! What a great feeling to know that this life is not the end and that you will be able to spend forever with your family! The day over all was super crazy though! We got there and found out the time had been changed so we were going to miss our bus home. We had to figure out how we were going to get home. One of the bishops said he would help us so we told someone from our bus to tell the other people we weren't going to go with them, well that message never got to them because right before the sealing three people came in telling us our bus was out there waiting for us to go. The next problem was wondering if we had enough money to get home because we could only ride half way with that bishop and then we took the high speed rail the rest of the way! Luckily everything worked out and we made it home.  A lot of things worked out so that I will hopefully have enough money for the rest of the week. The day that was supposed to be about 2000 Kuai ended up being almost 4000!!! So 60 dollars to about 120!  But somehow we will still be alright to get through this week! we also only get 7000 Kuai a month.... so that shows how expensive the day was. But the Lord definitely provides when you are doing his work and I am going to be able to make it through the week! Hopefully!

On Monday we were buying groceries at about 5:30 and the sisters called saying they had a lesson at 6:30 with someone that lives in our area so they wanted us to be there so they could hand her off to us. We got there and it was a former investigator that called them and wanted to meet because she had some things happen and now she feels like she needs this gospel in her life and that it can really help her! They said they would sit down with her first and then invite us to come in in a little bit. About 20 min. later they invited us in and told us "the spirit is really strong just bear your testimony on prayer" so we sat down and that's what happened my companion started on why prayer is important and then I felt like I needed to share an experience that I recently had with prayer and God answering through scriptures then I kept going and talked about trials and how he has helped me a lot! I shared a lot that I normally wouldn't share but I felt like I needed to and it got pretty deep! I finished and things were quiet and I was kind of nervous about what I said then she just opened up and told us pretty much everything! The spirit was super strong in that lesson and I know she felt it! Her name is Gill! 

Love you guys so much and hope you have a great week! You are all in my prayers! :)

http://www.mormon.org/monica

Love Elder Roberts

October 20 2014

This week was quite the week!! First off I just want to start off with letting you know that I am a visionary man!(ha-ha) Friday night I had a dream that I was district leader and that I was doing DTM, then luckily I woke up and it was Saturday morning and I wasn't.  It was just a dream. I kind of forgot about it then Saturday night we got a call from president and he said my companion was going to be a Zone Leader in another zone and then he told me I was going to be senior over someone that came on the Island with me. I was a little nervous but thought at least I am not District leader.... I was so wrong! I got a call from the zone leaders a couple minutes later telling me that I was the district leader of the MEGA district! We have 5 companionship's in our district (that's the most in the whole mission) and we have the zone leaders and the sister training leaders in our district! So things just changed really fast! Then later I realized that I had a dream about all of this and it was super weird!

My new companion is Elder Ng!!! He is the younger brother of the other Elder Ng, my other companion.  It is super cool that I get to be companions with both of them!  He is from Provo Utah and is super nice and always happy!! He is a super positive person it is awesome I am excited for these next three weeks!

Last Monday we went and got our haircuts by an awesome member in our ward! He is super good and crazy when it comes to cutting hair and when it comes to life he is just crazy!!! haha he wears all black and his clothes are super crazy but anyway the hair cut was awesome! He uses 5 scissors at once and he only uses scissors, no buzzers for him!! It was a super nice day and we got our hair washed like 3 times for about ten minutes each time!! I felt like I was at a spa! I will send some pictures!

Sunday night we were sitting in our study room and Elder Shelton was doing an baptismal interview on me so I could  see how to do one and about half way through right when we were really feeling the spirit I leaned back in my chair and we heard a loud pop and I was on my butt.  The back of my chair broke and it scarred the crap out of both of us!!! It was super funny but now my chair is broken.

Sister Huang is doing really good she is still reading and doing everything we ask her to, she is even keeping the Sabbath day holy and she loves to buy stuff so it is pretty awesome. She will probably get baptized in 2 or 3 weeks she just needs to come to church! This week we asked her to pray and truly repent and ask for Gods help to feel forgiven, the next time we met with her we asked her how it was and she told us she got her answer! She prayed and then flipped to the back of the book of Mormon to a random page in ether and started to read! The chapter she read was on repentance and she had marked almost every verse! God really does answer your prayers and will help you if you have faith in him and truly search he will give you an answer!

This week I had a special opportunity to give a sister in our district a blessing! She asked for a blessing of comfort because she is going home soon and is feeling really nervous. When I was starting the blessing I had no idea what to say and so I just started to talk, a few words into I stopped and my mind was filled with things to say and all I had to do was open my mouth and figure out how to make it all make sense! The spirit was so strong and we all left the room holding back tears! The power of the priesthood is amazing and I am so grateful to be able to have it in my life and to be able to use it to serve God!

I love you all and hope you have a great week!

Love Elder Roberts!

October 12 2014

This week was full of crazy good stuff!!! On Tuesday we had our zone training meeting and it was awesome! It was on following the spirit but I think what made it the best was when I walked in an Elder that I haven’t seen since my 3rd move call says to me holly crap you have lost a lot of weight! You look so lean and in shape. But we have been working out pretty hard the last couple months and it is paying off I guess. I am still skinny but I feel good! I ran a mile in 5:46 this last week and felt like I could have pushed myself harder.

We are still meeting with sister Huang and she is still doing awesome! She gave us some sweet ties last time we met with her so that was awesome! We taught her the law of Chasity this week to.  She is still super excited to get baptized and came to conference this week! Hopefully she can hit her goal on the 1st!

Conference was so good!!! But it was way to short! Time went so fast, and before I knew it we were on the last session. It is weird what sticks out to missionaries that didn't stick out to me before. It is so awesome that we have a living prophet today that is receiving revelation and can share with us to improve our lives and help us be happy!

Last night we had an awesome experience while contacting. We started contacting at 8 and had to be home by 9 so we didn't have much time and so we just headed out trying to follow the spirit I contacted this kid and at first I was a little iffy about it because he looked like a punk kid. Since I got a knife pulled on me I have been kind of nervous but I did it anyway. I pulled up to him and he was pulling a cigarette out of his bag. I asked him a few questions and got to know him then asked if he believed in God, he said no so I started to tell him that I know there is a god and he loves us and in the middle of a sentence I just felt like I needed to stop and so I asked him why he didn't believe.  He said because God has never helped him. I just sat there for a little bit and then started to testify a little bit but that isn't what I needed to say so mid-sentence I stopped and asked him if he had ever prayed and I think that is what really got him, he said no and I told him through prayer we can talk with God and feel his love! I got his number and asked when is a good time to meet he said tomorrow! At first I tried to get it on another day and I said we will call him and set up a time but once again the spirit said nope you need to meet with him tomorrow! So I set him up for today!  He seemed kind of down and like he really needs something in his life! The spirit guided that whole contact, it felt awesome! Then we started to go down a road but felt like that was the wrong way so we turned around and went down another road, at an intersection I saw a guy on the opposite side sitting on his scooter, about halfway through the intersection I turned so we could go talk to him, I almost hit my companion I turned so fast!  We got to the guy and he just got up and walked away. He just went over to his dog so we decided to wait for him to come back. He finally comes back and just rejects us. I was kind of confused but felt there was a reason, we turned around and there was a couple getting ready to go jogging and they were awesome! The contact started with them being really friendly but they said “we have met with a lot of churches before so it’s ok" and by the end they told us if we didn’t call them by the end of the week they would call us! It was a super good day!

Love you guys and hope you have a great week!!! 

Love Elder Roberts

October 5, 2014

This week was a pretty interesting week! On Monday we went to a sweet restaurant with one of our RC's (recent convert). The restaurant was on the beach and looked out over the ocean it was super cool, I will send pictures. We also had a Muslim come up and contact us and he started to tell us how we aren't true because Jesus was a Jew and Jews don't eat pork and so Jesus didn't eat pork and we eat pork so how could we be true. It was interesting. We shared some scriptures and by the end we almost got him to take a Book of Mormon! Then after him we went to get on the subway and there was a drunk guy with a bunch of security guards and he kept smacking his helmet on the floor and walls and he was going crazy! That was pretty interesting as well! We had a good lesson with one of our RC's, she is super crazy and said that she doesn't think she has felt the spirit. Recently we have been watching the movies about Jesus' life and we were on the one when he was crucified and when they finished she had tears running down her cheeks and was definitely feeling the spirit!! It truly is amazing what he did for us and how lucky we are to be able to follow after him and receive forgiveness!!! He went through a lot for us don't waist it!

Sorry it is so short not too much happened this week except for a lot of finding!!!! Hope you guys have a great week! Love you!

Love Elder Roberts

September 28 2014

This week was a pretty crazy week we saw the lord helping us so much!

At the begging of the week it was kind of sad, we had about 4 people that are really awesome that we are teaching right now and they all live in the same area, well this week we found out that that little corner is not our area. So we had to refer two of them to the other missionaries. Bummer for us but good for the missionaries in that area. The other two are just barely in our area. They live on the dividing line!

One of the people that we had to refer is so cool. Her name is Sister Lin. I started teaching her when we were on splits 3 out of the 4 times.  So I have really been the one teaching her and I am pretty close and she is definitely getting baptized on November 1st but when she first met us she told us she lived in our area... turns out that is just her set address but right now she is living somewhere else and it is kind of far from us. So we had to refer her. It was super sad but we met with her on Saturday and she took us out to dinner after we told her. She took us to a buffet!! She is awesome, hopefully I am still around to go to her baptism!

Then yesterday, Sunday, we had a super cool experience with one of our investigators. Her name is sister Huang or her English name is Lain and we met with her for the first time on Tuesday. She is super hyper and crazy!!! But super nice and she always brings us drinks and stuff. On Tuesday we taught her the plan of salvation and gave her a book of Mormon and asked her to read every day for 10 minutes and we would call and see where she was throughout the week! Well we ended up meeting with her on Sunday and asked her where she was at in the Book of Mormon. She flips open the book in the middle and says about here. My companion and I both look at each other and she keeps flipping through and turns to Alma 10 and says oh right here!! We about pooped our pants. Now we need to try and figure out how to teach someone that actually did what we asked. So we start asking questions like wow you read that far by only reading 10 minutes a day? Her response "well like 10 or 30... Maybe an hour.... I DONT KNOW I was just reading it!" We start flipping through and she has sticky notes with questions to ask us and has marked all the way through, from the introduction to Alma! As we went through our lesson we would bring things up and she would talk about how she read about that and then finish the story! It was crazy I have never had an investigator read more than like a page let alone half the Book of Mormon in less than a week! We ended up giving her a baptismal goal and committing her to the word of wisdom and she accepted and is going to get baptized on the 1st of November, as long as she comes to church!!! haha She also said while she was reading she just started to cry and wasn’t sure why but it felt good and she felt peaceful and just kept reading, She read Alma 8:14-15.

This week was awesome and we saw a lot of miracles but I don’t have much time so here they are really fast:

We contacted one guy on the road that first completely denied us and as we talked to him and talked about why our church was different by the end of the contact he asked us for our number and gave us his number and told us in 2 weeks he is going to call us to learn more!

We had a guy show up at church that Elder Greenhalgh contacted clear back in February but he was too busy and now has time to hear about the gospel!

And transfers were this week and me and Elder Shelton are staying together to experience more baptisms and miracles together!

I love you all and hope you have a great week!

Love Elder Roberts

September 21, 2014

This week was a pretty good week! We had zone conference and it is always nice to hear from the mission president! The topic was on our first lesson and how to teach a good first lesson but you probably don’t want to hear too much about that so I won’t talk about it too much.  The main point of it was to ask questions and find their need before you start teaching, once you find their need then you can truly teach them and not just teach a lesson! After the conference was over my companion had a District leaders meeting and so I was outside with other missionaries waiting for him and sister Blickenstaff came and asked me and him to help her teach a lesson in a couple minutes because president had to do interviews. It was a pretty cool experience but kind of weird but I got a free dinner out of it so I won’t complain too much.

This week we had a pretty cool experience with the "he" family. The son passed his interview and so he is ready to be baptized and really wants to but we have been trying to get the dad ready so he could baptize him. They were less active. They have been coming to church the last couple of weeks but the dad hasn’t had an interview with the bishop yet so we started to think that he probably will not be able to get baptized this week.  Next week is transfers and I am probably moving so I was kind of sad but it is better that they wait a little bit and have his dad baptize him. I think it would mean more to the family, but last night they called us and said they talked to the bishop and the bishop said the dad can baptize him!! So this week we will be having another baptism and bringing a family back into the church!!! Families are amazing and make doing this work worth it!

This week we also had another baptism and it was awesome of course! It was sister lee and her daughter! We got a call Friday night from our ward mission leader saying that tomorrow there is supposed to be a typhoon so we should probably cancel the baptism ha we said, we will see tomorrow and let him know! We woke up and the sun was out and it was a pretty nice day so we told him we were still going to have it! In the afternoon it started to rain a little bit and he called us trying to get it canceled again we said ha, we are not even wearing our rain gear because it was raining so little!!! So we told him no and he just told us it was going to rain really hard tonight....  luckily it didn’t and we were still able to have the baptism!! After the baptism we were told that there was no church tomorrow because of the typhoon. Then when we got home we got a call from the zone leaders saying not to go out until told otherwise. So Sunday was a long day of calling former investigators and organizing our apartment! So much fun NOT!!! haha The Typhoon was pretty pathetic to!! It was just like a normal rainy day in Taiwan nothing to great!

This week was a pretty good week, time is going fast!! I hope you are all enjoying all the little things in life! Love you all and have a great week! :)

Love Elder Roberts

September 14 2014

This week was pretty interesting, we had lots of miracles happen and we are hopefully going to have a good week! The last couple of weeks have been pretty slow and a lot of people have been not showing up for their scheduled lessons. So we have spent a lot of time out on the roads trying to find people to teach! One day we were heading to the church and ended taking a way that we had never taken before and we found this guy that is so prepared!!! Hopefully we can meet with him this week! We gave him the first lesson pamphlet and before we had left he was reading through it! He has read the bible and feels like there is more that he needs to learn.... WELL we can help!!!  

So every morning we wake up and go right out the door to work out. We go to a school that has a full track right by our house and there are always old people there doing their stretching. But one day this week we were running and every two laps we would stop and do pushups and sit ups and one of the crazy ladies came over and started to talk to us in Taiwanese and we told her we don’t speak Taiwanese but we speak mandarin.... haha she didn’t care she kept yelling at us in this crazy language and then all of a sudden this 60 or 70 year old lady gets down and starts doing pushups with us!!!! haha what the heck  she was crazy so I finished my pushups and stuff and got up and started running well I guess once I left she was looking at my companions form and she touched his butt..... haha The old people are so crazy here!!!

Last Monday our awesome RC took us to a water fall.  It was pretty awesome! I will send pictures of that.  Then we went to visit another one of our RC's and he gave us fresh sugar cane!! It was pretty good but really weird to eat!

This week we had some pretty cool experiences! Last night my companion felt like we needed to go tracting on a road that he saw earlier that week, we both were kind of hesitant because it isn’t the most effective method out here but we decided to do it anyway and while tracting we didn't have much success but decided to go across the street and call the APR, when we were leaving a mom and son self-contacted us and they were awesome!! We got there number and they are super excited to meet! The blessings of listening to the spirit!

This week we have two baptisms!!! We are baptizing sister lee and her daughter!  It should be an awesome day, I have been working with them from the very start and at first they were really iffy it is amazing to see how the gospel can change someone and bless their lives!!

I love you all and hope you have a great week!! 

Love Elder Roberts