Move Calls

Hello

This week was a good week. We had a lot of finding to do this week! We did a lot of different types of finding haha. Which was fun and it didn't get too tedious. 

We met with Lam and she wants to move her baptismal date from Nov 18 to Nov 10 so I am really pumped about that. And she asked me to baptize her. She also challenged me to a game of Chinese chess. And i told her that if she loses then she will have to go find the 80 year old guys in the park and challenge him to a game of chess and let me tell you: those 80 year olds are super good. One time I tried playing one and I lost in 3 turns haha. they just laughed at me haha. 

 We met with Vanessa this week and taught her the 10 commandments, Sabbath Day, and Law of Chastity. She didn't have any problems with those. But she told us that a lot of her friends and even her sister were telling her (when she was first meeting with us) that we were evil and then I asked her what she though. She told us that she didn't like how they judge us with out meeting us because Vanessa really does like our church. She even told her sister about what we have taught her and her sister told her "I shouldn't have judged the missionaries so fast." I hope that maybe one day we can meet with her sister as well. 

Nothing else super interesting happened except we met with a referral from the office elders. and her name is April and she actually has a lot of interest. So that was the miracle of the week. 

And today for Pday we went to Chai Wan and went hiking and found a pretty cool waterfall! 

That is all. 

Elder Gu 

 All the Elders who went on the hike with us.

 This was for my birthday and for Elder Hayden's (the middle elder) 2 year mark. He will go home this Friday. I lived with him when I was in Yuen Long for months and now he is leaving hah. It is pretty sad. He is a really good friend!

Vanessa's Baptismal Date!

Leih Hou!

This week was a very good week! To start things off we went to a members house for Pday to celebrate another Elder's birthday and then she gave me a cake for my birthday this week! Their family is super solid and her husband isn't a member of the church but he loves the missionaries and is super nice. And both of their kids have served missions. 

Then we went finding on Tuesday night and hiked up an interesting hill and there were no lights and all the sudden a huge boar jumped out of no where and was growling at us haha it scared us and we just ran a way haha. So that got our energy up to do more finding haha. 

Then on Thursday I was able to do a zone find with Elder Siddoway! it was pretty sweet because I never thought in all my time I would be walking in the streets of Hong Kong with Elder Siddoway haha so that was a super cool experience and maybe it will foreshadow the day that we become companions hahaha. 

Then we met with Vanessa and she shared how she doesn't feel like she has enough faith. But we shared so many life experiences with her and she was finally willing to accept a baptismal date on November 18. then on the next day she came to a baptism with us and she gave me a super nice tie and wrote a super nice birthday letter to me. She is super nice! 

that is pretty much it. 

from Elder Gu 

 This is Vanessa. She gave me a tie for my birthday.

 Birthday cake a member got for me.

This is a person commenting on my Chinese.  It made me happy. 

 Chinese Checkers.

 Elder Siddoway and I doing some finding together.

 A party at a member's house.  They fed us so much good food!

General Conference

大家好

This week was a very good week. So we got to go to the temple this week on Thursday. and we went to the Chinese session. It was pretty cool because they gave us translating things but I just listened to it in Chinese. It was really cool because it was all in written Chinese instead of spoken so that made it a little harder to understand. But I still understood most of it! 

We have been meeting with our progressing investigators and Vanessa came to General conference. The spiritual experience I had this week was with Vanessa. She came to General Conference on Saturday and then she had to go tutor a kid and then she wanted to have us teach her so we met with her again that night and taught her the commandments (follow the Prophet, read scriptures, and pray). And she had no problems. But then the spiritual experience was when I asked her if she had thought any more about baptism and she said she feels like shes still not ready and I asked why and she told us that she feels like she doesn't have enough faith. Then in her prayer she prayed sincerely about baptism and asked Heavenly Father to help her get baptized faster and to be prepared faster. I was super impressed. And I felt the spirit super strong in her prayer. We just need to stay in contact with her and keep helping her develop the faith required for baptism. I am super excited to help her!   

Lam is super solid! she is teaching us the lessons now just to review and so it is really fun to go meet with her and then just listen to her teach us haha. We just go and help her if she needs help when she is teaching us haha. 

Other than that the week was super good! my companion is still trying to learn english and Chinese so that is pretty cool trying to help him with both. He is very hard working! 

that is pretty much it. 我知道呢間教會係真實

古長老

 

This picture is some old guy that we talked to while we were finding. He was obsessed with his dog. haha

 I ran into my Bishop from my last area (Yuen Long) in my new area (NTK) . He is the coolest bishop out there. In my last area there are now three languages spoken in church: Cantonese, Tagalog, and Chinese sign language.

 Temple day

Us at a member's house for dinner on Sunday night.

 More destruction from the typhoon.

 

Baptism!

大家好

So this week one of the investigators that I taught for a few month when I first got to NTK named Rebekah finally got baptized this week! She asked if I could give a talk about the Holy Ghost in her baptism activity. When we were teaching her she was really intrigued with the Holy Ghost. So we spent a few lessons talking about the Holy Ghost. And then she asked me to give a talk about it for her baptism which was super cool! She has changed a lot.  That was probably the biggest highlight of the week. 

This week we also had a zone find in our area and it had some miracles because in the zone find Lam's brother Ben was found. And we have been trying to get Lam to invite her brother for a long time to meet with us and then we found in him a zone find which was a huge miracle! It was super cool so I am hoping we can meet them together. It just shows that Heavenly Father really has a plan for all families! 

The investigators are doing really well. Sam's mom wont let him come to church but he can still meet with him so we have just been meeting him once a week and helping him out. Then Vanessa is doing really well as well. We weren't able to meet with her this week because she had been super busy. 

And then another miracle that happened is that someone that we have kind of stopped teaching because he can never meet he is always too busy finally got a day off on Sunday and texted us out of the blue and said he could come to church. So we were really happy that Sunday when he came to church! 

This gospel is full of miracles if you are ready for them and if you are watching for them. It has been super cool to see. I love helping the people here. I really enjoy Chinese and the culture that goes along with it! 

That is pretty much all for this week. 

Elder Gu

 More pictures from our hike. One of them Elder Siddoway almost fell off the cliff haha

 Plus a guy smoking a huge bong made out of bamboo and that guy is like 90 years old hahaha

This kid was super adorable. I started talking to his mom. And she wanted us to take a picture with her kid because we were white and could speak Chinese

 This is Rebekah who got baptized!

From Sister Phillips: "Thought you might enjoy these pictures of Elder Gubler.  We love Elder Gubler.  He is a fine young man and a great missionary.  We are so blessed to have him in the Hong Kong Mission.  Sincerely, Sister Phillips"

你好

This week has been really good! To start it off on Monday night we were invited over to a members home to eat dinner and to celebrate the Mid-Autumn festival which is a very big holiday here. Everyone just celebrates by making moon cakes and eating the crap out of them. But moon cakes aren't even that good. They are cake with a hard boiled egg in the middle. So I normally eat the fake moon cakes which just are chocolate haha. 

Then on Tuesday we had service project to help clean a members home who got flooded from the typhoon. so everything was crazy dirty and super unorganized. haha But it was good service! 

Then on Tuesday night we had another Mid-Autumn music (singing) activity at our church. We would just go and eat and listen to people get up and sing. We invited our investigators Vanessa and Lam and they both came! Lam actually preformed "see you again" but it was all in Chinese and she even rapped in Chinese. It was pretty cool to see. And Vanessa is really good at singing but she was super scared to sing until the ward member that we have fellow shipping her convinced her to sing. And she sang Ed Sheeran's Perfect in English and it just blew everyone away! She has her own band too and when she preformed all the members were super impressed and just loved it! It was super cool to hear! Ill try to send a video of it. 

This week we met with Sam (not at his house) and shared the Family Proclamation to the World. He really liked what it said about families. Especially the part about the responsibilities of parents. We then invited him to share it with his family. We also asked if it would be ok if we could visit him in his home and teach English. He said his parents might not like that but he would ask them anyways. So we are just waiting to see if we can go visit him in his house. He didn't come to church this week because his mom wouldn't let him come.

Here is another one of my spiritual experiences with Lam. She has been taught all the lessons and is now just waiting for her baptismal date to arrive. So we have just decided to meet with her once a week and review. So we met with her and asked her to teach us about Joseph Smith. It was basically a role play. I was pretending to not know anything about Joseph Smith and she taught us. She even had a the scripture memorized from the Pearl of Great Price about how the peoples' mouths are close to God but their hearts are far from him. And when she shared this I was super impressed and could feel she was ready. I then asked her "God hasn't appeared to you like Joseph Smith, so how do you know he is real?" and she answered by saying something like this: "Because I have prayed and I have felt the influence of God." After that I was just super impressed. Lam is super solid! I could really feel the spirit while she was teaching us.

We met with Vanessa. Vanessa is super solid! We have taught her the Restoration through the Gospel of Christ and then we met with her this week to teach more about baptism because she recently attended a baptismal ceremony and we taught her and I asked her if she ever thought about being baptized and she said she wants to but doesn't feel ready yet. So we shared D&C 20:37 and we told her that from our perspective she has the desire and is ready for baptism but she wants to think about it first and answer us later this month. I am excited to see what happens with Vanessa!   

Other than that we had a good week! I am liking training even though it can be a little stressful because my companion doesn't understand Chinese very well but I love it! it is super good! 

Love you all! 

Elder Gubler 

Here is our area! And then the second picture is a picture with two girls. They are Jehovah witnesses. They came knocking on our door (which is illegal) and tried sharing a message about Jesus so we had to take a picture with them because they pretty much do the same thing we do. They were even speaking super quietly so no one would know they were there haha so they wouldn't get caught.

 This is what we did last pday. And I might need to get glasses so I tried on the classic Chinese glasses which are more circular than rectangular.

 This was our service project.