February 9, 2014

Hey Mother Dearest!! Sounds like the temple has been so busy!! It really amazes me how big this whole event is! This last week was another week full of miracles for us. One of which being Lu. He is an investigator that just walked in the church last week while we were having our zone training meeting. We asked him if he could come back after the meeting was over and meet with us and he was cool with it! Afterwards we met with him and he is so prepared!! This weekend he went to gaoxiong to see his mom and we called him to see if he could attend church in gaoxiong, but before I even had a chance to say anything about church he said "Hey I looked at that flyer you gave me and found the church in gaoxiong by my house and I am going on sunday!" So awesome! He is such a stud.
Other than that our zone did fantastic this last week. Everyone was so pumped from zone training meeting and interviews/ planner checks with President. The was a pretty big increase of morale and we saw tons of miracles and had a blast together! Hope you have a fantastic week!! Miss and love you!!!
-Elder Ripley

Hey Dad! I really can't believe how huge this whole new temple thing is!! I am excited to see it! I am definitely giving it my all this week and am going to cross the finish line at full speed. Email time is a little short this week but thank you so much for all the support and encouragement you have given me Dad, it has been invaluable to me on my mission. I am so excited to see you soon. Love you!
-Elder Ripley

February 2, 2014

Hey momma! Kevin and Corrin are getting so big!! I was so surprised when I saw their pictures! This last week was a pretty crazy week for us! We went to taizhong for a meeting on tuesday which moved our district training meeting to thursday and then for the rest of the week we had aton of members that fed us lunch and dinner because it is the chinese new year!!! So during chinese new year what happens is everything shuts do for about a week and everyone gets together with their family and celebrates the new year! They have lots of cool traditions and customs they do on the new year one of which is handing out red envelopes! They are pretty much just fancy red envelopes with money inside that are usually given to the children or younger people in the family. We should start doing that :) Anyways we ate ATON of food and had a great time! We also had a really huge blessing yesterday at church. We had three investigators come! Aton of our investigators went out of town or were busy last weekend so we were scared we wouldn't have alot of lessons or people that would be able to attend church with us this last sunday, but we had one that confirmed with us that he could go, one that just showed up with his family, and another one that we thought had dissapeared because his cell phone wasn't working but he showed up too! Super cool! They all loved the meeting and had a great experience at church!
We also met with a really great family this week. They are the family we met with a few weeks ago in one of our secondary areas. They have lots of questions and are really interested! They had to go out of town this week but we will definitely be meeting with them next week.
Hope you had a great week mom!! Love and miss you! -Elder Ripley

January 26, 2014

Hey mom don't worry about the pictures, you sent me all of the ones I needed! Thanks aton! And I have been taking lots of others lately as well. No I did not put a memory card in that box so no need to worry about that either, that was just abunch of stuff I wanted to send back. Thank you for those ideas as well! We are definitely going to use them! Ushering at the temple sounds like a blast!! There are so many people going in that is crazy! I am so excited to go see it. This week I had to write a miracle story and send it in to the office for them to put in a book or something. All of the misisonaries going home have to write one so I will just share with you what I Wrote. I was trying to make it sound really so I hope it worked. It was really intense though :D

Miracle Story- It was the end of the week. Time to report our work for that week. Knowing that the companionships in our district were strong missionaries with lots of faith, and that they were working with some great investigators.  We came back the next week with a fire in us. We talked about it together every day and encouraged and inspired each other to be better. Through our faith the Lord made up for that. We pondered our efforts of the last week in an attitude of happiness and appreciation for the blessings and miracles we had seen, yet dissapointment and confusion at why we had come so close to hitting the goal but fell short when we had so much faith that we could do it. Sunday night, 10:20pm, the phone rings and it is the sisters in our district. A sister of one of their recent converts just moved back home from another area and had been meeting with the missionaries there.  With 10 minutes on the clock we did it!!! With all of the miracles that occured and the effort that we put in to hitting that goal, we realized most importantly of all, that the happiness came not from hitting the number itself, but in seeing lives changed because of the faith and effort we put into becoming tools in the Lord's hand. When missionaries come together in faith, they can accomplish anything.

We had another super huge miracle this week. Brother chen progressed smoothly through all of the lessons and had a few really cool testimonies that God loved him throughout the teaching process. Last week he was baptized! He is going to be such a great recent convert because of his great sense of responsibility and his resolve to follow Jesus Christ. We are so blessed to have been a part of the proccess of him starting his new life in the Gospel!

Have a great week mom, love and miss you bunches. THank you so much for taking care of all that school stuff for me!! You are the best!!

Being an usher must have been awesome! I am sure you had a really great experience seeing all of these people gathering to see the temple.

That is a bummer that you missed niks, I should have told you he was heading back!

I will be sure and tell them happy birthday, thanks for the reminder dad. Love and miss you! have a great week!