復活節快樂 !

Best Easter dinner ever! I love Shen Jiating!

Happy Easter!

There is no better way to end such a great week, than by celebrating the birth of our Savior. Even though we didn't get to watch conference, it was still a wonderful week. This weekend, we will be able to watch it since it will have been translated into Chinese. But I'm still going to watch it in English, haha.

This week was so awesome! We were on Jin Hua Jie for most of the week. That's the street that the mission home and the temple are on. We went there on Pday after we emailed to get ManGuoBing (Mango ice cream) and to walk around the most popular tourist shops in Taipei. It was really fun.

Then we went back for a training meeting. It was crazy seeing everyone from the MTC. The girls I roomed with there all have native companions, so their Chinese is already so good. It was difficult trying not to compare myself. We have a language study plan here in Taiwan. Phase one, two and three. Phase one focuses on teaching. You have to pass off vocabulary, teaching phrases, scriptures, grammar, and practice teaching lessons, etc. It's super hard, but if you're diligent, you can finish it while training. I've been super overwhelmed this week because we haven't had an hour of language study everyday since we've had to leave the apt early to go to these meetings. I was feeling super stressed out that I wouldn't be able to finish by the time I'm done training. My companion is super helpful though, and she's encouraged me and picked me back up on my feet. I'm really grateful for her help.

The highlight of this week would definitely be Samantha's baptism! Her baptism in itself was a pure miracle. She's been seeing the missionaries

since October, but it has been hard for her to progress because she's late to lessons and church so had never been to sacrament meeting. She has a lot of personal challenges in her life that have been difficult to deal with. When I first got here, it was kind of the same situation, so we directed our focus to other people for a while, because it almost felt like all of our effort was being wasted. But then a few weeks ago, she just showed up at sacrament meeting for the first time, and stayed all three hours, and then asked us to meet with her again. Since then, we've been meeting with her, and she comes on time. We invited her to be baptized, and she basically picked her own date. April 5th was the soonest she could be baptized assuming everything went according to plans, and we were able to meet with her and teach her everything by then. It was a leap of faith, really to just believe that suddenly Samantha would be reliable to make these plans for. But really it is her decision in the end, so we just had faith in her and it was really incredible to see everything go as planned. We taught her everything in two weeks, she passed her interview, and she even moved to SongShan (she didn't live in our area before-hand) and she was able to be baptized yesterday. It was such a happy feeling - knowing that our effort wasn't wasted, and the missionaries that found her and tried teaching her for so long - their effort wasn't wasted at all. It was a really happy, rewarding feeling.

I really feel so grateful to be here. I've just been so overwhelmed this week with so much and with working on Phase One, and getting the flu for a couple days. But I've been so blessed! I have such an incredible trainer who is always willing to help me, we are in the greatest ward in Taiwan, I was able 
to go on exchanges with the Temple Sisters (They're like assistants, but sisters - they're in charge of Temple Tours), we were able to do Temple Tours this week as well and we've really seen Vincent start to progress and work harder at quitting his smoking. Things are just going so well! AND we got a new investigator from English Class and her English name is Zoe! If that's not God's plan, I don't know what is.

Miss you all!

Love,

Sister Hendricks

 Cool art on  JinHuaJie

My name tag finally came!