Tag Archives: LDS

Teaching English (in Florida)

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Dear Family and Friends,

So I don’t have much time today, but I do want to say another little bit about the Albanian couple I mentioned a few weeks ago. So we thought they had dropped us because they didn’t show up to that appointment two Saturday’s ago. We tried to visit them the next day, but they didn’t answer the door. I was bummed, but not worried. The next Friday I was looking at the European edition of the Restoration DVD and I noticed that it was in….. Albanian! I am sure to nobody else that means something. However to me it was another sign. So I called an audible and we drove straight there. Despite the fact that it was after 8:00 and Osmond was in his pajamas, they happily let us in. I showed them the DVD and some how set up an appointment with them for Saturday for another lesson to teach English. We meet them at their place and they followed us to the church. We started off by watching the DVD with them and then taught them the alphabet, numbers and time. It was sweet! We will have them fluent in no time!
Anyhow I love y’all!

Elder Joshua Cordon

Happy Chinese New Year

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Dear Family and Friends,

Well this was a pretty awesome week! We had the Chinese New Year which meant Deep Clean. Its the day when we all spend the entire day cleaning every crack and corner of the appartment! It looks so good now! Also to finish that day we watched the fireworks over the bay! Pretty Amazing.

Earlier in the week I also had the chance to do my first exchange but this one was the entire Zone mixing and matching. I got to have Elder McEwan who was in my MTC group. So we were both very new and also very blessed. We had to make a random trip to the airport even with all the delays we still managed to get a new investigator in my area which never happens! BABY POWER!

Also many other blessing came Elder Howells and my way this week although everyone is busy over Chinese New Year we were able to meet a few families and found a couple of guys who also live in our area. We felt prompted to go to this area we had never been and frankly we didn’t know what it was we just walked under the freeway and down this path to this beautiful bay side dog park! Way cool we ended up finding two people and teaching streets lesson, they both live in our area. So Cool!

Also today we got to go to Stanley its on the ocean side of Hong Kong Island and it had some amazing views. We decided to spend our P-Day with the ward for a great chinese BBQ!

I love you all have a great week!

Elder Cordon

Daily Miracles :)

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Dear family and friends,

This past week was a good week.

Seems like every day we felt like we had experienced a miracle. That is always a great feeling! Some of the highlights where some lessons that we had with the conseillant family. They are an awesome family from Haiti, we have been working with them for about a month and a half now. Their names are Gabin and Emmanuella, they have three beautiful children, Alayna, Nala, and Gianni. They are like our best friends. I will definitely be keeping touch with them for the rest of my life. They would be wonderful members of the Church. Gabin is Apostle material. A huge step was made with them when we were talking about the disciples in 3 Nephi 19 in the Book of Mormon. Emmanuella was confused about something and we were struggling to help her understand it. That is when Gabin turned to her and in a perfect way explained it to her in a way we never could. It was a huge step because he has never tried to help explain some of our doctrine like that before. They give us marriage advice all the time, mostly for Elder Hamilton because we are predicting that he will be married by the end of the year haha. It is some really good stuff! They really know what they’re talking about.

I am loving every minute of my mission so far! I feel as if my morning studies have improved and I’m really loving the opportunity to tear apart the book of Mormon and just find so many nuggets of wisdom and truth. I have truly grown to love that book as I focus my studies around it. I really don’t care to read anywhere else right now. The Spirit it brings into my mornings alone is worth it. I feel as if anybody who doesn’t take time to study the book of Mormon every single day is missing out on a wonderful opportunity.

A fun thing that happened this week was a friendly competition that we had. On Saturday the assistance called us and asked if we could have lunch so we could talk about a few things. On our way to the restaurant Elder Hamilton and I were trying to guess what they were going to rebuke us for. Unable to think of anything that would give them ammunition we were curious as to what they wanted to talk about. About halfway through lunch and folded the plan before us. They told us that Sunday night from 5 to 9 we were going to compete to see who couldn’t score the most points. You could score points by knocking on doors, contacting people, getting new investigators, and setting baptismal dates. The prize was a golden eagle trophy they had found in the mission office. The Lord bless us with great success and they are going to give us the trophy sometime today. 🙂

I know that God is aware of our lives, and that he really does care about each and every single one of us. His hand is always extended, and we just have to reach out. We will find success and happiness in life as we turn everything over to him. It isn’t easy, but it’s not that hard either, and it is most definitely worth it! Have a great week!

I love ya’ll!

Elder Joshua Cordon

“An unseen power will aid me and you”… Electricity or WiFi anyone?!

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Dear family and friends,

Things got pretty exciting this last week when I was able to receive
my iPad mini. These things are awesome! It is definitely a huge bonus
to serving here in Jacksonville, Florida. To answer any questions,
these are not full functioning iPad. The church has modified them a
bit to upgrade security and so that there are no any games or anything
on them. We have access to all the churches apps and Google translate,
Skype, and Facebook, but that is about as much as we get. It is also
all we really need. There’s so much information in gospel Library
alone, has everything you could possibly imagine as far as missionary
work is concerned. I’m excited to see how I can use this to grow the
work in this area.

A cool miracle from this last week shows how we used the iPad in a
creative way that opened doors we wouldn’t have had otherwise. Last
Sunday when contacting in an apartment complex we met a man from
Albania. He couldn’t speak any English, so we gave him a pass along
card and wished him a good day. As I was walking away I just found
myself wishing that I could just speak to him because he seemed like
such a wonderful man. The next day we went to pick up some French
copies of the book of Mormon from outside of the mission office that
sister roads left for us when in the stack we found an Albanian copy
of the book of Mormon. We asked her why it was there and she said it
was an accident. I immediately thought of the man that we the day
before and I felt that this was no coincidence. We didn’t exactly know
where he lived, but we went to the same complex and said a mighty
prayer and began wondering hoping to find him. We knocked on a few
doors and did a regular approach and then asked if they knew any
Albanian people in the area. We were continually sent down several
dead end leads. However, we felt the spirit was with us,guiding us. As
we walked we felt that we should talk to some young man we saw sitting
at a picnic table. After having a short conversation with him and
giving him a Book of Mormon, we started to make our way back to the
car. Right then we saw the same Albanian man that before walking into
his apartment. We ran after him and knocked on the door just after it
shut. He opened it and as he saw us a big smile came across his face
and he invited us in. We held out the book of Mormon like we are
giving him a gift. He took it and you could tell from his facial
expressions and body language that he was very grateful that we had
given it to him. After using the translation book of Albanian to
English on his table to communicate we set up a return appointment for
Sunday at 5 o’clock. We did this keeping in mind we would have our
iPads by then and that they had a translation app. After receiving the
iPads be translated a listen into Albanian. Yesterday we went to his
house and we held out the lesson we had translated and pictures that
went along with it. While we could not communicate to know how he felt
we could see he understood very well. We agreed to teaching English on
Saturday if he came to the church so we can use the Wi-Fi. One amazing
gift is iPad!

Check out my new iPad mini

Check out my new iPad mini

Josh 2

Josh 3
I hope you liked the story. I’m very happy here and I love my mission.
I know this gospel is true, I know God is part of this work, and I
know that if we do what he asks we can have the spirit as a guide. I
love this gospel so much! Have a wonderful week!

Love ya’ll!

Elder Joshua Cordon

Another Great Week! -Jared

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Dear Family and Friends,

Well its been another interesting week with things just getting more interesting this week. First to start the week off right I did my first hike in Hong Kong and that was pretty unreal!! also the card reader for my card is not working so pictures will be sent promptly. But we have decided to drop our fist investigator. He is a nice old 83 year old man but when he says he can promise he won’t commit adultery, well then we must rethink how well our efforts have been working. So this week we will be meeting one last time, unless of course he decides to read the Book of Mormon and has a desire to learn and accept then of course we will teach him again.

But with him going down our other new investigator is on the climb and he will be receiving a baptismal date after new years for sure! Things get hard around new years cause everyone has work off and a lot of people go to mainland and a lot of tourist come here. So it will be interesting but after the short delay in the work we will be able to pick right back up.

On other news we have found way to successfully contact families which has a very large challenge so far. What you need is to have a family you know in a park then you play with them and all the other parents see how nice we are and then want to talk to us! It worked yesterday when we went to a park and found a father and daughter we had taught twice and then after playing with them earned the ears of there friends, So if all goes well we will have our first full family lesson this next week! I will keep you updated!

Well things are moving here everyone is having a lot of success recently. The lord has been leading us to his prepared people!

I love you all Have a great week and Happy New Year!

Elder Cordon

Temple Work- Jared

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Dear Family and Friends,

This was another great couple of weeks! We really have been blessed this last week was temple day so that moved and shrunk my p-day. Which I am not complaining cause I got to go to the temple it jsut took away from me emailing you all.

These last 2 weeks we only had 3 days where we did not teach a lesson. So things are really picking up for us. We have 3 solid investigators now. One pretty new, the other should have a confirmed baptism date by the end of the week and the other is our 82 yeard old eternigator(he will come around as soon as he realizes God is better than horse racing). Things are really looking good. Its been a hard road opening up a new companionship for your first area, but by golly we have done it. Also a young man we found sitting on a park bench my first month got baptised yesterday. He is a Mandarin so we didn’t get to teach him, but man we sure found him! So I kinda count that as my first baptism haha.

We have learned a vital lesson that our president was tryin to teach us. Which is when you focus your priorities in order(the number 1 being the most important thing and 3 being the least important) you can recieve them all. As far as finding goes families are the 1 and then you have young people then old people. We have made it a big focus of ours to really shoot for those families. Its a principle that we tried and well it absolutly works. We have been finding a lot of families these last couple of weeks, also a lot of young people, and then of cours the poe poes and the soak soaks. When you align your priorities with the lord he absoluty makes them possible.

I know the lord loves us and I have seen miracles in peoples lives, this church isn’t just a christian church. Its the Church of Jesus Chirst where he leads it as surely as he lead it when he established during his minitstry. Its not where we learn about Christ, its where become like him and truly know him.

Love, Elder Jared Cordon

Ushering in the Technology Age of MISSIONARY WORK- Joshua

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Dear Family and Friends,

BIG CHANGES ARE COMING TO JACKSONVILLE. This is an exciting time to be a missionary. Last week we were visited by Michael Hemingway who is charge of online proselyting in the missionary department (He also used to be the mission president in Rochester, NY). He came to usher in the new age of new tools. In an increasing effort to improve productivity and the ability of the missionaries to find and maintain contact with all of our investigators we will be issued I-pad minis. If all goes well I will be getting mine during leadership meeting this week. I am so pumped. I find myself thinking all the time if I only had an I-pad right now I could show them… you get the picture. So that is something to definitely be excited about.

So, remember that lady that I told you about last week who used some colorful language, well her neighbor is a member in our ward, and he heard about what happened. He went and talked to her for us. Well apparently the conversation went really well because when we were there yesterday she came up to us to apologize and asked for our forgiveness. Despite all that happened I couldn’t help but eagerly accept her apology and forgive her. She began to cry as she walked away. Reflecting on the experience, I realized how much wisdom God us given to us in the word of wisdom. Too often people do things they regret when they are under the influence of any number of drugs and chemicals. Regret is a painful thing, even when you have received forgiveness. I feel bad that she doesn’t have the light of the gospel in her life, and that she has yet to experience the joy that can be found in it.

Sorry for the short letter this week, but I hope ya’ll have a wonderful Martin Luther King Jr. Day!

Love,
Elder Cordon

There is Good Chaos and Bad Chaos -Joshua

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Dear Family and Friends,

There has yet be any consistency here in this area. No two weeks have been the same. There has always been something that has set the week apart and made it interesting to me in some way or another. I will have to say that that has definitely been the best part about serving as a Zone Leader here in this area.

Last Wednesday was transfers and I was wondering how that was going to effect us because it takes place in our Zone, but at the same time it doesn’t fall under the realm of any of our responsibilities. Wednesday morning came and we hadn’t heard anything so we were just expecting to have a full day of regular proselyting. Well then we got a call from one of our district leaders asking if he could have Elder Hamilton’s bike helmet because he is getting transferred to an area where he will need it and that he also needs our help jumping his car. So we called a quick audible in our plans and went and helped him out.

Just as we were finishing up there, the assistants called and asked if we could help them with getting one the APs bike from their apartment. We of course said yes and helped with that. We had a good chat with Elder Tuft as we rode in the car with him. (He has been the assistant for almost a year and he just got released, he is also my mission great-grandpa)

Once we finished up there we chatted for a bit with Sis. Craig and Elder & Sister Rhoads and snacked on the food they had their for transfers. We no sooner finished up that when those Elders we had helped earlier called asking if we could jump their car again.

Having completely ruined our morning plans we took a quick lunch and went and had a lesson with our recent convert Solomon. Just as we were finishing up the lesson President Craig called and asked rather urgently how quickly we could get to the Mandarin Chapel. We told him 10 minutes and got into the car and sped off to meet him. We then accompanied him to the airport to pick a Temple Square sister from Brazil who just got transferred here. He couldn’t go alone so he needed our help. It was great to be able to just relax and talk with President about random manly things like cars and sports as well as mission related topics. We had a good amount of time in the car with him and so there was no pressure at all.

All in all it was cool that the desire of my heart was met because I really wanted to take part in a bit of the chaos that surrounds the process of receiving new, sending home, and transferring missionaries.

We also had some great success and some crazy encounters this week as well. The success was seen in who came to church. We were able to see Lily there and she is still very excited about baptism in two weeks, and also one of investigators, a black sister named Genesis, was able to come. She brought two of her children and the ward just wrapped their arms around her. She loved it so much and is probably at this point already wanting to get baptized, I can’t blame her, this church is pretty great.

Something that happened Saturday though was that we were teaching one of our investigators, Wally, in front of his apartment, when this cookoo lady came walking up. She had what I hope was a cigarette in her hand and she waved it around and she rudely interrupted the lesson we were having. It didn’t help that my patience with her was non-existent due to previous encounters, as she proceeded to tell us that we are wasting our time here, “everyone on this street has been saved.” She then said, “In the name of Jesus Christ.” and then paused for a moment in strange mentally distant way, while I cringed at what might happen next. It seemed as if a she was shut down temporarily why and evil spirit took over as captain of the vessel. Then she proceed shout some of the most profane language referring the “sinners” across the street. I, completely baffled at what just took place, protested immediately the use of such language especially when accompanied with the name of the son of God. I no sooner finished when she turned on me and managed to use even more profane of language than I had heard before. I will not say what i was tempted to do at that moment. Luckily I managed to stay very calm as I looked at my investigator, patted him on the shoulder– all while under verbal fire– and told him, “well brother, have a good night.” We (Elder Hamilton and I, and a member that was with us) turned and just walked back to the car. The lady yelled the whole time we were walking to our which was much longer walk than I had hoped. After we had sufficiently distanced ourselves from the spawn of satan, I managed to get a chuckle out of the other guys by quoting the restoration movie in saying, “God’s grace is sufficient to save all sinners.” A good way to conclude the worst encounter of my mission yet. I guess as a missionary, you really do see the best and worst sides of the world.

Love Ya’ll

Elder Joshua Cordon

New Year, New Mind -Joshua

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Dear Family and Friends,

I have this problem of not remembering anything that happened the week before when it comes to doing emailing. I guess that is why I keep a journal right? Yet somehow I still remember peoples names that I met a month ago. I think God is trying to show me where my priorities should be; not in the past, but in the present. I might share a little of the past with you though.

Church was great! It was packed! I have never seen it that full. People were actually looking for a seat. Luckily our investigators were there early 🙂 The Conseillants came! It was so awesome to see them there 🙂 Gabon had that big grin strapped on his face that he is always wearing when we come over to his apartment, and Emmanuela was paying attention to everything single detail, not to prove it wrong, but because she liked it so much! She was saying afterwards that she really loved relief society, and that they were actually good singers in there haha a nice contrast to sacrament meeting. Also Bruce came to church too! He really liked it as well. He is a character though. He has come two weeks in a row and we still haven’t taught him anything, and he wants to keep coming, but he doesn’t want to schedule any lessons… Ya I don’t understand either.

Also on Sunday we were contacting a referral from the sister missionaries and as we were walking up Rodney (the referral) was outside drinking and bbq’n and his boys were playing basketball. It was a bit weird at first, but we were determined to connect with him. Elder Hamilton then asked if he could play ball with kids ( by the way… he is really good), and so he challenged them to a game two on one. As they were playing Rodney who was just loving all of this said that we should have made a bet with them as he laughs at the fact that his boys are getting beat by one person in a shirt and tie. Then I shouted that if Elder Hamilton won then they had to come to church. After the game was over Rodney was like, “we will see you Sunday.” Haha It was really funny. We also connected really well with his family because of that. His boys want to come and be on the church ball team, which is good because our ward lost last Saturday.

So anyway, this past week I decided to make sure that I was making daily improvement toward my ultimate goal of returning with our Father in Heaven, so I decided to map out daily things that I could be doing to achieve that ultimate goal. It was a really eye opening experience and it gave me a lot of areas that I can improve upon, which was great because now I feel that I have a lot more focus than I did for the rest of my mission! Wohoo! IMPROVEMENT!

Anyway,

Love ya’ll!

Elder Joshua Cordon

Things are happening!!! -Jared

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Dear Family and Friends,

This was a great week for our companionship! A bad week as far as numbers are concerned but for everything else its awesome. The ward had given a referal the other week of a family. Well we have done our best with this opportunity. The daughter and her friend have been coming to English class and they have had such a great time that when we asked the mom to come to church that she could not refuse when the two girls were jumping up and down with excitement. So she came with the two girls sadly the husband didnt come but we will keep working on him. They ended up staying the whole time and had a really great experience! Also there is a opportunity down the road for another family through this girls friend.

Families have been a really big focus for the mission and especially the zone! this Last week we had a great zone training meeting and we all made a commitment to give a little time at night to additional prayer for families. Also yesterday I made a specific fast that we could find families. Well my prayers were defiantly answered we found more families yesterday than we have my whole time here. The Lord does not dictate our desires but when they allign with his he is sure to let us know.

Also cool little blip is that we will be reinstating the split tags very soon. Its been a long standing tradition in Hong Kong tell early last year to have split english and cantonese on the same tag. With the great diversity here there is a constant need for both. Well the church has finally reaproved that and we will be recieving those tags any day now. I can send a picture. Its cool cause we are the only mission in the world with dual language tags.

Well everyone I am so greatful for the prayers and the support and Happy New Year!

Love Elder Jared Cordon