Tag Archives: Missionaries

People At Church!! Whoot! Whoot! -Joshua

Posted on by
Reply

Dear Family and Friends,

It will have to be a short one this week sorry! We don’t have a lot of time. Not having a car makes things so difficult sometimes. Especially on government holidays when the libraries close haha.

Anyhow, this past week was a great week! We kept ourselves very busy!

The one experience I do want to share with you though is regarding Mati. She is one of the greatest people we have ever met and every week we don’t see her just pains me. So, because we haven’t seen her for a couple of weeks it has been very painful. However, we decided to just swing by on Saturday during a trade-off and SHE WAS HOME!!! We had a wonderful lesson with her and she even said that she was going to come to church tomorrow. We also had her daughter Amar pinky promise us that she would go too.

We found out that the next morning Amar went running into her mom’s room at 5:45 yelling, “We got to go to church, we are going to be late!” Needless to say that she was ready this week haha 🙂
They had a wonderful time at church and I was all smiles the whole time. It has been so hard to get people to church and to finally see her there was just incredible! She got welcomed by the ward in such a wonderful way and her daughter wants to go next week even though Mati has to work.

Also Thomas and Ashley came to sacrament which was also awesome!

Anyhow, sorry to be short this week! I hope ya’ll have a great one!

Love ya’ll

Elder Joshua Cordon

Week 2 Down! -Jared

Posted on by
Reply

Wow what a week!

So this week wasn’t any different, but I can say I did enjoy it a lot better! There is a great thing to understand you may not change your circumstances but you can change you attitude so thats exaclty what I did. Also I guess our mission is soley responsible for China its technically our mission. So I am in the biggest and most populated mission. A great work that is going on here is that the members in China are doing a great job of spreading the gospel so they convert their friends get them to start following all the commandments and once a month we get large groups of chinese that come stay at the mission home which has like a small hotel on it). They spend a whole day meeting with the mandarin elders and sisters recieving all the missionary lessons and then recieving baptism by the close of the day, then we send them back to China as newly set apart member missionaries! What a wonderful work. China is open just more in the way that the qurom of the twelve has been pushing missionary work, and thats threw the members.

Being in Wanchie is hard because this area has the most non Chinese populase so we have been doing a lot of turn overs. Its hard turning people over because you build that trust and you want to help them all the way down the path. I know this work is guided by the Lord so if I am called to find and only find so be it. We find a lot of people from Indonesia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Napal. They come here to Hong Kong to be hired as Helpers, for all the extremely rich people here. For example yesterday I saw 5 ferraris,6 aston martins, a rediculous amount of porsches and such! These are special people that come from these countries they are very accepting. I know i was sent here to help bring the Hong Kong people unto Christ and I will work and work until I do. The potential they all have can really be seen in the wonderful ward I am serving in. All the members are so kind and so Happy and I know that all the upset work beaten people I see once use to be sons and daughters of god and if they could only understand a particle of the joy they could feel from the gospel they would come running.

Well everyone I will keep you updated on the how the work is and I will be sure to put a picture up next week!

Just know that salvation wasn’t easy for the Savior, but the joy he recieved was greater than we could imagine!

Love Elder Cordon

I’m As Busy As By-George I Reckin – Joshua

Posted on by
Reply

Dear Family and Friends,

Sorry I didn’t write last week. Things got really crazy and we only got an hour to email. Anyhow and things are very crazy this week as well so it will have to be a short one. These past few weeks have been very crazy and a TON has happened!! But sadly I can barely scratch the surface! I will pick 3 experiences and tell those ones though.

For the first one I got a sweat recliner chair. It is so nice, but I only use it when I read in the morning so I almost feel like it is wasted, though it is thoroughly appreciated!

As for experience number two we have been meeting with this really awesome lady named Kim for the past little while. She is so nice and I always leave feeling full of the most peaceful spirit. We haven’t made much headway until this last lesson though. We taught her the Restoration and she believed it all! Which isn’t really that surprising because it is easy to believe the truth. Then we followed up to see if she watched any of the Mormon Messages (that was our last commitment for her) and she ended up watching half of the district!! (they are videos of real life missionary work that we use for training) Haha I think it is awesome though. She told us that she knows all of our secrets now 🙂

As for my last experience. About a month ago we ran into a guy named Dorian street contacting and we had a pretty good lesson with him. He was a really smart guy and very inquisitive. He had a few concerns but offered to read the Book of Mormon. Well we finally caught him last week and he has been reading and has a lot of questions for us. We had a terrific lesson, and he left the lesson feeling very pumped about reading the story of Enos. That is what happens when you show somebody how to study not to just read though 🙂

All in all it has been a terrific 2 weeks, but there is never enough time during p-days, so I got to go!

I love ya’ll!!

Elder Joshua Cordon

So close you could almost taste it! Release your inhibition!

Posted on by
Reply

Well hello there!

Alright 2 more weeks to go then Hong Kong here I come! There have been some nice mix ups this last week to remind me the importance of the MTC and other things just make me really wanna leave!

This week Elder Cederlof and I have been able to see what it feels like to truly work through the Lord with our investigators! We have been struggling along with one. She didn’t feel our messages relation to her and she wasn’t experiencing what we were saying!

So finally we buckled down and decided we need to hit straight from the source! We prepared a lesson about the love of Christ! Although it was not exactly how we planned, she felt the love of Christ! (I want to remind everyone this is not a real investigator) but, the Spirit there was!

She has been complaining about her knee hurting and making work bad for her. So we felt prompted to show her the Bible video about Jesus healing the palsy stricken man. Then we shared testimonies about Christ healing us through blessings we have received. She started tearing up, then we were prompted to ask her if she had faith enough to be healed, she started crying again, and said whimpering yes I do. After the blessing we knew the spirit was there and God answered our prayer! We then being prompted told her about baptism and how the spirit she is feeling could be with her always! We then invited her after more testimonies, she started balling again, after a long long silence she said yes!

That lesson was amazing the spirit was so strong and I could definitely feel the spirit working through me! We now know what it feels like to have our investigator experience the discussion!

Whats been hard this week is we ended up not moving to WyView. My whole branch did but us Cantonese, we are sadly getting moved to a new branch. So after saying all these goodbyes I feel like I should be on a plane right now. sadly that is not until 2 weeks. But I did get my Chinese tags with my Chinese name in Characters! I do know how to read that one at least!

Also after long discussions with the Elders from Hong Kong I can not wait! All my experiences with the Hong Kong people have really helped me develop a love for them!

The work is Hastening and as my brother said the miracle will not only be through Missionaries but also members! Open your mouth and The Lord will fill it for you!

Everyone Take Luck

Love Elder Jared Cordon

A Very Crazy Week!! -Josh

Posted on by
Reply

Dear Family and Friends,

This past week was very… Unique, to say the least. Monday and Tuesday were fairly normal I suppose, but then on Wednesday, another Elder I rode with a member down to Gainesville for a training meeting to prepare us to become trainers. It was great, a terrific way to put some spice into the week. BUT then on Friday morning we got a call from the zone leaders telling us to meet them at there ward building to pick up Elder largo because his companion just got called to be the next assistant to the mission president. Being in a trio is definitely a different experience. Elder Largo is a great missionary though, we were contacting a referral and the family was about to shut the door, but he spoke up and just bore his powerful testimony to them and they let us in and we had a powerful 45 minute lesson. The couples names are Lorenzo and Topeka. Lorenzo loves the Book of Mormon even though he is a deacon in his Holiness church. We will be back there soon.

Some wonderful miracles this week was that the Sutton’s came to church!!! Bro Sutton was supposed to work at 10 but he called his boss and told he is no longer working on Sundays because that is his day to go to church and be with his family! He is such a champion!! We had several powerful lessons with them this weekend. They even came to the sisters baptism on Sunday and Bro.Sutton said that he was so jealous that he couldn’t get baptized right then. He just needs to get married.

There are going to be a lot of changes starting tomorrow with a new companion, being on bikes, and smaller area and all, but I am excited. I will say that I am going to miss Elder Newbold, he was a great trainer and terrific companion. He is going on to bigger and better things though as he heads to Gainesville to be a zone leader.

Sorry for the short email, but things are crazy round here!

Love y’all!

Elder Joshua Cordon

Has it really not even been a full two days???

Posted on by
1
Dear Family and Friends,

 
So the Missionary Training Center (MTC), isn’t really what I expected, but then again I didn’t know what I expected. After getting dropped off on Wednesday I got a quick tour of the campus, and then I was dropped off in a classroom where I met my district and my companion.

 
So a quick explanation on districts and zones. The split everyone at the MTC into zones, we were divided up by language and region. In my zone I have all the english speaking missionaries going to the Florida, Jacksonville mission, the Arkansas, Little Rock mission, and the Indian, Indianapolis mission. Basically, there are some really great missionaries in my zone. Then from there they split every zone into districts. My district has only 10 missionaries in it, and we are all going to the Florida, Jacksonville mission. There are also more Sisters than Elders in my district.

 
Now for my companion. His name is Elder Searle, and he is from Holiday, Utah. The first thing that I found out about him is that he loves to fish, more so than anyone I have ever met, which is pretty cool. I also found out he attended BYU last year as well and is thinking about doing Mechanical Engineering as well. So we got a lot in common. We have gotten along very well and I am glad he is my companion, we teach are first mock investigator lesson tomorrow, and I feel like we will work really well together.

 
Some big new from yesterday is that I was asked to be the District leader. I guess it means that I am basically the Father of the group. I make sure that an opening and closing prayer is said, I check on the companionships and make sure that they are doing well, and provide them with council when appropriate. I also have the responsibility of getting the mail, the one job that my district thinks is the most important.

 
Some antics went on in the residence hall last night. Some of the guys were having a competition to see if they could jump high enough to hit their head against the ceiling, and many were successful. Also my roommates and I (which are the other 3 guys in my district) noticed that there where these metal outlet cover things on the wall, and we figured that it would be a good place to hide something for future Elders. Well we weren’t the only ones with that idea. We opened the first one up and it was packed full of candy. Like bit size snickers and baby ruths, and tootsie rolls. And a letter from the Elders who said that it was put there on 4/19/13, so still fresh :). Then we excitedly opened up the other one and found a chocolate orange, left there by some elders in January I think, also still fresh. Right now we are brainstorming on what awesome thing to replace it with.

 
Despite all the antics, the spirit is very strong here. I have been full of peace for every single minute that I have been here and with every meeting and lesson, I become happier and happier. I wish you all could feel the awesome feeling that exists on this campus. It feels every once of your soul, with a warm and cozy burning. I want to feel this way the rest of my life.

Have an awesome week,

 
Sincerely, 

Elder Joshua Cordon