Jacob Dyer Missionary Blog: July 13, 2015

I moved. I'm in Corona with Elder Foy who loves baseball too, still a zone leader! I'm not in a Chinese area anymore which isn't that cool, but my new address is:

Elder Jacob Dyer

5398 Trail Street

Norco, CA 92860

Norco is "Horsetown USA" by the way and I somehow ended up with the original Mulan car - Chevy Cruze.

This past week was amazing. It was Elder Murray's last week in my mission so all of the Chinese members in our ward invited us over to eat food. By Thursday I was dying - too much good food.

Pretty interesting thing happened this week. We got a call from the Irvine missionaries saying they had a referral from Arcadia (Chinese missionaries). She needed help translating something in Corona, so we headed over. She was there with another Chinese woman and the woman’s older American husband. They had us translating to help them give the ownership and business license of a massage place to the Chinese woman (the single one).

So we were talking to the government employees and they said it was closed last week by the police for shady stuff happening, illegal stuff. So they said they'll have an agent go check it again to see if it's approved to open again under the new owner. Elder Murray, bless his heart (bless your heart Elder Murray), left our number so the person checking could call us and we could translate whether they passed or not. So they left to their massage parlor store place and we left to meet them there to translate some utilities thing. But I decided to go back and ask if we should be translating.

After talking to the worker there, she said Corona has a lot of these massage places that get busted and try to reopen under a new owner. So long story short after going there and telling them we couldn't go inside because we're missionaries, we took our phone number off the application and called them and told them we couldn't translate because they were involved in illegal activity, she asked "what activity, did the government people say?" And I told her, "you know what I'm talking about." because she did, so we got out of being the translators for a brothel.

We were meeting with a recent convert and his wife and talking about prayer. They said they both prayed this week about a city inspection on their home (they're doing extensive renovations) to pass. He prayed to God in the name of Jesus Christ, and she prayed to Buddha, and they passed! And they were in an argument about "whose God answered their prayers?" Selina said it's very important to know who helped them pass. I thought it was a funny argument to have.

The week culminated in Sister Xiong's baptism. Her husband was baptized last November. At the start she was really standoffish, not really wanting a lot to do with the church, but we kept working with her, and she finally made it into the waters of baptism! That was an awesome feeling, seeing their family together.

During the baptism, Sister Xiong started plugging her nose before her husband started the baptism prayer, so by the time he was saying “Amen” (which is only like 10 seconds), she was gasping and hitting him to tell him to go faster. It was funny. Their three year old son, right before they started the prayer, reached down in the water and shouted "SO HOT" (in Chinese). At least we had warm water this time! But it was an awesome experience to help her to be baptized. Now on to the Temple!

We were saying bye to a lot of investigators this week and one of them, when it really sunk into her, started crying. Not fun to have a grown woman start crying on you, so I just told her it'll be all right (her husband and son are in Beijing getting visas to come visit right now). She wants to move to Utah which will all work out because Elder Murray's there to translate (have fun Murray).