ately we have been visiting the Xiao Family. What an interesting family. They have 2 kids who are the most well behaved Taiwanese children I have ever seen. The dad is hilarious, he chews Beatle nut, smokes, and drinks all at the same time. I was quite impressed. I can’t imagine that it tasted very good though. We don’t visit them that often because they are hardly ever home and we don’t have time most nights to go over to their house. Even though we try and go work from 6pm to 9pm sometimes stuff comes up. These past couple of weeks a lot of stuff has been coming up. But thankfully last night we had the chance to swing on by the Xiao Families house.
Mrs. Xiao is very religious and she wants he family to be too. She is Buddhist, but is very open to all good religions. The husband however, is basically the opposite, he thinks religion is silly and doesn’t really want anything to do with it. He like us though, mostly just because he thinks we are funny. The kids love us too, I always teach them some English.
Last night we shared with him the organization of Heavenly Father’s church. He said, isn’t there only 1 Jesus Christ? Then why are there so many different Christian churches. He brought up the fact that a perfect God would not have that many different sects. We agreed which seemed to make him a little dumbfounded. It was like a deer in the headlights, he didn’t know what to say after we said, “Your right Mr. Xiao, a perfect God would not create that many churches that teach different things.” My companion and I didn’t say anything for a couple seconds just to make sure he absorbed what we had just said. I couldn’t help but smirk a little bit from the expression on his face. He shared with him a brief message about the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and introduced the Bible and the Book of Mormon to him. At this point he threw his hands up in the air and said, “ I can’t read this, if I read this I will fall a sleep and my mind goes numb.” Mr. Xiao isn’t exactly the kind a guy that likes to sit down and read a book. Actually, I am not entirely sure he can read. He told my companion it’s too bad that you all don’t have a movie that we could watch about this, because there is no way that I can read this scripture. As he said, that my companion reached into his bag and pulled out a DVD about how the Gospel was restored. We popped it in and watched it. Mr. Xiao seemed to like it, but I am not sure he took it very seriously. That is one of the problems with showing people religious stuff through TV. A lot of people are so used to seeing fake stuff on TV that they are not able to recognize the difference between what is real and what is not.
After visiting with Mr. Xiao, we went over to visit Grandpa Zhang. He is another really awesome 85 year old man who loves Buddhism. We don’t really teach him a whole lot, mostly we just visit him to keep him company and share a brief message with him. He seems to like our visits a lot though. In his house he has a speaker that constantly repeats this Buddhist prayer over and over and over. The prayer has a tune to it and it makes me sleepy. I had better be careful, I might get hypnotized by the Buddhist monks and kidnapped. Hahaha… seriously though, those monks are dangerous. I learned something interesting about monks the other day. In Buddhism a monk came become a monk 7 times. So if he wants to he can quit and go back to normal life, then years later he can go back and become a monk again. However Buddhist nuns can only do it once. I admire the Buddhist nuns a lot more now.
After getting lullabyied to sleep by the Buddhist man we headed home to start our 9 o’clock work in the office. At 10 we headed over to close an apartment that was about 40 minutes away. We loaded everything up and headed back to Taichung to put all the stuff in our storage unit. Finally at about 2:30 we headed to bed. The reason we do it so late is because if we do it during the day we will create traffic jams. We have to park the car in the middle of the rode to put the furniture in it. Since the alleys that the apartments are on are usually pretty small we have to go at night so that we have a place to park the car. Taiwan is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Driving a big old van here is a nightmare. I am pretty used to it now though. Once you learn their driving style it’s not a big deal. So that is basically what we did yesterday.
I know I promised you pictures of the Christmas lights, but I didn’t get them off of President Hoers camera yet. When he comes back I will get them.
I hope you ate a lot for me at thanksgiving. I ate Burger King to celebrate my birthday, it was pretty good, but they put to much mayo on it. I think I am going to become a vegetarian when I get home. Hahaha… yeah right? The vegetarian food over here is so good, but I am sure it is really hard to find back home not to mention I bet it is super expensive.
Love ya,
Elder Craig Anderson
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