🍆Tortang Talong😋

 Hey everyone,

This week I had the opportunity to have a great dish called Tortang Talong from the Phillpines. a Filipino elder here made it and it's pretty good. Basically, you take an eggplant, boil it, and then put in some meat and vegetables and stuff. Then you fry it. I did not have the highest expectations as I have never had eggplant before, but it was honestly pretty good. 

This was pretty chill though. Not actually very cold even though it's supposed to be cold season, and we live right next to a river. This week was the first week we had church at our new building though. It was soo amazing. Our mission President, President Kanyaphan and his wife came out to be there for the opening of the building. Super blessed and miracle-filled Sunday. We ended up having 47 people in total, 13 of which were friends one of our 2 companionships are teaching. 

For this week I'm just to go through some of the people we had the chance to teach this last week. 

Our first amazing Poosonjai is P Gob. P Gob has a shop where he fixes devices. We've stopped by to teach him like every other day since I got here. We've recently got through all the lessons. Since he has started learning with the missionaries for the past month or so he has read up to Helaman in the BOM and he just finished reading Matthew in the Bible. He undesrtands so well and this we were blessed to help him have a goal to receive Baptism on February 1st. He is soo amazing and can't wait to see his faith grow more. 

Another person we've started teaching these last 2 weeks is named Yada. She's around 19 and she was one of the first referrals I called when I got to Nakhon Panom. We were able to take one of our new members who is 21 and they're now good friends. We've taught her online this past week as she lives around 30 minutes out of the city. She has read all the pamphlets we've given her, and has started reading the Book of Mormon. We were blessed this past Saturday tho because the Senior missionaries, Elder and Sister Stennet, have a car and were able to take us out to her house to visit this Saturday. We had a spiritually filled lesson. She shared how she felt we were an answer to her prayers, and then another miracle came when we found out she's thinking about trying to be a nurse. Sister Stennet used to be nurse and was able to share some insights and give her contact information if she needs help with anything. We were also to meet with Yada's family who is very Buddhist and not interested letting her come to church. However, they're fine with us teaching her. Please pray for Yada to be able to come to church in the future as it would be an amazing opportunity for her. 

We honestly have quite a few more people we're teaching who came to church, but I want to just finish off with 2 more.

One is named Ping Pong. He is a middle-aged English teacher and he's so lit. Both of his sisters have been baptized, one in the last month. He has been learning with the Missionaries for a lil bit now, and he has a testimony of prayer and other things he's seen. He's also on the last step where if he feels ready he could be baptized this month. We're hoping we can help him prioritize scripture study and feel ready to enter into his first covenant with God.

Our last guy I want to talk about is P Dthou. Saturday Night at almost 9 pm we were heading to our bikes after just finishing a lesson at the walking street. As we got to our bikes to head back I was about to hop on but I saw this guy walking down the stairs so I figured I would start talking with him first. I greeted him and just chatted with him a bit and he started asking a bunch of questions about what we're doing here. I was able to give a lil rundown of missionaries and asked him if he's free tomorrow morning. He said he didn't have anything in particular because he recently left his job. I invited him to church and after a little hesitation he said he might go and we exchanged Facebooks. I wasn't too sure if he was seriously gonna pull up, but then when we got home he had already messaged on the Facebook and asked for the Church location. Sure enough, the next morning a little after the meeting had started he pulled up. This was really just such a cool miracle for me, and double bonus was sister kanyaphan talking with him and helping us get him to agree to a follow up appointment this week. He also told us he will be coming to English Class.

I love Nakhon Panom and I love all the amazing opportunites I've had on my mission so far. I hope you all had an amazing Holiday Season and Thank You for all the amazing people that reach out to me. 

For my spiritual Thought I'm gonna share a scripture I think we could all abide by.

Jacob 6:12

12. O be wise; what can I say more?

Some flics