Riley #80 Torrance, CA - The Baptism and the Courage of her Sister

       Is the film your participating in related to school or is this something separate? By the way, in case you didn't know, we aren't allowed to use the internet. We can't just Google something or search for something on the internet.
     

      We do try to use the restaurants the best we can in advertising for English class, but if we contact there we usually have to buy something so we can't do that too often. We are still working on ideas and activities, but it always takes a little while to get things started off.

Rancho Palos Verdes

    
The baptism went great. She was baptized along with a 16 year old boy Elder Burr and I had started teaching last year. He was born here, so the service was in English. 

    We had a lot of members from the English wards come, so we met in the chapel. We had a missionary musical number from us and the missionaries serving in the English wards. It was pretty bad. We had a Chinese member come up to us afterward and tell us the baptism was great, but our singing was terrible.

      The lady who was baptized bore her testimony in Chinese, and our Branch Mission Leader translated it for the audience right after she was confirmed. (Usually convert confirmations only happen in Sacrament Meeting. The Branch President had us do it the same day, because she returns to China on Tuesday). It surprised us. We had asked her sister before if she felt that her sister would be willing to share her testimony, and she had told us probably not because her sister is very shy.

     Early that morning, in Gospel Principles she had been asked to say the prayer, and she said it perfectly, but her face was red after the prayer. When she bore her testimony in front of everyone in the chapel, she looked totally calm. She mentioned how she is normally shy, but she could feel that Heavenly Father wanted her to be brave and share her testimony. She said she wanted to share the gospel with her family when she returned to China and would continue to keep the commandments while she was there. It's was really amazing to watch and hear her. The spirit was strong.

    Elder Casey is District Leader which means we have a lot of exchanges this week.  We will swap companionships for a day. It can be kind of fun, but it also is annoying when you have a lot to do, like Elder Casey does. We'll probably only be together in our area about half the week, because of all the exchanges we have over the next couple weeks.

I'm out of time.

Love,

               Elder Bowman