XinNian Kuaile! (Happy New Year!)‏

Dear everyone,

Here a some pictures of this week! Two of them are from the zoo last P-Day. Sister Briggs was so sweet to plan that for me! It was so fun, to get to talk to other sister missionaries, and eat ice cream, and see animals! One of my favorite parts was that for lunch, Sister Briggs brought a loaf of bread, peanut butter, and bananas, so we all could have peanut-butter and banana sandwiches. That was always my favorite thing to eat together when we were in the MTC. 

Another picture is from last Tuesday, at our zone conference. Zone conferences are these three hour meetings you have with a bunch of missionaries who live in your area, and you discuss lots of good stuff about God and how we can be better missionaries and stuff like that. They also can be a bit boring, at times. (We all know it's true!) But we currently have the two most hilarious zone leaders ever right now. I had a feeling last Zone meeting was going to be a bit more lively than usual, and it was! Elder Baker started by passing out cards and just asking everyone to write an appreciation card to an investigator. I got really excited about the idea and got four cards to write to four investigators, haha. Then we started discussing Lehi's vision of the tree of life, and what the fruit of the tree of life means to us, why we want to share it with others, etc. Then he announced that we were going to ACT OUT the vision of the tree of life. He assigned some people to be Lehi's family, others to be members of the great and spacious building (who for some reason were standing on chairs?) and others to be part of masses of lost people, something like that. I was in this last group, and was quite thankful when he told me I was going to be blindfolded because it gave me an excuse to have no idea what was going on. (This was looking like quite a mess.) After I was blindfolded, a sister was instructed to guide me around the building while other missionaries started making lots of loud, distracting noises. I was trying to think of what on earth was going on when all of a sudden I was back in the main room, and I could hear that everyone else was there, too. Elder Baker said, "Hold out your hand, and taste this." He gave me a piece of chocolate covered in frosting and asked if it tasted sweet, and if I wanted to share it with others. I made some joke about how it tasted like the love of God. Then they took off the blindfold and it was a birthday cake! And there were balloons all over the place, and they started singing happy birthday! And apparently while we were "writing cards to our investigators", everyone had been writing birthday cards to me, which they taped to a green flower poster. It was so cute, and made me feel so loved!

Yeah, so it was a good birthday week. One of my favorite investigators, Wu May, brought me a cake on Thursday, and that meant a lot to me, too. People are so good to me! Mom, I haven't had a chance to go to the mission office lately so I don't know if your birthday package has come, but I will let you know when I get it. 

Thanks everyone for the birthday wishes!

This weekend has been really fun. Chinese New Year has started! This is their biggest holiday here, and it lasts nine days. Almost everyone is off of work, so the streets are much more quiet than normal, many businesses being closed, and a lot of people having gone to Southern Taiwan for the Holiday. It has been a chilly weekend, but there is such a fun spirit in the air--this is like their Christmas. And we have been fed HUGE meals both lunch and dinner the past two days, (members have been inviting us to their houses to eat). I really have never experienced being so consistently, sickeningly full in my whole life. (Taiwanese people love to go all out when feeding you. They kind of pressure you too keep eating and eating and eating, all their vegetable dishes, their meat with bones and fat still attached, their little fruit cakes they give you, and rice, rice rice.) It could be frightening if I were concerned about calories, but I'm looking at it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to not care. We have meal appointments scheduled daily for the next week. I will probably write to you next week at least five pounds heavier. 

This week is also special for missionary work. We have hardly any appointments at all this week because this is everyone's holiday! Either everyone is out of town or they don't want to meet because they are out playing with family and friends. That means a lot of empty time to fill with finding, and being creative, and trying to figure out what missionary work is. It's a much more complicated answer than you might ever imagine, unless you have been here. Sometimes I think it means earnestly talking to everyone I see who isn't a member. Other times it means taking time to talk to my companion, because she's feeling insecure. Sometimes it means bearing my testimony. Sometimes it means sharing my doubts. Sometimes it means setting high goals for finding new investigators and using all the good desires of our heart to meet them. Other times it means forgetting any goals you, your district leader, or your mission president have set and following the nudge in your heart that you should be doing something else. 

I think this is more typical of real life outside the mission than not. There's never any solid answer to what we're supposed to be doing. We are supposed to be growing in the light of Christ to figure it out every day. It is a painful but joyful journey. Sometimes I have no idea if anything I am doing is right, and that is really tough.  But yesterday during personal study I had an epiphany: the fact that I have the rightness of my actions as a continually open, raw question is probably a better indicator that I am trying to do what is right than a bunch of fancy words insisting that I am. Which I realize is hypocritical for me to say because I am often one with a lot of words. Even these words right now are just words, and in a very real sense deaden all the daily, delicate inner-heart struggles of trying to know how to be good. I want to live for those moments, for illumination they bring, for the way they beautify my world in ways that escape description. I don't want to live for the essays I can write about these moments afterwards, unless of course they help us others to seek that goodness, too.

John Mark and Natalie! An elder in my zone is from Morgantown, West Virginia! He totally knows you guys! His name is Elder Wong. He is really funny. It's so weird to randomly have the connection of knowing you two. 

Love you all! 

Diana