Elder Kaden Rees

This week was good. One of our friends Chen moved back so we have started teaching him again. He is afraid of baptism but likes what we teach him. We are trying to get him to understand that you do not need to know everything to be baptized. You just need to have faith and a testimony of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. Baptism is the first step we take on a lifetime committed to following Jesus Christ. This Thursday we also got to go to the LA temple and do some service. They replaced all the carpet in the temple so we moved all the furniture back onto the new carpet. Scripture of the Week: Mosiah 26:30 Yea, and  a as  often as my people  b repent  will I forgive them their trespasses against me. I love this scripture because it shows to me that Jesus Christ is always waiting for us to come to him. He is knocking at the door, we just have to open it for him. - Elder Rees

This   week   was quite the   week . Because of Hurricane Hilary we had to do some preparation for the storm. We went shopping on Saturday instead of on Monday like usual. The storm died down a lot so in the end there wasn't much of a hurricane that hit us. Just a lot of rain. The day the storm hit us we also had an earthquake! We live on the top floor of a 4 story apartment so we could feel it when the building swayed. This   week   I was also able to do the first baptismal interview I have ever done. It was a neat faith building experience and the man I interviewed already has a strong testimony of the Gospel. His name is YeJia and he heard about the gospel from his Dad  who joined the church in Dallas Texas. This   week   me and Elder Lyu will be doing a bunch of finding because we don't have many friends that we are teaching. Scripture of the  Week : Mark 12:33 And to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with a...

  This week flew by! We had transfers on Friday and I am staying in Pasadena for a 5th transfer. I am excited to finish Elder Lyu's training and continue serving in Pasadena. Our zone is almost completely different. We had some areas whitewashed and almost everyone has a new companion. I am a District leader this transfer and my district is very young. Our zone has a lot of faith so this transfer should be great. Our most progressing friend right now is Che. We call him bicycle man because when we met him on the street a couple weeks ago he was on a bike. Shortly after we contacted him we forgot his name, so he became bicycle man. The funny thing is that bicycle in chinese is 自行车（ZiXingChe) and his surname is 车Che so he really is bicycle man. He actually speaks better Korean than Chinese. He was born in China and then moved to Korea when he was very young. Because of this he can speak chinese but cannot read chinese so he uses a Korean Book of Mormon in our lessons. It really teach...

  This week is the last week of the transfer. Sorry I didn’t get an email last week, it is kind of a tragic story. Last week I wrote a huge email recapping the week and right before I submitted it my phone refreshed and deleted the whole thing. I’ll try to recap what happened in this email. Last week our friend XiuFen Zhou got baptized and this week she received the gift of the Holy Ghost. She is getting more involved in the ward and I can see her continue to make changes in her life. The funny thing is that we met XiuFen Zhou through her sister, who we started teaching a couple months ago. Her sister invited her to church and from then on we taught them together. As we were getting them prepared for baptism we realized that FangFang (XiuFens sister), actually lives in Anaheim which is outside of our mission, so we had to refer her to the missionaries in that mission. They ended up getting baptized on the same day!  A fun story from this week is that our English class made it ...