Fwd: Elder Winters - April 9, 2012 Happy Easter

Hello everybody, and Happy Easter.  I hope you all had a great time remembering our Savior's resurrection, because I know I sure did.  Easter in Chinese literally means "resurrection celebration," so they make it easy for us to remember.  

It's been a great week with a lot to talk about, including a guy eating pizza with chopsticks.  I'll do my best to filter out the less important things, but I can't make any promises that I won't stray into the topic of food. 

In exciting news, David A. Bednar of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles came to our mission conference on Friday.  All I can say is that he is an Apostle of the Lord, comparable to one of Jesus' Apostles when He was on the earth.  It was amazing to see the spiritual pattern he used as he taught and it was incredible to see how much I could learn in three short hours.  He truly is an incredible individual. 

In teaching news, we are continuing with teaching quite a few people that were recently baptized, to help them review and keep the information fresh in their minds.  One couple we taught is from Taiwan, and they both speak limited English.  Also, their first language is Taiwanese (completely different from Mandarin), and they kind of incorporate some of that into their Mandarin, so it's pretty dang tough for me to understand.  Whenever we teach them, I'm always scared to death they will ask me a question and I'll say something dumb.  As it just so happens, I got the opportunity to express just how dumb I am and inadvertently took full advantage of it.  I was talking about how my sister was serving in Taiwan, and then the husband asked me a question.  I thought he asked about how many missionaries there are in the world, so I responded, "about 55,000."  There was an immediate uproar as it was quickly clarified that the question he asked was "how many sisters do you have?".  I guess it just wouldn't be a real mission without these experiences.

I'll talk about food just a little today.  I finally fulfilled my lifelong dream of eating a dragonfruit.  Somehow, I imagined it tasting a whole lot cooler - in reality, kind of like an unsweet kiwi.  But still, I felt cool eating it.  Also, I felt like finding my inner chef this past week and cooking up something creative in the kitchen with pineapple, kimchi, and Chinese sausage.  As it turns out, I don't have an inner chef.  To make a long story short, I kind of put too much oil on the frying pan and left it on HIGH for just a little too long.  Man, and people thought the BP incident was bad.  As my last little tasty tidbit, I discovered a new delicacy in the Asian market: pork uterus.  Elder Kim hasn't had it yet but he's stated his opinion that it's "probably good."

In spiritual news, I would just like to let you all know that I know that we will all live again.  Our Savior broke the bands of death for us so that we all might be able to stand before God in His presence after we die.  This is a free gift to us all because Jesus Christ loves us.  If I don't know anything else, I know that our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ love us.

I also love you all, and hope that you have a great week.

Elder Winters

Here is the infamous dragonfruit, the view from a member's home, and Daniel opening his Easter package.