Sunday, August 25, 2013

Elder Phillips learns what Yam chah is...

Hello Friends and Family,

This week has been pretty great.  Here is a story about how I almost broke the Word of Wisdom.  For those who don't know most Latter Day Saints don't  smoke, drink alcohol, drink coffee/tea, or do any type of illegal drugs.  I won't explain it all, so please don't think that I've just explained in full the Word of Wisdom.  Anyway, we went out to yam chah the other day. Yam chah is a Chinese tradition where people get together at a time between breakfast and lunch and sit down and drink tea and stuff themselves with food.  Yam Chah literally means drink tea, so it's expected that the tea plays a pretty big role in yam chah.  So we went to yam chah with a potential investigator and a church member.  The church member left to go back home and get something.  So we were left alone with our potential investigator.  We explained to him that we can't drink most types of tea because we have a code of health in our church that teaches not to.  He understood, but we told him we can drink fa chah which is flower tea.  Flower tea is totally adhering to the Word of Wisdom so we told him he could order that and we could drink it.  So he orders it and the waitress puts two tea pots on our table.  One is full of the tea, the other is hot tea water.  My companion and I quickly filled our cups with hot tea water just in case the tea was not okay, but the potential investigator still insisted.  So he took the tea pot and topped our hot water off with the tea, and urged us to drink.  We were just about to, and our member comes in and says Elders!  Wait!  This is not okay!  And he dumps our tea cups out into an empty bowl on the table.

Pretty great!  We didn't eat anything to strange at yam chah.  But I was eating a dessert and realized at the end there is a thin film of paper on the bottom of the pastry, so I'd been eating paper along with the dessert.  Oops!  We've found a new investigator.  His name is Aaron!  I don't know if I've mentioned him yet, but he is 17 and a very nice kid.   We took him to see a baptism on Sunday though and afterwards he said: "I don't want to do that!"  It was pretty funny.  In the baptism the girl had really long hair so it floated to the top when the guy was trying to submerge her.  They had to redo it like three times.  But maybe he will change his mind later.  so that's Aaron!

One guy we meet with once a week is a guy named Celvin.  He is this 17 year old guy who has absolutely zero interest in the gospel.  But he likes the missionaries so he comes to Games Night at the Church and I play chess with him.  He was beating my companion too badly so I started playing with him.  But since I started playing he has not beat me yet!  So he's going to keep trying.  He likes to speak English and he has the best English I've heard in Hong Kong.  I think he watches a lot of American TV  because he adopted somewhat of a gangster type of accent.  If I didn't know him better I would have thought he was American.  But he's a very smart guy.  Hopefully he will develop some interest one day.  Until then I'll just keep playing him in Chess.

That's about all I have time for.  Love you all!

Elder Phillips

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