Hannah In Hong Kong: Rain Rain

Happy Buddha's Birthday! Yes, today in Hong Kong it is a public holiday in celebration of Buddha's birthday!

The best way to describe this week is to say that it POURED! In Hong Kong they measure the amount of rain by color. So it goes yellow, amber, red, black. Black being the heaviest. When it is black we are not allowed to leave our apartment. When it is red we have to stay close enough that if it gets worse we can be home within half an hour. But, red rain is still insanely hard! It just dumps water and the streets fill up and then it thunders and lightenings! It's crazy! Yeah, so I am giving this weather summary because we had red rain on and off all week.

The rain was a bit of a bummer because it led to many cancelled lessons (people don't really like to go out in the rain), but at the same time it also led to many great experiences!

Saturday we had originally had lessons planned all day. Which, we were grateful for because we could hear super loud thunder all night and when we woke up it was still gray outside. But, by 10 am all but one of those lessons was cancelled (and that lesson wasn't until the evening). And so, Sister Ellsworth and I decided to go finding down on one of the promenades. For most of the day it was a steady and not too heavy rain. There weren't much people out, but we were still having quite a lot of success.

After walking down the promenade for a while we ended up in this really cool spot that was kind of at a right angle to where we had come from and so we could see the coast of Kowloon, Hong Kong and the bay. It was beautiful! There were big gray clouds that were moving super fast and it just looked way cool. Sister Ellsworth and I were looking around when we noticed that down the coast to our left (a few miles or so) there was a HUGE wall of rain coming! We decided to turn around and head back for the way we had came. Of course the weather is faster than us and in no time we were hit by a downpour and got Soaked!!! Eventually we made it to a pavillion and after we thought the rain had calmed a bit we decided to go out again and maybe head to somewhere else for more finding. But them BOOM! the biggest lightning and like loudest thunder ever came right in front of us! We screamed and sprinted to the next pavilion. When we got there we happened to meet the cutest and nicest Mandarin family who was also hiding away from the rain! And so, for about 40 minutes while a huge thunderstorm happened above us, we were able to speak with this family. Unfortunately, they had zero interest in learning the gospel for themselves. But, they were super interested in just talking and asking questions, and so during our conversation Sister Ellsworth and I had several opportunities to bear testimony to them about our message! It was a lovely time! I don't know if we will see them again (they didn't want to exchange info or anything), but I do believe that the Lord scared us into that pavilion so that we could meet them and at least give them an introduction. We are probably just stepping stones on their path to conversion!