Elder and Sister Croft in Taiwan

Two weeks ago was pretty tough for me (Darren). I was experiencing a variety of small frustrations, and three frustrations that felt very big to me: I couldn't communicate with anyone. We couldn't find contact information to visit members of the church or people who had shown interest in learning about the church. My leg around my ankle started hurting badly after a run, enough that I was limping when I walked. From the symptoms, the internet was saying to plan on a 12 week recovery with no running! At times I was feeling useless and hopeless. Sometimes staying in bed even sounded appealing. I feel these types of thoughts and feelings are emotional temptation . Churches often talk about sins, both of omission and commission and temptations to commit sin. I think it is less often that we talk about emotional temptation, but I think they all go hand in hand. I believe that our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ are actual beings who know us individually and love us, and want us to

  When we first walked into the Elders' Taitung apartment, we were a little dismayed that all the windows looked like this. We figured someone did it to prepare for a typhoon, but it made the apartment feel dingy and really unpleasant. We asked multiple people whether the tape needed to stay that way and they all just looked at us puzzled, so we decided to take it off. Pulling off the yellow part was easy, but most of the tape got left behind as gunk on the window. (I think the tape must have been there for a year or more). We tried to find a razor blade scraper at department stores, but with no luck. One store suggested a nearby building supply company, and they had a relatively expensive scraper, but I had to have it. To clean all the windows took many hours, but it was worth it. The apartment is now very pleasant and has wonderful views and is bright and cheery! There was an even more challenging cleaning problem in the apartment though. Unfortunately, this before picture doesn&

  This is probably not what you think of when someone says Chinese food, but it is a popular treat here. The base is shaved ice, but it is shaved very fine and is more like ice cream than a snow cone. There is fruit and syrup and all kind of very sweet things that can go on top including beans (yes sweet beans) and boba (chewy balls) and sorbet. I decided to start with something obviously different to make a point. Most of the food Americans think of when we think of Chinese food is really Americanized Chinese food. The Americanized version is often breaded meat and often sweet. I don't think I've ever eaten anything like Orange Chicken or Kung Pao chicken in Taiwan. There is a huge variety of food here. There are a lot of noodle dishes -- beef noodles seem especially popular. The Taidong area has a lot of chicken done in a particular way. Squid, octopus, clams, mussels, and shrimp are also popular.  It is normal to cook almost all parts of an animal. People eat chicken and pi

My (Elder Croft's) biggest worry about this mission has consistently been the language. Part of my desire to be called to Taiwan was for me to be able to learn to speak Mandarin, but unfortunately desire does not equal ability.  When Sister Croft and I were first dating, I eagerly started learning a few words. But, I quickly became discouraged when the Mandarin for, "I want to go to sleep" and "I want to eat dumplings" sounded exactly the same to me. This video has fun with those exact phrases , so apparently I'm not unique. In the 33 years since then, I've done some sporadic studying. Most of the time I can hear the tones now, but my vocabulary is so limited that anything anyone says to me just goes right on by. In Chinese this is, "I hear but don't understand." In October I got a Mandarin tutor from the MTC who helps me for an hour or two a week over zoom. The last session we had before I ended up leaving for Taiwan he challenged me to wr

  President Yang asked us to serve in Taitung (that is using the old romanization. The new romanization is Taidong)! This is an area in the South of Taiwan on the East side of the island. As you can see, it is beautiful! The office helped us rent a car and we drove down the coast early Saturday morning. It was my first time driving in Taiwan. We heard the traffic would be really bad, so we left at 6:00am. That worked out really well and we made it safely. Probably my biggest surprise driving was the speed limits. I'm used to driving 70mph to 80mph in Utah, but most of the time, even on large, well maintained roads, the speed limit here was only 60kph to 70 kph which is only 37mph to 43mph. The fastest speed limit we saw was 80kph (50mph) for a few short stretches. There were times on smaller roads where the posted speed was only 40kph (25mph). Residential area speed are only 30kph (18mph) but that makes a lot of sense because there is poor visibility from parked cars and scooters e