Hello everyone!
This week has been great! The language is coming very well and I'm learning a lot! Usually my head feels like it's going to explode after every day. Haha I guess that 11 hours of studying will do that to you though! It's really building my testimony of the promise in the Oath and Covenant of the Priesthood about our bodies being renewed. I know that I would never be able to sustain this kind of mental, physical, and spiritual growth and stress without divine assistance.
The food here is great for all of you that are wondering. Unfortuantely for me though, I take in about 3,000 or 4,000 calories a day and I only have an hour of excerize, so I'm pretty sure that I'm gaining some weight. I like to justify my eating by telling myself that we live on the fourth floor and walking up and down all of those stairs is bound to burn off some calories hahaha. But it's been great! We've been teaching and learning and I can't wait to learn it and then get out there and actually do it! Sometimes I envy the English speaking elders, because the hardest thing for us to figure out isn't what we're going to say. It's how we're going to say it in chinese hahaha. But it'll come!
I did have one special experience this week that I would like to share. We had committed an investigator to baptism (Which I'm pretty sure every missionaries first investigator says yes) but we needed to figure out what to teach him next. So me and my comp prayed about it and talked it over and we ended up rationalizing that the plan of salvation was out of the question because that has so much foreign vocabulary. So we decided we could tie his baptismal commitment into the gospel of Jesus Christ. So we planned it all out and I felt like it wasn't really fitting together, but I just thought that we would make it work. We were slated to teach right after dinner and dinner started at 4:30. Well all of my afternoon class, I felt uneasy about the lesson and I just thought that maybe we should be teaching the plan of salvation. Then at 4:20, the spirit just started screaming to me that we needed to teach plan of salvation. So I gave in and told my companion. He wasn't very happy hahaha. But I went to work switching it and I just decided to take a leap of faith. So after dinner, we went in with a lesson that we had prepared for 10 minutes in english and I just hoped that things would go well. Now with english speaking missionaries, this would never be a problem, but I didn't know how to say hardly any of it in chinese. Needless to say, the lesson went amazing. We both had to read some stuff off of cards because we had never studied it before, but this lesson the Spirit was there so strong. I could just feel the power and even though we might have been teaching in a very simple and vague way with our limited vocab, I could tell that he felt something. It was so amazing. I think next time I'll switch the lesson plan a little bit sooner hahaha. Lesson learned.
Speaking of lessons learned, you're probably all wondering why the title of my email is Temple Runi in the Rain. And it's kind of a funny story, so here goes. This morning we went and got breakfast and there was a light drizzle. Then we changed into our suits to go to the temple and when we had gotten down all 4 flights of stairs, it was an absolute downpour. However, any suggestion of walking all the way back up the stairs would have been blasphemous so we just decided that we would be fine. Long story short, we ended up sprinting to the temple in the downpour and we were absoultly soaked. The people in the temple made us stay outside for a few minutes so that we would stop dripping. Haha it was a great time. Anyway, this week has been lots of fun and it's been so good to hear from home! Love and miss you all!
Elder Jackson
This week has been great! The language is coming very well and I'm learning a lot! Usually my head feels like it's going to explode after every day. Haha I guess that 11 hours of studying will do that to you though! It's really building my testimony of the promise in the Oath and Covenant of the Priesthood about our bodies being renewed. I know that I would never be able to sustain this kind of mental, physical, and spiritual growth and stress without divine assistance.
The food here is great for all of you that are wondering. Unfortuantely for me though, I take in about 3,000 or 4,000 calories a day and I only have an hour of excerize, so I'm pretty sure that I'm gaining some weight. I like to justify my eating by telling myself that we live on the fourth floor and walking up and down all of those stairs is bound to burn off some calories hahaha. But it's been great! We've been teaching and learning and I can't wait to learn it and then get out there and actually do it! Sometimes I envy the English speaking elders, because the hardest thing for us to figure out isn't what we're going to say. It's how we're going to say it in chinese hahaha. But it'll come!
I did have one special experience this week that I would like to share. We had committed an investigator to baptism (Which I'm pretty sure every missionaries first investigator says yes) but we needed to figure out what to teach him next. So me and my comp prayed about it and talked it over and we ended up rationalizing that the plan of salvation was out of the question because that has so much foreign vocabulary. So we decided we could tie his baptismal commitment into the gospel of Jesus Christ. So we planned it all out and I felt like it wasn't really fitting together, but I just thought that we would make it work. We were slated to teach right after dinner and dinner started at 4:30. Well all of my afternoon class, I felt uneasy about the lesson and I just thought that maybe we should be teaching the plan of salvation. Then at 4:20, the spirit just started screaming to me that we needed to teach plan of salvation. So I gave in and told my companion. He wasn't very happy hahaha. But I went to work switching it and I just decided to take a leap of faith. So after dinner, we went in with a lesson that we had prepared for 10 minutes in english and I just hoped that things would go well. Now with english speaking missionaries, this would never be a problem, but I didn't know how to say hardly any of it in chinese. Needless to say, the lesson went amazing. We both had to read some stuff off of cards because we had never studied it before, but this lesson the Spirit was there so strong. I could just feel the power and even though we might have been teaching in a very simple and vague way with our limited vocab, I could tell that he felt something. It was so amazing. I think next time I'll switch the lesson plan a little bit sooner hahaha. Lesson learned.
Speaking of lessons learned, you're probably all wondering why the title of my email is Temple Runi in the Rain. And it's kind of a funny story, so here goes. This morning we went and got breakfast and there was a light drizzle. Then we changed into our suits to go to the temple and when we had gotten down all 4 flights of stairs, it was an absolute downpour. However, any suggestion of walking all the way back up the stairs would have been blasphemous so we just decided that we would be fine. Long story short, we ended up sprinting to the temple in the downpour and we were absoultly soaked. The people in the temple made us stay outside for a few minutes so that we would stop dripping. Haha it was a great time. Anyway, this week has been lots of fun and it's been so good to hear from home! Love and miss you all!
Elder Jackson