Da Jia Hao!!
Thank you for the package!!!! I love the family photos- best ones we have ever had!!! We also loved the Zucchini bread :) I can't believe I am beginning my 3rd week at the MTC! According to the last thing I heard, I will be leaving around August 7th which means I have about two and a half more weeks! ahh! I'm so excited and grateful that I get to leave so early, but I definitely don't feel like I'm to that point yet....although I know I will be :)
Where to begin! Well, Chinese is hard....but it's the good kind of hard. well sometimes :) We have been teaching our teacher's "investigator" in Chinese and the first lessons were so bad. We just sat with our little study books on our laps and read out of them. It's been really hard to come from English lessons where we have learned how to invite the Spirit and really cater to the investigator, to where we feel like we can barely communicate our feelings and understand our investigator. I started to wonder if I would ever be ready to leave the MTC.......I can testify that Heavenly Father does not always make things immediately easier for us, but he helps us through the baby steps. We had our fourth lesson with our Chinese investigator yesterday and we didn't read out of the books, but just tried to teach and testify with the words we knew. It actually went a lot better and we felt like we were beginning to make a stronger connection with him. Things were far from perfect though.....Sister Embley asked him out on a date while she was trying to invite him to church :) haha the beauty of Chinese! I know it's not supposed to be easy with learning a language, even if you have experience. We have to work hard and make mistakes or we would never appreciate it when we have experiences when it all comes together. This is no easy task, but I'm grateful for the opportunity to work at it! I will be so grateful for the day when I can give a lesson in Chinese like I experience with the Spirit in English.
We have workshops every Monday in the MTC and I LOVE them! We practice teaching each other and learn more in depth about what we do when we teach the Doctrine of Christ. In this week's workshop, we watched the first part of The Restoration and the teacher asked us what the original question was that brought Joseph to pray. You know what it was? It was how does man receive salvation? We learned that we don't teach these lessons so that people can know about baptism, Joseph Smith, or the Plan of Salvation, but to offer them salvation. That's the purpose of a missionary: to help all of these people obtain salvation through teaching them the Doctrine of Christ. It completely changed my perspective as a missionary! Another powerful thing I have learned this week is that the Atonement is everything.....literally everything. The Atonement is the key to salvation and therefore should be the center piece of every lesson. Our teacher told us we should study and ponder on the Atonement every day so we can gain a stronger testimony of it to bear to those we help and teach. I think it's amazing that Heavenly Father gives us a lifetime to learn about the Atonement. I'm so grateful for it and know it is true. Christ is our Savior and Redeemer and can lift any burden from us- I would not be here without Him. I feel so inadequate when I teach about the Atonement because I feel that Christ is the only one true teacher of it. Someone told us this week that through our missionary service, we will be able to experience a very small piece of what Christ experienced during the Atonement.
We had to leave the MTC twice this week for Dr. appts for Sister Bambrough. It was fun the first time, but by the second, I didn't want to leave the MTC! It is such a powerhouse and I feel so comfortable here. When we were waiting for our shuttle to pick us up from one of the offices, we had a couple people ask us if we were Provo missionaries and then they saw our badges :) haha We decided we were the Chinese speaking Provo missionaries.....we came up with a plan to walk over to the neighborhood next to us and start knocking on some doors.....asking for Chinese referrals or Chinese food. We're goofs sometimes- my companions are so wonderful! Sister Bambrough became the Coordinating Sister this week and one sister had gallbladder surgery this week, so it was great to help her :) We laugh all the time together and am so grateful for them!
You know you've become a missionary when:
-You're more comfortable wearing a skirt than jeans
- When you have to sing a hymn while doing wall squats
- When you can't handle doing anything without your companions
- Letters make you super happy :)
You're all wonderful!!! I love you so much!!!
Love, Sister J. :)
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