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| Mandarin name tags came this week! |
Week 6 has been quite a good one:)
On Monday night, we had a Skype lesson with a Chinese-speaking member of the church which was really interesting. A couple of the other companionships thought it was super awkward and went really badly for them but ours went fine. The topic was how to receive answers to prayers at church. The girl we talked with was named Esther and I guess she was good friends with our teacher because he walked by and I guess she smiled. I didn't really notice so it must have been right after I told a joke (just kidding. I can't joke in Chinese yet). The lesson did go really well, though! We understood everything she said. Well, she did tell us what one of the words she said meant, namely "Relief Society" because she knew English really well and she could tell we were struggling. Other than that, we taught and discussed for 32:15 all in Chinese! I was pretty proud but I tried not to let it go to my head because I knew if I did that, our next lesson would have to go terribly in order to humble me again! And blessed are they who don't need to be compelled to be humble, but rather are they who humble themselves (or something along those lines).
Anyways, lessons with the investigators are going well! Que Dixiong is making good progress in terms of feeling the spirit and we're connecting with him more. Unfortunately, the teacher playing his role is getting married this Saturday so his last day here is tomorrow. We've got our last lesson with him then so we'll have to go out with a bang! Just kidding. We'll probably just make it a normal lesson.
Lessons with Lu Dixiong were awful all this week. We went in there on Wednesday, or maybe it was Thursday. I forget. In any case, we wanted to teach him about the first vision and the restoration of the church. However, as we asked him how his week was going, what he was up to, etc., we found out that his favorite activity to do with his friends is karaoke and drinking. We were just going to chug ahead and save the Word of Wisdom lesson for later, but then he found out that it was my companion's birthday that day and asked if we were going to go out drinking. Sooo...change of plans. We taught him about the Word of Wisdom and he didn't take it super well. We asked him to pray about it and he said he probably would, but we couldn't get him to commit to live the commandment.
We came out of that lesson pretty discouraged or at least I did. The next few days, we--or at least, I--thought about what his needs were and we decided together that we need to help him understand the purpose of the Word of Wisdom better, but we also need to help him know how to receive answers to his prayers and develop a really close relationship with God. We also realized that in order to have a successful lesson, we can't plan exactly what we're going to teach so for this last lesson, we had a topic which was Word of Wisdom/receiving answers to prayers, scriptures, and thought-provoking questions and that was it. AND IT WAS AN AWESOME LESSON!! The only bad thing was that he hadn't kept his commitment but I think through the lesson, we showed him how important it was. I shared Alma 7:21-24 which is kind of a word of wisdom/how to improve your life combo. My companion shared Proverbs 3:5-7 which talks about how we can't understand exactly why God gives us some of the commandments he does but we need trust that he is all-knowing and won't lead us astray. We asked him if he wanted to become a better person and he said yes. The lesson was almost over by that point so I really quickly had him read D&C 9:8-9 which is the scripture when God tells Oliver Cowdery why he couldn't translate but it talks about how you can receive answers. So we challenged him to think about what we had said and then asked him again to pray about the Word of Wisdom. We teach him again tonight so we'll see how that goes!
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| My companion's creation. Microwave personal pizza with slim jim bits on top. Blech... |
No exciting stories about elders in the dorms this week. The problem ones were shipped out on Tuesday. Woohoo:) Just kidding, I'm sure they were nice guys. They just weren't completely ready mentally, which I think is true of everyone here to varying degrees.
We started actually doing SYL(Speak Your Language) this last Friday night when one of our teachers called us to repentance essentially and we did awesome from then until Saturday night at gym. We've been pretty spotty since then but it was much better than before when we hardly did any. I'm going to try my best to be an example!
The gospel is true! The Book of Mormon can change your life. I'm doing the Lord's work and that really is a huge and humbling blessing. I love it and although I miss all of you at times, this work is too important to let anything distract me from it. I love you all! I'll talk to you all next week:)
-Elder Brendan Smith
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