Hey Everyone,
So, the move-call/transfer/change day is today and I'm..............Staying!! Woohoo! This will be my fourth transfer in Yongkang and I'm stoked. For those who don't know what a transfer is, missionaries have the possibility of switching areas every 6-weeks and that 6-week period is called a transfer. So long story short, I've been in Yongkang for 4 and a half months now. It's going to be really tough to leave when I finally do. I love the people here and I'm just..settled. I don't know. In my district(comprised of all the missionaries in the city of Yongkang, 4 elders and 2 sisters in all) the only change was that one of the sisters left to go up to Taichung and a new missionary came down to be trained by the sister who stayed here. Everyone else stayed the same though so it's going to be a fun transfer with people I know:)
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| Brendan going skydiving on P-Day. Kidding, Kidding. Had you for a minute, didn't we? :) |
First off, my mom mentioned that I haven't really talked about what I do every day and for people who aren't acquainted with missionary life, that might be kind of confusing, so let me explain: I get up at 6:30 every day and exercise for half an hour or sometimes less depending on how fast we get ready(sometimes, it's slow going). At 7:00, I get shower, eat breakfast, and get dressed, etc. At 8:00, I start personal study. I study the good word of God! Scriptures, Preach My Gospel(the missionary manual), I plan for lessons we're going to teach that day, and if there's time, I ponder about what I want to be and what I want to do on my mission/that day. Next, at 9:00, we do companionship study. We sing, we pray, we share what we learned in personal study and we study together. At 10:00, we have language study(I just started learning characters. I'm super stoked!!). At 10:30, we're out the door and if we don't have a lesson or errands to run, we usually just talk to everyone in sight about the Gospel of Jesus Christ and try not to weird anyone out. At 12ish, we eat lunch and do another half an hour of language study. After that, it depends on the day, but it usually consists of finding people to teach, teaching people, and eating dinner. Or a combination thereof. Sometimes, we have meetings with other missionaries where we get trained on different aspects of the work, and sometimes we get to see someone decide to follow Jesus Christ and be baptized. We return to our apartment at 9:00 or sometimes a little later and we do the next day's plan for half an hour. Then, for the last hour of our day, we write records so other missionaries/our future selves can remember what we taught that day, write in our journal so that our posterity/future selves can remember what we did that day, and we wind down. At 10:30, we pray, then go to bed. But yeah, that's about what we do every day. On Mondays we have a Preparation day where we basically buy groceries and do whatever we want from 10:30 AM to 6:00PM.
So yeah, this last week, the standouts were as follows:
1. Golden Chen finally got baptized!!! He's what we call a week A drop-in. When we have people we meet with and they set a date to be baptized, we say they're a week A if they're going to be baptized that week, week B if it's next week, etc..So if you have a week A drop-in, that means someone decided to be baptized the that same week. So yeah, Chen did that. We met with him on Thursday and he decided he wanted to baptized on Saturday. Super stressful! He had an interview on Friday and then he was baptized on Saturday afternoon. It was a wonderful day. Not a lot of people showed up to his service because it was so sudden, but there was a really strong spirit there. He gave a really strong, humble testimony. I'm super excited to see him keep going and do great things. He's still got the work situation that keeps him from coming to our ward every week, but he'll at least be able to go to a sacrament meeting every week and he wants to retire as soon as possible so he can become a teacher(no work on Sundays! yay!). Anyways, that was awesome.
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| Brendan, "Golden" Chen and Elder Gish at Chen's baptism. |
2. The other elders in Yong Kang taught a family and committed them all to baptism. The best part, though, is how they found them. The father was someone that missionaries from another area referred to us. The other elders were calling them while we were there and Elder Surdu decided to play a joke and pretend he was talking to this guy(he hadn't answered any of the 4 or 5 times they had called him before) and say the guy wanted to talk to me. He handed the phone to me twice and both times I said "Hello?" in Chinese, but the guy had already "hung up". Finally, I got sick of it and just called the guy myself. He surprisingly answered and was being kind of flaky about setting up a time to meet in the next week, but then he kind of all of a sudden asked if we had time right now. I said "yeah" and he said "alright, I'll be there in 15 minutes." Elder Gish and I left, but I guess the guy came to the church and brought his 18-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son. They met with them and committed them all to baptism on the 29th of March. It was super awesome!! Miracle status.
That's about all I can think of at the mo. If I think of more later, I'll tell you all next week. Love you guys!
-Elder Brendan James Smith
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