4/17/17
This week we get to go to the temple for Preparation Day, so this email is coming in on Wednesday rather than Monday. This week marks a sad one in the way of Christmas. On exchanges with Elder Klein, we had to go back to our apartment to get something during the day, and it just so happened to be all-to-convenient to finally cut off the Santa hat I have been wearing on top of my helmet for the past five months. What a sad moment... I miss having to flip back the top of hat so it wouldn't hang down in front of my eyes... I miss the little white puff-ball on the end that I would have to wring water out of when it rained... I miss that soft, red felt that I could use to meticulously mop that grease from my hands after adjusting the imaginary brakes on my Precambrian bike... well, c'est la vie...
We have this awesome investigator named Joy. He smokes. He drinks. He does just about everything prohibited by the Word of Wisdom. He met with missionaries for a long time in SanChong before he moved over here to TuCheng for work. We started meeting with him, and actually most of our lessons are in English with a bunch of Chinese phrases thrown in just to clarify. He is a really funny guy, and super mellow. Well, every time we teach him about baptism he brings up that he can't quit smoking. Or drinking tea and coffee. Or alcohol. Or... And then we have to cut him off and say, "Joy! One at a time buddy, lets just focus on one at a time." Anyways, we get a call from him yesterday, and he is almost in tears about not being able to quit all this stuff, and asks us to come visit him. We think he is just plastered and drank way too much that day, but went anyway. To our surprise, the address he gave us turned out to be a mental hospital. Sure enough, there he was in the middle of a bunch of adults with various mental incapacities. We are still not sure if he was a patient, caretaker, or just visiting, but either way it made for an interesting lesson. Afterwards, we asked the doorman to the apartment building complex, and he told us it was a mental hospital for those with schizophrenia. Well, awesome! We are teaching a schizophrenic with amazing English.
Our mission is focusing on improving prayers, and as I pondered last week on what I could do to improve my prayers, I had an idea. I took some notes I had from that morning's personal study and from general conference and prayed over them during my prayers before bed. It was awesome! As I pondered the things I had been learning at the end of the day and was able to ask Heavenly Father what I could do the next day to apply what I had learned, I had several clear impressions of things to go and do. Those impressions are so exciting, because that is when you see miracles happen on your mission, and those are the experiences you remember the most. I know that as we seek and act on personal revelation, we will, like was mentioned by Elder Rasband in conference about President Monson, be "on the Lord's errand". Hope you all have a wonderful week!
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