My Taiwanese Companion & Other Adventures

May 3, 2015

So it turns out Italian is the language my companion and I can communicate in. 

Okay its not true, but when we are working on music pieces she doesnt know how to describe how to do it in English, and I dont know music words in Chinese yet, so we use the old Italian words on written music to describe how we want to perform pieces, haha. 

Guess what, President said he originally thought I liked the heat and thought I would like PingDong. Darn it. Haha. 

Anyway, this week. Was an adventure. We had nothing to go off. No investigators, nada. It was kinda a hard week. Here are some of the excuses I heard over intercom: 

1. "Sorry I cannot talk, I am still sleeping"
2. "I'm sorry, the person you are looking for is not home"“I'm sorry there are no people home."
3. I'm sorry, but the TV is still on. 
4. And one mom told her son to tell us that she was not home. She was standing next to her son in the doorway… 

       5.  I’m sorry there are no people home

Basically here is the letter I sent to president about it: 

So, this week we only had one investigator, which meant we had nothing but all day, every day to contact. President, I have never worked so hard to contact my whole mission. We were just talking to people at the stop light, we were biking to catch up to people at the stop light before it turned green. But we still had no success. People would tell us "no" before we opened our mouth, they screamed at us more than once, and one motorcyclist dumped trash on me. I started to wonder if I was in Taiwan or if I was back in Seattle. 

Then a miracle started to happen. Sister Xie said we needed to be grateful, so we just kept saying prayers of gratitude. Then Saturday I just had this overwhelming sense of peace about me, that Heavenly Father was really mindful of us, and that he was really proud of the work we were doing. It was such a peaceful feeling to know he really was satisfied. And after, we both just felt this overwhelming love for the people we were talking to, like everyone really was so loved by Heavenly Father. We couldnt stop smiling.

Anyways, by Saturday night we had no new investigators and no one coming to church, but Sunday came and six people we had invited in the week came! We were stunned. Sometimes we just can’t see the fruit until awhile after our efforts. It was such a great week. 

Sister Xie's English is actually pretty cute. She keeps saying applesauce instead of the apostasy, and her translations are so funny. See if you can guess what she's talking about from her words: 

1. Watered Melon
2. Cockboaroach
3. Sofa Potato
4. Swoppy
5. Letter Man

Those words would be watermelon, cockroach, coach potato, sloppy, and mail man. Hehehehe. 

One thing I havent gotten used to is being talked to in the morning in Chinese. She says things within the first few minutes of the alarm going off and I’m just like... what? What are you saying? I know its like three words but it just.. doesn’t.. make ... sense. Why are we even talking right now? 

A Mission is Humbling

As much as I made jokes about how, "English missionaries come back scriptorians, Spanish speaking missionaries come back linguists, and Chinese speaking missionaries come back humble,"-- as much as I joke about it, I really do think its true. Before I a mission, I was pretty prideful. I mean ya I liked some correction and all still focused on the gospel, but I just didn’t know how prideful I was. Most of my life, I've been pretty capable. And I worked hard to be capable- get good grades, be independently minded, make my point clearly— and then I got here and realized all my "work" and all those things really werent enough, and weren't gunna save me. Heavenly Father was. And he's got it all under control. And the only way Im going to do it is 100% completely on his help. It’s really humbling, and really good.