Josh Mission Email March 2: Me and My Ducklings
Hey everyone! Hope yall are doing well.
Chinese class is still chugging along, it’s like drinking from a fire hose but it’s working. I can do a little teaching and give a testimony now, and we have been covering a ton of words so I feel like I can talk about a bunch of stuff. Unfortunately I now understand enough to have my questions answered in Chinese so I haven’t been able to force any English in a while. Shoutout my teachers tho, they are great at drawing pictures and doing hand motions until we get the gist.
This week we had a TON of early arrivals that we were in charge of, and it was pretty fun. We all sit at a table in the corner of the cafeteria so we can keep track of them and because there were so many trying to leave it felt like herding cats. My companions went to go track down the stragglers and I tried to lead the rest of them out of the cafeteria. It felt like a game of pac man, we were dodging in a crazy route trying to avoid big groups of people or rows that were full of people walking VERY FAST considering they had like three plates of food and zero spatial awareness. We eventually made it out, and the sisters in my district all got a big laugh out of it as they watched it unfold from our normal district table by the exit. They said I looked like a mama duck leading her little ducklings through the city. I’m very proud of my ducklings, I only lost one and my comps caught him on their way out so we’re chilling.
In other fantastic news I’m getting a lot better at foosball. We played a couple times this week and I’ve been cooking. I met a couple people in the gym who played tennis in high school and we were able to run up some good quality pickleball. My dawg Elder Bowman and I beat two sisters who have better UTRs (tennis ratings) than us which was sick.
Spiritual thought for this week comes from a speech David A. Bednar gave at BYU a while back. Shoutout BYU speeches, I thought I wasn’t going to have access to them on this phone but I figured out how to pull them up. He talked about the Atonement of Jesus Christ “As you and I come to understand and employ the enabling power of the Atonement in our personal lives, we will pray and seek for strength to change our circumstances rather than praying for our circumstances to be changed. We will become agents who ‘act’ rather than objects that are ‘acted upon’”. He stresses that the Atonement of Jesus Christ has two parts, the redemptive power and the redeeming power. You guys should study the word grace this week in the gospel topics and bible dictionary. Understanding how it works hand in hand with mercy will bless your life and help you better understand how to make the bad good and the good even better.
I know that Jesus Christ loves all of you and His arm is always stretched out. Joy is possible no matter what because of Him. His atonement can change our outlook and our very nature, giving us true peace.
Love yall, I don’t know when March Madness starts (not for a while yeah?) but I’m going to need to know all the haps please and thank you
Elder Banks
