Josh Mission Email March 16: 2 weeks until fluent – trust
Hey everyone! I’m still cruising here in Provo, only 2 weeks left though!
Chinese this week was pretty good, it’s still super hard but I’m making progress and me and my district are having fun with it. In addition to our regular daily life/gospel words this week we got into some cultural learning. We practiced proper home etiquette with one of the teachers from Taiwan, and he taught me that you politely decline their invitation to have you sit down first only 2-3 times. This was only AFTER about the 10th time I insisted he sit down first, but I’ll for sure remember it forever now. We also learned about food, and our teachers pulled out photos from their missions. The MTC food isn’t too bad, but everything looked little bleak after all the photos of home cooked Chinese/Taiwanese food 🤤. We also learned about religion in China and Taiwan, which was super cool. We’re not supposed to discuss anything political as missionaries, but we got our teacher to discuss the history of Taiwan and China. It was the most watered down version you could imagine, and it was funny to watch him try and avoid saying anything after mentioning people like Mao Zedong. Really cool stuff, I’m excited to learn more once I’m in the field.
This week we had about 25 early arrival missionaries that my comps and I were in charge of taking care of and getting settled in. It was genuinely wild, especially considering we were giving info to all of them while also trying to translate into Spanish, Tongan, Japanese, and Chinese. Shoutout Google Translate, I had a pretty good convo with the Elder from Colombia where we just typed messages and held them up to each other.
My district went to the temple again this week, and it was great. We’ve become so close, which is really cool to see because we’re all so different. We have people from literally all across the world and such diverse personalities, but we have our common purpose and we’ve been able to build a strong bond through that. Our district gained 2 new Elders this week. They’re not in our class but they’ll leave at the same time as us and they are speaking Chinese. They’re only here for 3 weeks because they’re already fluent. One grew up in China then moved to Indiana and the other is from Taiwan. They’re both SO FUNNY, and they’ve been helping us with our Chinese. We also had to separate them at the foosball table because their win streak got too big.
Elder Soares of the Quorum of the Twelve came to speak to us this week, and he gave a really inspiring message about patterns the Savior lived and how we can emulate them too. As we strive to be like Him, choose joy every single day because He has promised us strength to endure all things as we turn to Him. My study in the Book of Mormon this week has helped me to understand how Jesus Christ blesses us through our faith, and made me even more grateful for His mercy and grace.
Love you guys!
