I feel like I say that every week, but really... every week is great! The people of Hong Kong officially have my heart after this week, and if I had a waffle iron and could see my friends and family, I'm pretty sure I'd never come home.
Okay maybe a little extreme. But I. LOVE. HONG. KONG.
And I discovered this week that I'm officially scared of white people. I'll explain.
We started out the week heading out to Discovery Bay to teach a referral lesson to a friend of Chan Ji Muih's parents. Let me just lay out Discovery Bay for you. It's basically this world of 25,000 ngoigwokyahn (foreigners) in Hong Kong. You have to take a special bus into DB and it goes through this tunnel and then opens up into this "ngoigwokyahn world" surrounded by mountains. So no cars or outside traffic are allowed in and they have their own bus system, international school, tennis courts, shops, 7-11... you name it! It's crazy! And basically everyone there is white! Or Asian and speaks English in a British accent.
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| Picture @ Discovery Bay |
But instead it was, "Chan Ji Muih, we're not in Hong Kong anymore."
It was really beautiful and we had a great lesson, but it was just super weird to be around white people! My area really has very few ngoigwokyahn. You see a lot of Filipino helpers, who are some of the nicest people I've ever met, but that's about it!
So there's that experience for the week.
Other than that we had Zone Training which was awesome as well as Stake Conference.
Stake Conference was AWESOME! #1. Because it was about missionary work! #2. Because I ACTUALLY UNDERSTOOD WHAT WAS GOING ON. It was amazing. Really this is probably the first time I've walked out of a church meeting having understood what was going on. I usually have an idea of the topic and catch a few things here or there, but at Stake Conference (apart from a few high councilmen who talk faster than the Energizer Bunny) I actually understood the stories and a large majority of what was said. So #winningmomentwithlotsofhelpfromthespirit.
Here are just some thoughts from Zone Training, Stake Conference and this week:
1. I've realized why President Hawks is such great mission president. Well there are many reasons. But here's one. He invites us as missionaries to act as agents, not objects. Obedience is an expectation, not something he forces us to do. He understands that we won't have mission presidents for the rest of our lives telling us what to do.
2. Reading your scriptures is the key to everything. There was a huge focus on how the Book of Mormon helps us in missionary work in Stake Conference, and our Zone Leader shared something that he learned from President Hawks. He said that President Hawks told him that many missionaries will ask him in their exit interviews how they can retain everything they learned as a missionary. He will tell them to do three things; pray, go to church, and read your scriptures. But then he will say, but really you only have to do one of those. If you read your scriptures every single day, you will pray and you will go to church, and you will remain a proactive member of the church. There you have it folks. Read your scriptures every day!!
3. Obedience is SUPER important. But not only the fact that your obedient, but I think Heavenly Father is real interested in where our heart is. Are you obedient because you're afraid of the consequences? Are you obedient because you want the blessings? Or are you obedient because you love the Lord and want to show Him your love by keeping his commandments?
4. I love teaching people who don't know who God or Jesus Christ are. We go finding, which is where we just walk around and try to talk to people. As you can imagine, most people don't really want to talk to us, but we find people that do and have a fair amount of street lessons, where we're able to teach a doctrine and then pray with the individual(s). We met a super awesome girl named Pearl this week from Mainland, visiting a friend in Tsuen Wan. She had heard of Jesus Christ and the Bible, but lots of people say that and basically that means they know basically nothing about either. So we were able to talk to her for quite some time, and really get to know her. We share a scripture and then were able to give her a Book of Mormon and then teach her to pray. And we do this all the time. We've given plenty of Book of Mormons out and taught a whole lot of people to pray. But this time I was really able to think about what we were doing. We were able to help this girl understand that there is a God, He sent His son Jesus Christ to die for us so that we can have eternal happiness, and then teach her how she can communicate with her Heavenly Father any time she wants. FOR FREE. As a missionary it's kind of easy to get caught up in what we're doing because we talk about this stuff all day every day. But when I was able to stop and think about how cool it was that we were able to teach Pearl about this, I was filled with a whole lot of gratitude. So even if we never see her again, she's headed in the right direction. I don't know, super simple experience, but it was cool to think about!
Well we'll stop there. Hope you have a killer week and read your scriptures and eat lots of waffles and stuff like that! LOVE YA PEOPLE.
Love,
SisMoRob
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| Thanks for the Socks!! You know me too well. |
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