Family, Faith and Farewells

Ni hao nimen

This week has just blurred into one long day. Here are some of the highlights of this week.

Tuesday: The craziest thing happened while standing in line for lunch. There was a senior couple who was standing next to us and I saw that their last name was Porter so I asked them where they were from, they are from Arizona but they continued to tell me that they are related to the Porters in Porterville/Morgan area. But it gets even crazier! An Elder in front of us turned around and he was a Porter too!!! His family is also from the the Porterville/Morgan area. So we had a little family reunion, I realized afterwards that we should have taken a picture but we forgot! It was just a really weird moment.

Wednesday: Not a whole lot happened. We had class and taught one of our teachers a lesson. The lesson went really good. It's weird to think that 3 weeks ago my comp and I knew no Chinese but now 3 weeks later we are teaching lessons in Chinese and we are actually starting to understand a little bit of what they say.

Thursday: So my comp had to go back to the dentist for another deep cleaning, and a little back story: since she is from the Philippines she has never seen snow. Well on our way back to the MTC there was this house that had fake snow everywhere! So our driver pulled over and we took pictures in the fake snow, a guy came over and told us that it was a set for a christmas hallmark movie!!!!!!!!!! So that was definitely the highlight of that day.

Friday: I was reading in 2 Nephi 27 during my personal scripture study and a lot of it was just a blur for me. I was frustrated with my Chinese and I had gotten into the mindset that I would never be able to speak the language. I got to verse 23 and the spirit hit me so hard. It says "For behold, I am God; and I am a God of miracles; and I will show unto the world that I am the same yesterday, today and forever; and I work not among the children of men save it be according to their faith. I realized that my faith about learning Chinese was not with God. I had to do a major attitude change. Now whenever I start to get discouraged I remind myself that I need to put my faith in God and that faith isn't having a perfect knowledge of things but trusting that he has a perfect plan for us. So during one of our classes our teacher was gone for like 30-45 minutes and being so focused we started talking about Harry Potter. We went through and assigned everyone in our district a character from Harry Potter. Our District Leader, Elder Keys was Harry Potter. The Australian Elder, Elder Preston is Hagrid. Sister Andersen is Luna. Her comp, Sister Griffin is Ginny. Elder Bataa who is from Mongolia called himself Dobby. Elder Gray couldn't decide between Voldemort and Snape so he is both. Elder Berges in Draco and his comp Elder Dalton is Ron. They assigned me as Hermonie and my comp as Cho. Our teacher came back in asked us how our studying was going, so we told him what we were discussing. We then continued for another 10 minutes discussing Harry Potter. It was the best thing ever.

Saturday: We taught our very first TRC, we go in and teach two 20 minute lessons back to back to members who speak fluent Chinese. I sat there and didn't understand a single thing that was being said. I couldn't remember any of my Chinese. I am beyond grateful for my comp who taught our whole lesson. I went completely blank the entire time. I had no idea what to do. Afterwards I was thinking about what happened, and I still have no idea why I went blank. We taught a lesson to one of our teachers later that afternoon and that went absolutely amazing! It helps remind me that it's ok if we have bad moments because God will help us through them. It also helped me remember that we are doing God's work, and it's ok if we aren't perfect because his spirit and his gospel is. As long as we have the spirit with us the people we come into contact with will feel that.

Sunday: We said goodbye to the two oldest districts in our zones. There is 23 of them leaving by Wednesday, and we are receiving only 8 new missionaries into our zone this week. Our zone is shrinking to about half its size. Probably the weirdest thing is that I am going to miss them all so much! I have only known them for 3 weeks but they have been a ginormous part of my life. I have learned so much from them and we have become one big family. It's super sad to see them go but I am also so excited for them to go out and start the next part of their missions!

My faith has grown so much this past week, I grow closer everyday to my Savior. I know that all of you can do the same. I encourage you all to read 30 minutes of the Book of Mormon everyday and pray about what you read. I know that if you do this you will see the difference it will make in your life.

I love you all so much!

Love, Bao Jie Mei (Sister Porter)