We had our first Skype TRC lesson with a sister in Taiwan last Monday night. It was quite the experience to try and teach a native speaker. I felt like I understood about 5% of what she said, but it was also the first time I remember feeling the spirit while teaching in Chinese. Teaching a real person, sharing their real problems is so much more powerful than role-playing and I left that lesson with a much greater understanding of the importance of loving the people I serve. It’s funny because I felt like that became a theme of the week for me. We spent a lot of time in class just discussing Taiwanese culture to give everyone a greater appreciation and understanding of life there. One of my teachers went to Taiwan and we spent about an hour just looking at pictures and talking. (I kind of felt bad for everyone going to California and Canada when we talk about food) We also had a lot of great discussions about Chinese which was really fun because every time I get to look at the big picture of Chinese and not just focus on learning words, my love for the language and the people who speak it grows exponentially. It was so awesome to just sit down and discuss but every time we do I just want to get to Taiwan faster!
On Tuesday our devotional speaker was acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve, President M. Russel Ballard. It was a really powerful meeting. He didn’t really share a message but instead spent his whole time teaching us about Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith. Their life, but mostly the context surrounding their martyrdom. It was one of those talks where nothing in particular seems to stand out but the spirit in the room and the spirit surrounding the topic is undeniable. For the closing hymn we sang “Praise to the Man” and I don’t know if my testimony of Joseph and Hyrum has ever been stronger than in that moment.
That’s pretty much it for the week. The only other interesting thing was choir practice last night where the director, Brother Eggat, talked about the wedding traditions and ceremonies for people in Jesus’ day. The whole process was literally just a metaphor for Christ. Basically the bride and groom’s fathers would arrange the marriage, then the groom would leave the house of his father to come make engagement covenants with the bride at her house. Then the groom would leave a gift with the bride to remember him by because we would then leave for usually around a year, to build a house for himself and the bride. The new house would be on or connected to the house of the groom’s father and had to be better than the house the bride grew up in. Once the house was done, the groom would come get his bride who would hopefully have stayed faithful and used all this time to prepare for their life together by making clothes and stuff. That’s a pretty sparse overview, and there are a lot of extra parts that make the metaphor even stronger, but that’s the basics. I'm sure you could look this all up online but I wouldn’t really know, haha! Brother Eggat is going to finish the whole discussion about this on Tuesday’s choir practice but I don’t know if we are going to make it because the gym is being resurfaced so Choir is in T3 in a room that cant fit everyone, so it’s first come first serve. They also changed the time choir starts so now it conflicts with my district’s dinner time. Hopefully we can still make it because choir is one of the highlights of the week.
Everything at the MTC is going well although all the days are starting to blur together. Every day I sit down and have to discuss with my companions about what to write in my journal because all my memories from the day are a little jumbled.
Side note, Elder Burton has never had Takis before coming on the mission, but you (mom and dad) sent me Takis and Aunt Kim sent me one of those 24 packs of the single serving mini Takis. So I had a ton of Takis! I gave some to Elder Burton for him to try and he more or less got addicted. Every night he would come home and eat a thing of mini Takis. He would come home with a headache from learning Chinese and for the few minutes or so when he was eating Takis his headache would be gone and he would just kind of sit in a chair and stumble around. Anyways, we opened the big bag you all sent today and he kind of went into shock.
Here are just a few of his Taki quotes for today:
“How can something so good be of this earth!”
“Just looking at them makes me . . . Aaaaaaaaa . . . (Possibly passes out for a second)”
“These make my mission worth it”
I don’t know if I should be letting him eat Takis at this point.
Thats all for now! Love,
Elder Tustin Neilson
倪長老
Taiwan, Taipei
台灣，台北
I don’t have any good pictures for the mass email but my companions and I have been taking random pictures of everything we do today to have something to send:
 |
This is our breakfast this morning. We got sack breakfast because we didn’t want to change into Sunday clothes in order to go get food in the cafeteria. We have to do this pretty often when we have exercise in the morning and the lines get progressively longer every time we go because the MTC just keeps shipping in new missionaries. It’s not really worth the line anymore just to get some hard boiled eggs and some bread or cereal but what can you do?
|
 |
| This is us studying this morning preparing for our Skype TRC tonight (lesson with a member in Taiwan). It was a really nice morning and so it was nice to study outside. |
 |
| Here we are writing emails while waiting for laundry to be done. |
No comments:
Post a Comment