Monday, June 3, 2013

JUNE 3, 2013: HYRUM'S WEEKLY LETTER #3

HYRUM'S WEEKLY LETTER #3
JUNE 3, 2013

3 Jun 2013
 
So this week started out pretty poorly, but quickly turned very good! On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and half of Thursday, I don't know what happened, but things were not so great. I didn't feel like I was progressing, our investigator lessons didn't go well at all. I'm not sure what caused it, but for a few days everything was harder and I was feeling the Spirit as much. Maybe my mind was too distracted with the outside world or something, but luckily it all turned around Thursday night.
 
We had a really neat experience Thursday night with a teaching demonstration that our class was a part of. For some reason, our class has been targeted as a good "guinea pig" class, so there have been a couple of extra things that we have done, including a bit of new curriculum they are testing. And then our investigator lessons went so well on Friday!! I decided that I needed to stop taking in so many notes to our lessons. Reading from a script really hinders the Spirit that we can have in our lessons. So on Friday I just took in a general outline and some key Chinese vocab words. The lesson itself went pretty well, but the best part was at the end. Our investigators name is Lin Dixiong (played by our teacher Huang Laoshi), and after we taught a lesson about eternal families and prayer, we asked to pray. I know it was still my teacher who was the investigator, but his prayer was so sweet. I felt the Spirit and I know he and my companion did too. It was really amazing.
 
Our other investigators name is Roy. He is played by our other teacher Mu Laoshi. This week for our second lessons, we taught a great lesson about the power of prayer, and then finished with the story of the First Vision. The story of the First Vision is so powerful! Even though I was reading it (I didn't have it memorized then), it still brought the Spirit into our lesson. After the story, we asked him a few questions and then asked him to say the prayer, which was also great. After the prayer, we challenged him to pray to know if the First Vision story was true, to which he said a few sentences I didn't understand. After about five minutes, we finally understood he was saying "xiangxin" which means believe. He said that he already believed in Joseph Smith! Then, even though it wasn't in our planned, I asked him if he would commit to baptism, to which he agreed!! It's still not a real investigator, but that doesn't mean it's not exciting! We were on top of the world! It's great to imagine how much better that will be when it's for reals!
 
Here's a great thought we talked about in class one day.
There are four levels of training:
1. Being unconsciously untrained - means to be unaware how bad you are at something
2. Being consciously untrained - which means you know that you are bad at something, but you don't know yet how to be better
3. Being consciously trained - which means that you are really good at something, but you still have to work really hard at performing to that level
4. Being unconsciously trained - this means that the level that you perform  at comes naturally, and you don't have to think about it anymore
 
Obviously the best one is the fourth level, but it takes a lot of work to get there. In our case, it applied to missionary work, and teaching correct doctrine and using all the elements of effective teaching, but it works for most things that require practice! Musical instruments, communicating with others, being kind to people, almost anything! I really liked that.
 
So this week in our classes we talked a lot about the mantle of missionary work. In that teaching demonstration I talked about, and in most of our other classes and demonstrations, the teachers will stop and ask the missionaries for help. These teachers are all return missionaries, and they all know what they are doing, but they are no longer set apart as full time missionaries. Only a missionary is entitled to the gift of perception and revelation pertaining to directly to an investigator. It's really neat to think about how I am entitled to that, and I hope I can continue to learn how to receive it!
 
Chinese is awesome. It's really hard, but it's such a neat and interesting language. In chinese, when you are trying to describe something, you use a few simple words to describe it, rather than like English where we just make up a new word. For example, faith is "xinxin" (two different tones) which literally translates as "heart message." The word for computer game (which I learned so that I could ask an investigator about it) is "diandong" which means "light move." Missionary is "chuanjiaoshi" which means "spread gospel person." Chinese is really neat like that! I also appreciate that they have a specific word for when something is "kitty-corner" to something else, "xieduimian" (diagonal across place). Of course, this method makes for funny sentences when you translate from english to chinese and back to chinese. There's a line in the first vision story when Joseph says something is "directly over my head." In chinese, it's "zheng zai wo tou shang" which means "right at me head top."
 
Chinese is really awesome. We had a testimony meeting in church yesterday, and it was nice to hear people say simple sentences that I could understand! I'm doing fairly well at speaking, but the biggest thing I'm struggling with is listening. In our lesson Friday with Lin Dixiong, I challenged him to pray everyday. He then talked for about 30 seconds, of which I caught exactly one word. That word was "peiyang" which means to develop. So basically I used that one word to guess the meaning of his entire speech. It was great.
 
We Chinese speakers think that the English speakers are pretty weaksauce, but we're also all just a little bit jealous that teaching is so easy in English, and that they get to leave here in ten days from when they arrive. We've been here twice that time and still have 7 weeks to go! We're all already rarin' to get to Taiwan and start preaching the word! We're also upset cause we are down in the basement of one of the oldest buildings, and the english speakers get the newest building. So that's fun. Haha oh well. We get to learn Chinese!
 
I think next week I'm going to give you guys a bio and picture of everybody in my district. I'll spend some time this week writing it out so that I can do it in an hour of email time.
 
Until next week!
Elder Richardson
 
 Caption: This is my daily planner page for Wednesday. It was a busy day!