Week 96- Chuanjiaoshi (missionary)

Wow, it feels totally crazy to be writing my first missionary email. even though I am only 3 days into the MTC I am absolutely loving it. Chinese is very hard but I know the gift of tongues is real and I know that with the lord's help I can learn this language. My District is the best, We are already super tight and we have already had some amazing experiences together. Days here in the MTC however are long and hard. I thought of a pretty accurate analogy of how I feel. Have you ever been tubing behind a boat? The first three days have been comparable to the first 5 seconds of this experience, For about the first 2 seconds on the tube you say "Oh this isn't too bad" and then the slack comes out of the line and you are being whiplashed all over the place and someone's knee is in your chest and you are holding on for dear life. Day one of home MTC felt like those initial 2 seconds... And then day 2 and 3 hit. The good news is I am not alone in this feeling. Yesterday one Elder in my district expressed some frustrations with learning chinese, And I was able to share with him something I would like to share with all of you.

New things are going to be hard, that is a given, and we must be patient not only with our trials but we must also be patient with ourselves. Don't beat yourself up because you haven't learned chinese in 3 days, That is impossible. Now we may not all be learning chinese but we all have our trials. I beg you all to take it easy on yourselves. No one is perfect and we should not beat ourselves up for that fact.

Anyway that is just something I felt like I should share. Now here is a funny story for the week. In the first two days of MTC you do devotionals with essentially everyone who is in the MTC, and as you can imagine the "chat" section of zoom can get pretty crazy. On day one many Elders were commenting about how they missed their "Boys" or their friends, So I throw into the chat section, "Can we get an F in the chat for the boys?" I then watched as the chat section filled up with 250 "F"s. That was  maybe my proudest moment of the week. (For those that are confused, typing the letter 'F' into the chat bar is a way to essentially say RIP).

I look forward to writing to you all next week!

Here are some pictures

 1. best zone ever

2. My comp. Elder Miller

3. Frisbee with Elder Miller and Elder Johannesmeyer