Week 6- June 5, 2012

Hey everyone!

Hope ya'll are doing well! I had another good week this week. I am really looking forward to getting out to Taiwan though! 3 weeks from today and I should be on the plane. I can’t wait! If I were to teach someone today in Mandarin I feel like I could give a pretty good first lesson (which is mainly about God, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon and prayer)! I probably wouldn’t be able to understand a lot of what they would say back though. LOL But like we were taught this week from President Uchtdorf (in a film), language doesn’t matter a whole lot. What matters is that you are teaching with the Spirit, that you have the light of Christ in you, and that they can feel your love for them!

Last Tuesday, Elder Zwick from the quorum of the seventy came and spoke to us. He gave a really powerful testimony about the Book of Mormon and how people can know this church is true or not by reading the Book of Mormon all the way through and sincerely praying about it. He gave a cool story about his mission. He said he went on his mission somewhere in South America (I forget where exactly.) But he said that while there he was hospitalized for a few days. When he left the hospital he said he left 20 Book of Mormons at the front desk. 20 years later, he had no idea what happened to the Book of Mormons he left at the hospital. But 20 years later, he went back down to his mission area. While there he was meeting with the local ward and the bishop came up to him and pulled out a Book of Mormon. It was one of the Book of Mormons that Elder Zwick had left in the hospital 20 years ago! The bishop said that 20 years ago he wasn’t Mormon and that he was in the hospital. He decided to pick up a Book of Mormon that he saw there. He took it home and never read it. He was about to throw it away one day but his little son was like no don’t throw away a nice book. So he kept it and ended up reading the whole thing and praying about it. After doing that he knew it was true and ended up joining the Mormon church. Crazy!

So I guess I’ll give you a rundown of a typical day...

I get up a 6:30, eat breakfast in the cafeteria at 7:20. Then at 8am, we teach a 30 minute lesson to a mock-investigator. At 9am, we have an hour of learning Chinese in the classroom, and then at 10am, an hour of learning how to teach better. At 11am, it is an hour of personal study where I study the Book of Mormon and other things. At noon is lunch and then 12:45 until 1:45 is an hour of personal Chinese language study. Then at 2pm, I and my companions prepare our next lesson. Then 3-5 is more classroom time. At 5pm is dinner, and then 5:45-6:45 is an hour a learning Chinese on the computers using a program called TALL. Then 7-8pm is gym and then 8:30 to 9:30 is another hour of study. Then after that we get ready for bed and go to bed by 10:30. So that’s the excitement here.

I hope everyone is doing good!

-Jordan