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!
