This is Matt's Letter this week. I was so proud when I got the picture of his poster. He did learn something from his Mom. I remember all the late nights doing school projects. He did listen and learn after all!
Okay well this week didn't go as bad as I thought it was going to go, but holy cow was I humbled on Friday. I got this number of some lady from Beijing, a potential investigator. People from Beijing have really good mandarin and they have a really thick accent so it is really hard to understand. I call this lady up and schedule her we meet with her on Friday and it was probably the roughest lesson I've taught. I just completely couldn't understand a word she said. I felt so worthless. Elder Whiting is a really good missionary, hard working, really fun, but the language is not clicking. He is only a move younger than me but I daresay my chinese coming out of the MTC is better than his is now, so basically its all me in lessons. So this was our first lesson together just me and him. All other lessons when I don't understand things I could just look over at my companion and he would understand or between the both of us we could get pretty close to figuring it out. Well we are trying to teach this lady and I just have no idea what is going on so I go to look at my companion like I usually do and that has no use anymore. It's like this, if I don't understand what's going on nobody does. I've never been more humbled. I got home and just got down on my knees and prayed so hard for Heavenly Father to help me, things seem to be getting better.
I learned so much Saturday though. Saturday was statutories, statutory holidays are when the Government declares it a Holiday and all of these Phillipino workers get the day off. So one of the zones in our mission is called the international zone. If you serve international you speak english and work with all the international people but is what it is is phillipina work. You just teach and baptize philipinas. Its in the international zone where they have church everyday of the week for the phillipinas who only get one day a week off. When it is statutories there is just phillipinas everywhere. So saturday the international elder called us up and asked us to come and help them with statutories, because there are so many people out when its statutories we can go help the international elders for 4 hours. Lets just say English work and Chinese work is totally different. So there is this place called the world wide center and its just full of philipinas so everyday you just go there. So we get there at 12 and church starts at one. So we head down to World Wide and to pull people back to church, pull backs are definitely not the easiest thing either the church is like 3 subway stops away. So we head down there and we just start contacting people and itis just a steady flow of people. Well we end up pulling back the first philipina I contact. So we take her back to the church drop her off with these philipina members and go back to the world wide. It is amazing how good the members are in international. The branches are a mess because you have about 150-200 philipina women in a branch with no priesthood but they love the church its all they have. Well we go back and end up pulling back so more philipinas and you just put them in church then go back out its amazing. Time is up and I got to go this probably makes no sense, but I went in there thinking I was just going to pull back people like it was nobody's business and I did. But it got me thinking why don't I use that much faith in Chinese work? It got me thinking alot about how I do missionary work.
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