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| Zone Dinner |
I go on lots of splits with a Cantonese Elder who just arrived because my companion and his companion are the zone leaders here, and this last week we had an over night and all day split while my companion went to Kowloon for meetings, and it was definitely a fun experience! Got to practice and learn lots of Cantonese with him. We had a great learning experience as well, because we live on a different island than Macau we take a bus everyday to the island, and we ended up taking the wrong bus. I had a fairly strong prompting to get off the bus at one of the stations I recognized, but for some reason I stayed on the bus, thinking I was still right even though I clearly wasn't. When we finally got off I had no idea where we were and had to resort to a lot of praying and a lot of talking to random people. Eventually we just had to hop on a different bus rode it for awhile and talked to everyone on it, no one really spoke Mandarin though so I got what I could from there instructions and just got off the bus again, praying really hard that the Spirit would help guide me, and feeling really bad for this new missionary who had no idea what was going on either and kept asking me questions, like I had any clue haha. Eventually we just wandered, and I pretended to know where I was going for his sake, all the while praying that we could find our way and make it to our lesson appointment when suddenly we walked somewhere familiar! It was quite miraculous and I knew I had been helped along because I literally had no idea where i was going and somehow ended up at a stop I recognized! We were able to get to our appointment, but were super late haha. I learned a great principle of always acting on the promptings we receive, doubting my doubts before my faith and promptings, and leaving a path when we are told, even if we feel comfortable on it. Often times we can find ourselves on a 'bus' or path that may seem to be heading in the right direction, and we have almost full confidence in what we are doing. In the mission it can be something as simple as some small, seemingly insignificant disobedience, but in the end we are always warned to get off the path, or find ourselves much farther from our destination than we had originally. It is always much harder to find our ways back from that point. It reminded me a little bit of Uchtdorf's airplane and degrees analogy. It was a good if not mildly stressful experience and helped me to get to know Macau better!
Our investigators here are great, we have 2 baptismal dates for next week, one of which (named Tang Yang) is progressing super well, and even shared the gospel with his family! He is for sure going to be ready and is a total stud. The other guy (wong) is a bit of a confusing guy, and kind of a compulsive liar which comes from his desire to please everyone. He tells us he reads so much scripturem and when we ask what he read he makes up some general story, then tries to slyly open the book and read the heading and then really quickly say Oh ya now I remember haha he also tells us absolutely ridiculous stories from his life, so it's hard to trust him. The other day he told us this hilarious and slightly racist story of when he was an exchange student in America, about how he and the other Chinese students would get in these huge brawls with black students and how he would take on 6 guys at a time haha and they had bats etc etc he is pretty ridiculous. Pretty entertaining dude, but I'm not so sure he really is taking anything seriously right now. We got 2 new investigators this week as well and Im excited for them to progress! |
| Temple in Hong Kong |
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| Another temple in the same area of Hong Kong |
We work with a lot of less active members of the M2 branch, which is the international branch and try to help families specifically. Some of these people's lives are extremely sad, the work they have, and how much they sacrifice, and we have had so many Spirit filled lessons where we help people remember what they are missing. Those lessons always touch my heart. This week we taught an especially touching lesson, this man works a really rough job in the casinos and his best friend had just jumped off the bridge and killed himself. He was absolutely crushed when he came to us, and he just looked so tired, worn, and deadened by the weight of life that he was carrying. I was able to bear a powerful testimony of the Plan of Salvation, of my own personal experiences with deaths in my family, and how I know that death, though tragic, is not an ending. Though we may mourn their loss of life, we need not fear or remain stricken with empty grief because our Savior overcame death. He didn't die in vain, because he broke those chains of death, all may rise, and through him, return to our loving Heavenly Father. I told him I knew he would see his friend again, and not just as some nice thing a religious person would say, but because I really, truly know, without a doubt, that he will. As we all bore testimony, and invited in the Spirit, I saw his eyes fill with a hope so real, and a desire to know, and my eyes filled with tears of happiness for him, seeing Christ reach into his crushed life, and give him a feeling he hasn't had in a very long time.
This week I learned a lot about humbly seeking, and trying to truly be an instrument in God's hands. My 'ponderize' scripture is Alma 29:9 (shoutout to the roomie this is his plaque scripture) which is about glorifying God's work, and striving to do all we can to simply let Him use us as His tools, Our joy is in being a tool of God and helping others become happier, and impart of my joy to all that I can. So in order to become the most effective tool possible, I have to consecrate myself as a missionary, which means putting everything on the table and leaving nothing back and giving all to the work. It's far easier said than done. I read this talk on being a consecrated missionary and definitely realized a few places I can improve upon a lot, or change in order to be a better tool for the work, so that my efforts here can glorify our Father in Heaven, just as all that Christ did was to glorify the Father.
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| Happy Halloween! Thanks so much Lucas family!!! |
Love you all! I'll try to get more pictures out this week I have a ton backed up from the past weeks, the computers here in Macau are harder to do that with for some reason. Thanks for the support! Praying for you all everyday!
Love,
Wu Zhang Lao
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