WEEK 33 - Giving Birth

Hello everyone! I hope this week has brought you much joy and tranquility like it has for me. I found out on Monday night that I will be training this transfer. I was decently surprised that I was gonna be training, but I was pretty excited that I was gonna get the opportunity to do it. This news brought me back to the exquisite times of my training, living with my beloved Elder Campbell, being objectified and loved by my best friend Peter Chen, and teaching and baptizing some amazing people. After I thought about that I was so excited for my new little man to experience what I had experienced. Then I started to remember the negative parts of the beginning of my mission. I remembered how scared and sad and alone I felt when I first got to the mission. I remembered how badly I wanted to give up and go home. Remembering this worried me because I really did not want my new companion to have to feel the way that I felt. When I picked up my sweet Elder Yee I noticed something different in him compared to me when I first got here. He was definitely nervous and worried but he was choosing to be happy. When I got here I was nervous and worried and I chose to let those emotions grow and consume me and make me miserable. At first in my mind I was like “ah, he is Hawaiian and they are just very jolly people” maybe that is an aspect of it, but it really just boils down to that Elder Yee wants to be happy so he is choosing to be. In our lives we are rarely gonna have times that life is just peachy and we don’t have any problems. So why not let ourselves just be happy even when not everything is perfect? So that is my invitation to you and to myself today is that through the hard times in our lives, that we can choose to be happy and to put our trust in God. Elder Yee is such a pure soul. When I am around him I feel like I am spending time with the dude who sings somewhere over the rainbow or like a male side character in moana. He is just a wholesome pleasant man to be around. Let me tell you about this brother and my week: - We had a super dope lesson with our friend Lisa this week. Lisa has some super hard challenges in her life and was telling us about some of them. I was like “Lisa, some things on earth just can not be healed by the things of this world, some things can only be healed by Jesus Christ.” She really liked that so I started to go more in depth on this topic. I was like “I like to think of these trails like mountains…” and she raised her hand so I was like “yes Lisa?” And she was like “one sec” and meandered her way inside and shut the door. Me and Elder Brown were confused because sometimes people just do that and never come back out. Like 90 seconds later she comes back outside with a picture. And she was like “you are identical to my nephew Andrew!” She showed us the picture and I saw this young man in the middle of the picture and I was like “ok I accept, I can see it” and she was like “no no no that’s not him! You look like him!” she points to the man on the right and in the nicest way possible, this man looked nearly identical to megamind. I was a bit distraught and I was like “aw thanks what a um handsome looking guy haha” and she was like “that’s exactly what Andrew would say!” Then she was like “alright it was good to have you guys!” and she walked right back inside. I hope that lesson uplifted her because I haven’t felt that self conscious since my days in the chinese branch. That lesson was so random by the way. When we have lessons they are 98% of the time with black people (because black people are so nice here) and they always say they have already found Jesus, so we usually ask if we can pray with them before we go, and they say yes. So they grab both me and my companions hands and we stand in a circle and I begin praying and I am like “thank you for this day” and they squeeze my hand super hard and like have a mini seizure and mutter out a quick “hallelujah!” and it pretty much goes like that the entire prayer. It makes me feel really good about my prayers and I always feel good when I leave. I actually love Tyler. - So when you are training here you go to transfers on Thursday, and you don’t get your new companion until Saturday. So you get paired up with someone else who is training for 2 days and you get to go to a different area. I got paired up with my boy Elder White and we got to be in Plano! Gosh darn it was wonderful to be back. Plano is literally maybe the least beautiful place I have seen in my entire life, but it is so nostalgic and I love the people there. We got to stay with some missionaries who I Iove, one of them is Elder Galbraith and he is a big board game guy so I got to hear about how to play the dune board game. It is a 120 minute board game full of “conquest, diplomacy, and betrayal” it is apparently like the most complex board game and it was just so fun to listen to Elder Galbraith explain it in depth and to understand literally none of it. His companion Elder Wallice is quite the character as well. Elder Wallice sadly crashed his bike that night and destroyed a sign. He got back and was in great pain and he was making it well known unto the 5 of us. He called the health senior missionary and she came over at like 945 and diagnosed him. She said he had simply bruised his shoulder, but I do not think he was satisfied with this diagnosis. He cornered me and explained the best he could why it was likely broken or dislocated, so I was like “on a scale of 1-10 how bad does your shoulder hurt?” and he was like “10” and I was like “ok 10 is getting your arm sawed off and 1 is stubbing your toe” he was like “dang ummmm probably 8 or 9” I laughed a little bit inside but still tried to console him. The next morning we got to go pick up our new missionaries. When you train in the mission they become your “son” and you become their “dad.” I gave birth that morning and full respect to our women of this world but it was not as hard as I have heard it is (I am kidding I love you women). I got my most beloved Elder Yee and we grabbed his bike, his helmet, and his 76 pound suitcase that cost him an extra 200 dollars to fly here and we got on our way. He is a cool man, I am sure I will have bontius amounts of Elder Yee stories, so prepare yourself. - Welp I miss you all a lot and hope you have all had an incredible last 7 and a half months. That’s crazy that it has already been that long, time is flying out here! Love you so much, reach out to me if you want to! Talk to you next week! - Google photos if you want to visualize this Elder Yee: https://photos.app.goo.gl/qwGY1QhS99ne5wGy8