Thursday, June 11, 2015

First MTC Email!

Hi! I'm finally here emailing you! I've never felt so stressed emailing in my life. I don't like being rushed! 
Things are going great! My companion is, wait for iiiiitt...... Sister Crandall from Idaho! Haha, So your prayer worked, Mom! (Kristen's doesn't count because she bragged about it). I'm trying to send pictures!
Ummmm... things. Words. Words are hard.
It was so amazing praying in Malay for the first time! I knew very little of what I was saying, and I was reading it, but I felt the Spirit so strongly as I prayed. It was amazing.
oh! hahaha, I had an elder slip me his email at a mission conference. He shook my hand and said "I really enjoyed your comments," so I was like, oh, thank you! Then he was like " No, I REALLY enjoyed your comments," and pushed the paper into my hand. So funny. Someone isn't quite committed to their mission yet.
I accidentally told my investigator that I was God yesterday. Haha, Tuan (God) and Tahun (know) are very similar, so when I tried to say "I know" it came out "I',m God!" It was a confusing moment for everyone. I then proceeded to accidentally tell my investigator that I'm her wife. Yeah, I can speak Malay. The church is true. Haha. It's incredible though, how even when my language is so incredibly broken, SO broken, ....The Spirit is still there. We teach our lesson often times with notecards to help us remeber our words, but then we ask if she understands and has questions.  She'll start this incredibly long and fast sentence where I can mayble pick out two words, but when we have brought the Holy Ghost into the lesson and truly care about the lesson and the investigator, I know what she's saying. It's... amazing. I can answer questions, forming sentences that barely make sense, but she understands. And when I leave the room I can't ever remember what I said, because I wasn't speaking my words, I speaking words from the Spirit.
I had a really cool, well several, cool experiences. Okay, more than that. TONS of cool experiences and blessings, but here's one that meant a lot to me. I think it was Thursday that we were having a branch meeting with our presidency and all their wives. I was tired, I was frustrated, and I was oh, so grumpy. It was one of those days when I just wanted to not keep all those little rules. I was being a stinker the whole night. I just wanted to scream. But at the close of the meeting, the president looked at me and asked me to play the closing hymn, "Nearer my God to Thee." As I played my heart simply melted. I realized that I was not having the kind of attitude that would allow me to have the Spirit with me and follow its promptings and that I was being hard hearted and prideful. To put it simply, I was being stupid. But Heavenly Father knows me, He knows me so well. I know that it's not a coincidence that President asked me to play the piano. That man is inspired. He was prompted to do even that small thing that not only changed my day, but my heart, my week, and taught me many things that will influence me for much longer. It doesn't need to be angels and visions to show us that Heavenly Father knows and loves us. It's the little things, but we have to have our eyes open to see them.
So we only have one language teacher. It's a blessing, because we also get an English teacher and can actually understand things; but it's also a little hard because we're not AS proficient in the language. I was having a rough time comparing myself to a few of the other missionaries in my district, as well as the Indonesians. (they're in our branch. Indonesian is VERY similar to Malay, just a few words here and there are different.) They have three language teachers and seem to know quite a bit more than we do. It was frustrating. It still can be. But as I was thinking and praying about this, I remembered a talk that sister Clark (of BYUI) gave... I think it was my first devo up there, where she talked about what we use as our mesuring stick. We can't use others as our measuring stick; we can't compare ourselves to others because it is not others who we need to please. It's the Lord Jesus Christ and our Heavenly Father that need to be our measuring sticks, and we need to do our best by them. Our best won't be the same as someone elses, and that's okay, but our best will be enough for our God.
I love you!
Idaho & Nevada, ready to go!



Loving Life!

Someone is glad she brought her jeans for P-Day. (Thanks, Krissy!)

Companions! -Sister Crandall & Sister MacKay 
MTC


Temple Walk (Provo, Utah)


1 comment:

  1. AMAZING! So awesome and so full of happiness, frustration, hope, love and every emotion between. YEAH!

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