Elder Mark Ensign: Week 4: August 5, 2019

什么上?

This past week, we got to host new missionaries! Not the normal ones that come in through the parking garage, we hosted the ones that flew in. The missionary I hosted was from Taiwan, Elder Hsu! He lived in Puli. I told him my older brother went on his mission to Taiwan in that area. I remember he looked at my name tag and went "... Elder Ensign?", so I told him the Chinese name Gao Zhang Lao, and he looked super surprised! Apparently he knew Michael when he served his mission there! He said he was baptized around that time. Him and his mom are the only ones in his family that are members. Super cool! He's really nice. He's going to the Taipei Taiwan mission. He's not in my zone, but he's in the other Mandarin speaking zone. I'm so glad I got to host him, that's probably one of the coolest things that's happened here!!

We get new missionaries in our zone every 3 weeks, so we got a whole bunch of new ones last Wednesday. 25 new ones (3 districts worth), which is a lot! They're all super cool. There's one going to London, so now there's two people going to England in my zone speaking mandarin, me and him! Here's a kinda cool story about one of the elders in our zone. On last Wednesday, the day the new missionaries came in, they meet with the zone leaders, the sister training leaders, and the technology specialists (yeah, I'm big time). But one of the elders came into the MTC at like 7 PM rather than like noon when everyone else comes in. Apparently his older brother got back from his mission that day! So he didn't come to the MTC until later that night. Me and Elder Beam had to go pick him up from the front desk right before the meeting. Super lucky for him!

I'm starting to get the language more and more each day! For our TRC's on Saturday, I could actually understand what was going on! I don't know how to say a lot though, so I wasn't really able to offer a lot to our lesson besides what we had planned, and my testimony. I've set a lot of goals for myself to learn the language, and I feel like it's been working. It's hard work, but hopefully it'll pay off. My district's Christlike attribute goal this week was on charity and love, so I've been thinking a lot about the people in England that I'm gonna teach. And it's been motivating me a lot to work harder to learn the language so I can help them!

My district is super awesome, and I can't say that enough! Every night after class we all have a "blessing circle" together, where we basically share some of the blessings we saw that day. It's always super uplifting, especially because class can be really hard and defeating some days. We all pretty much agree that our district is our family away from home.

This past week, I was flipping through my paper scriptures because I was bored. And I noticed that when I was a freshman in seminary, we made a lot of connections between the Old Testament and the Book of Mormon. One of them was in Mosiah 2, when King Benjamin was addressing his people. In verse 6 it says "And they pitched their tents round about the temple, every man having his tent with the door thereof towards the temple". And I had connected that to Genesis 13:12, where it says he "pitched his tent towards Sodom". And for those of you who don't know, Sodom was this really wicked place, full of wicked people. And later in Genesis, the Lord destroyed Sodom because of how wicked it was. So I was kinda pondering both stories, and it made me think: Are we pitching our tents towards wicked places that will destroy us, or towards holy places, like temples? Food for thought.

Only 5 more weeks until I fly out for England! 我爱你们!

-Elder Ensign

A picture of a super cool view from one of the buildings at the MTC!

Me, Elder Mathews, and the other Elder Ensign

My district again all eating mints (yeah we're pretty cool)