Elder Mark Ensign: Week 6: August 19, 2019

你们好!

Pretty great week! This past week we had to switch rooms so that our whole branch could be put right next to each other. We got moved to the building right next to ours, but even though it was so close, everything is VERY different. We moved from the top floor of a building to a basement. The penthouse to the slums. In the words of Elder Chansing (I'll talk about him later), “from economy plus to economy”. In our old room we had a perfect view of the temple with the mountains in the background, but now we can see people's feet if they walk by. Half of the lights are never on in the hallways so it's kinda depressing and makes you feel like you're in a dungeon. We also have an exposed wire in our room so that's pretty exciting. We call it shock wire, cause if you touch it, you die! Just kidding haha but not really. It's actually not too bad, we have a slightly bigger room, we're with most of our zone, and we also have the vending machines on our floor, which is nice. Oh and we don't have to walk up 4 flights of stairs every day now. So not too shabby!

Also this week Sister Sheffield was walking backwards during exercise time, and I guess she tripped over her foot, stepped on it, and now it's fractured. Kinda a crazy story haha. She has a boot and has to use crutches, but other than that she's fine. Also, last week, Elder Beam was playing volleyball, and tripped on the flat ground when he was about to serve and landed on his knee pretty hard. We had to go outside of the MTC to get X-rayed, and apparently he bruised his bone pretty bad. But it's not broken so all's good!

Pretty much every exercise time I play 4 square (or occasionally volleyball). It's actually super fun despite it being a game you usually play in elementary school haha. Me and two other missionaries: Sister Wimmer (going to Melbourne Australia speaking Mandarin), and Elder Chansing (going to Hong Kong China speaking Cantonese) formed the “dream team” where basically we get in the top 3 squares and keep destroying the person in the 1st square. It's super fun, we say “计划!” when we play against people that dont speak Mandarin, it means “plan” haha. We also mess around with people a lot, we always ask people if they wanna be a part of the dream team as a joke, and when they say yes (they always do), we always say “well you can't”. Kinda mean but also super funny haha. We also have a volleyball dream team but that's not as important (; But Sister Wimmer and Elder Chansing just left the MTC today for their missions ): so if you know anyone coming to the MTC speaking Mandarin or Cantonese in the next 3 weeks let me know so I can form another dream team!

This is kinda super crazy, but I guess there's been riots in Hong Kong for a couple weeks (I haven't heard anything about it cause the MTC's super sheltered) to the point where the airport got shut down. And so all the Cantonese and mandarin speakers that were about to leave to Hong Kong today got reassigned to either Ogden Utah, Denver Colorado, or Idaho falls Idaho for 6 weeks. I feel super bad because they probably won't have as many opportunities for them to use their language, but at least they'll be safe!

TRC's were awesome this week! I got to see my older brother, he volunteered! I didn't get to teach him but the other elder Ensign got to. But my TRC's went really good. We taught about the Atonement and used Ether 12:27 to help teach and hopefully help them improve their life. I was actually able to understand pretty much everything that was going on! It was probably the best TRC I've ever had.

This past Tuesday, we had a general authority seventy (Elder Nielson) give a devotional based on a bunch of questions missionaries asked him. It was a super good talk, probably my favorite devotional so far. But one of the questions he answered was “How can we best help wards with small numbers?” Which I thought was a super interesting question to answer, especially at the MTC. But as he talked, it reminded me of an article that my older brother sent me a couple weeks ago, about an area in my mission. Here it is, read it! https://www.lds.org.uk/first-chinese-sacrament-in-manchester?fbclid=IwAR1t90O3LUkPsLQ6hFkKz3qusnHe8aLvdk3md_UL-7VcNaaCVIroi1hcUaQ But basically this went along really well with the devotional. I wrote down these 2 notes: “We go to church to give, not to get”, and “Church is a place to serve and help others, and as people realize that, they'll want to come to church”. So I just the article and that part of the devotion went really well with each other, and wanted to share cause that's where I'm going, speaking Mandarin! In the article it talks about how the people in that ward will be pioneers in bringing the gospel to China, which honestly just makes me more excited to go to England and teach the Chinese! And also that's super good advice. We shouldn't go to church to get things out of it, we should go to give!

Sorry my email is so long and jumps so much from topic to topic this week, but there was soooo much I wanted to write about, and none of it really went with each other. So there you go! 3 weeks today until I leave to England! Can't believe I'm 2/3 done with the MTC! 我爱你们!

-Elder Ensign