Post san (three)!

I have been in the MTC for almost three full weeks.  It feels like I have been here for months, and yet at the same time I can hardly believe I am a quarter of the way through my MTC stay!  The amount of information I have learned is incredible, and I am still a little surprised at how much of it I retain on a day-to-day basis.  We are using our Mandarin more and more, trying to SYL (Speak Your Language) and it has been cool to see vocabulary that I didn't know I knew pop up in my daily conversation.  I still have to ask what a lot of words mean, but that is okay.  We are still learning, and that is what is important.

This week we went to the Teaching Resource Center (TRC) for the first time.  At the TRC volunteers come and the missionaries teach them a lesson.  Sometimes the volunteers are real investigators of the Church, but often they are just Mandarin speakers that live in the Provo area.  This week Sister Stevens and I taught two young men, one who's name I can't remember (oops) and Frank.  Frank is in America on a two month long vacation from Kaoshiung, Taiwan.  He was so fun to teach, but so hard to understand!  His accent was very pronounced and he had a slight lisp, so trying to figure out what he was saying was a little difficult.  Even so, he bore a beautiful testimony about the importance of the Atonement and of Jesus Christ in our lives which Sister Stevens and I were able to (mostly) understand.  The TRC, we learned, is stressful but can be rewarding!  This will become a weekly occurence for us.

We had some fun in our district the past couple of days.  For the past bit my companion and I have been trying to figure out what animal best represents each member of our district.  We finally hashed out most of them, so I decided to draw our district in animal form.  By the time I had almost finished the picture, I realized that we had not figured out what my animal was.  Since you can't really choose your own animal, I posed the question to my district.  Their answer?  A hamster.  I'm not quite sure what qualifies me to be a hamster.  I've never really identified with them, to be honest, they seem like timid little creatures.  Still, I drew myself in as a hamster.  I am going to draw another picture with the animals that we want to be, so we can set goals to become more awesome.

My thought for the week: turn out.  I watched a talk this week by Elder David A Bednar where he talked about the character of Christ and about turning out to serve others, even when we feel like we are in need of service.  As we do this, we can better serve others and we can be more open to the healing power of the Atonement.  I would recommend reading his talk from a few General Conferences ago on this topic - it's pretty great.

I love you all, and I hope you have a wonderful week!

Sister Beer (Bi Jiemei)