你们好！
(that means "hello ya'll")
First half-week of online Missionary Training Center(MTC)
has been done, and it has been tons of fun! We wake up and exercise and get our
personal and companion study done, have some workshops and classes, and then
with free time I study some more Mandarin so it's awesome. My virtual
companion, Elder Liang, is a Mandarin wizard! The man has Taiwanese parents so
he speaks and understands so much of it already. On top of that he's from Texas
as well. On top of that he has a black belt in Taekwondo and is training in
Judo. On top of that, he is a beast at the cello, he's been playing it for many
many moons. On top of THAT, I did not know any of that until I squeezed it out
of him; he is super humble in that way.
It's been amazing already and I think I'm only on day 4 of 9
weeks of training. I've just been smothering myself in Mandarin hoping to
immerse myself as much as possible while I am home. It's an awesome, beautiful
language, you'll see more why when I do my little spiritual message. My good
friend Elder Ryan Fagergren has come over some and we've done some classes
together and studied together. He's learning Japanese and going to the Japan
Sapporo mission like a beast. He also says while Mandarin Chinese sounds like
singing, Japanese is rap so if you're in to that kind of stuff take up some
Jap(I don't personally care for rap so yet another reason why Mandarin is
awesome).
We had a chance to do some service today and helped somebody
move a bunch of their stuff out of a storage place into a condo. It was so much
fun. Elder Fagergren and I pull up and there is like 3 other sets of
missionaries helping too. As in-training missionaries still, we both felt we
needed to earn these experienced Sister's and Elder's respect, so when
everything was full and the time came to move everything to the condo and there
was a grill still there with no room to pack it...Elder Fagergren and I offered
to walk it to the house while everyone drove there. Definitely was not needed,
but it was worth it: we earned their respect.
Anyway I have a cool thought/discovery and a testimony to go
along with it. So Chinese doesn't really have words. Chinese characters carry
meaning and putting them in combinations with other characters allows you to
translate it into an English word. A good example of this is the word prophet
in Mandarin: 先知(xīan
zhī). Now you don't need to know how to say it to understand this.. 先( xīan
)means "first, foremost, or beginning," something along those lines. 知 comes
from the phrase 知道(zhī
dào) which means "to know". put together you get 先知:
prophet. Which taken character by character roughly means "first to
know". This was awesome to me, because it's an amazing example of the
purpose of prophets in our lives. Prophets are there to warn us and protect us
from dangers of our day. As a prophet, Noah, warned the people of the earth to
repent of their wickedness and the flood that would come. In the Book of
Mormon, Lehi warned the people of Jerusalem of it's impending destruction and
warned them to repent. Prophet's are our watchmen; they are called of God to
guide and direct His children on the earth. They have been called in ancient
times, and they have been called in modern times. President Russel M Nelson is
the prophet of our day. I know he has been called of God because I have felt
the Holy Ghost's confirming witness in my heart that he is a prophet of God.
Listen to the prophets, past and present, and you will not be led astray. In
the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
Cummings长老
No comments:
Post a Comment