MTC Week 2

Hello, Family!

Thanks so much for all the DearElders letters. I am enjoying the frequent letters :) HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD! So glad that my P-day and your birthday overlapped. Happy Fathers Day as well!
So I have wonderful news: there is going to be this missionary broadcast thing here at the Marriott Center on June 23rd and there are going to be a bunch of Genral Authorities attending since they are the ones who organized it. The MTC choir gets to sing at the broadcast so be looking out for me! It's great I get to participate in this event since I will be here so long.

Last Monday was an interesting day... Having Sunday then most of monday off isn't too great when you have class Monday nights and you forget what you learned two days ago. Whoops! Yeah so, when we had class Monday night our teacher kept on calling on me to answer questions and I had no idea what was going on/ it was hard for me to answer in Chinese since I have such a limited vocabulary. Basically, it felt like I was sitting there trying to answer 'how the Holy Ghost helps us' for like 5 mintues because I couldn't think of anything to say. SO EMBARRASING! hahah. So glad that my face doesn't turn red because it would have been super red. It's all good though. I laughed it off.

I looked all day long for Hayley on Wednesday and I never saw her :( I think she might be at the new west campus, unfortunately. They are now hosting all Tuesday devotionals at the Marriott so mabye I will see her tomorrow!

My tong ban (companion) and I have been having pretty good lessons so far. Mostly I just sit there and try to understand what everyone is saying and I think the best way to understand Chinese right now is to just not focus on it too hard. When ever I read the "investigator's" body language and use the words I do understand I can ususally figure out what they are saying. We are trying to ween ourselves off of taking in a script and teaching just a lesson. Our goal is to be better at "teaching people not lessons" by trying to speak what is in our hearts. The Spirit always has a greater presence when we do that.

For Relief Society this week, we had a speaker from the Relief Society board come talk to us. One of the things that stood out to me from her talk was that we should expect to see miracles on our mission. This is applies to everyone learning a new language because being able to pick a language in the span of 18-24 months is such a miracle. In the scriptures Christ talks about how faith proceeds the miracle and that got me thinking of why it is that everyone keeps saying "they send the best missionaries Chinese speaking." I do not mention this to think highly of myself, because I do not think that highly of my missionary skills but I say this to at least talk about those in my district. We had  a mini testimony meeting yesterday afternoon on the topic Faith in Christ and after hearing the stories that were shared I know that they all have such great faith and that is why they are going Chinese speaking. As I was saying before, faith proceeds the miracle. We are all gong to need faith to learn this language and these Chinese speaking missionaries have demonstrated the faith necessary to learn a language. I know that we are all going to witness the miracle of speaking a new language. Even if it doesn't come when we want it and even though we may not speak Chinese as well as we want, I know that all we need to do is open our mouths and the Spirit will do the rest.

I wasn't able to send any pictures last week because the computers here were acting up and wouldn't read my SD card. It is working today so I have attached some pictures! Looking forward to hearing back from you all.

Ai,

Sister Jordan