A New Companion

31 March 2014 Tiapa Paea

My new companion is amazing. His name is Elder Smith. He is from Micronesia Saipan. His parents are from California and he has lived on Saipan his entire life. However, he only speaks English. ;) I am pretty sure he likes our secteur, even though it’s really little. Training is awesome; it’s all I wanted to do in the MTC and now I get to do it. Our daily schedule is as follows. Since he’s in training we have to do a supplementary hour training every morning. We wake up, do sport, then 1 hour personal study, 1 hour companionship study, 1 hour training study, 1 hour language study, and then its 12:00. We eat lunch and then go out, so the morning is pretty long but I like it. Since we don’t have many lessons a week, we do a lot of member visits, which I think personally is the best way to learn the language. It’s stress-free, and they keep talking with you, so it’s great for Elder Smith's French. And at the same time, they speak Tahitian with me so it helps me as well. So awesome; he’s already caught on so fast. He’s one of those people that I don’t think would ever complain about anything.
 District leader just adds a few more things that I have to do. On our Friday district meetings I have to give trainings. I gave my first last week and a lot of the sisters said they really liked it. Luckily I’ve already given a couple when I was at BYU as Sunday school president, so the only difference was speaking French in front of 12 people, which isn’t really that bad. Honestly I’m more comfortable teaching in front of people than leading meetings.
 We gave talks in sacrament meeting this Sunday. Saturday night the Ward mission leader calls me and tells me we’ve got talks tomorrow. Luckily our church starts at 10, so I could prepare it before hand, and Elder Smith bore an awesome testimony. I talked about Ammon, and his example to the King Lamoni. He didn’t start preaching the gospel right away. The first thing he did was offer service, and provide a good example. This softened the heart of the king and prepared him to receive the gospel. So the message was we need to provide service and show good examples if we want to soften the hearts of others for missionary work. (Good examples are a problem here). Piano is coming along as well. I can almost sight read easy hymns. On Sunday I sight read “Where Can I Turn for Peace” and it went pretty well. 

Oh, the training I gave was on Helaman Chapter 5, starting at verse 29 or something. It’s the story of 2 missionaries, Lehi and Nephi, and what I called an example lesson. The Nephite, Aminadab, was an inactive, or a member integrator. I thought it was interesting that the Lamanites directed all their questions to him, and it was he who responded because of the example of the two missionaries. In fact, I was astounded that Lehi and Nephi didn’t really talk at all throughout this encounter. They were just there to invite the spirit and it was with the church member that the Lamanites learned what they needed to do. So I applied this story to how it is important to have members at lessons because the people we teach will be more willing to believe what we say coming from another fellow person than the missionaries. We just need to have the spirit with us at all times. Voila, the insights that the spirit gave me on that one.