Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing

This week was so full of miracles!!! But I’ll get to that.

First off: food update. My new favourite smoothie flavour is Strawberry-avocado. Trust me, it's so good!

We met this amazing 90-year-old woman at the market. She is so sweet and kind! I love her so much! She has a child who speaks Spanish and she tried to have me talk to him on the phone, but I could barely remember any Spanish! Apparently I need to practice in two languages now!

A really cool experience is that I got to talk to a nonmember who was at the church to meet with the elders. She was practicing the music from La La Land on the piano, so I went and talked to her (mostly in English). We started talking about singing and she asked if I was good at coming up with harmonies. I told her that I can only really sing harmony to church songs and I opened to Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing (because that's still in the Vietnamese hymnbook. It had the words in English too). I sang through it and she asked me to teach it to her since she doesn't know very many of the hymns. As I taught it to her I had to explain a few of the English words, like Thou, Thy, ceasing, fount, etc. That gave me the chance to explain some about the respectful language we use when we talk to God and to tall her that we were singing about Christ and how His grace and mercy never cease. I really loved teaching her some through music and singing with her.

My language victory for the week is that I was able to invite someone to learn more about Christ, all in Vietnamese (with some charades)! I told him that Christ could help him to have strength and comfort in hard times. He said that he didn't have time to meet and learn about the Gospel right now, but I gave him our card and showed him where it has the Vietnamese lds.org on it, lds.vn, and I told him he could find out more there. Then, on Sunday, we got a text from him saying that he wants to learn more! We're going to meet with him next Sunday!!!

Another time we were out talking to people we met a woman cutting vegetables outside her stall. We talked to her for a while and invited her to church. She said she could probably come, and then SHE asked US if we could meet that night! It was so crazy!! Unfortunately we got hit by a bit of a storm, so she couldn't come.

I'm going to copy this next bit straight from my journal. This was just after dinner one night and it was one of my favourite parts of the week.

March 30:
After we finished, we went out to the road and started biking. We were basically home when Chi Kim Thu slowed down so that I could bike next to her. She asked me if I'd seen the man we biked past outside the restaurant with a disabled son. I said no and she said she kept feeling like we needed to go back and talk to him. So we went. I think that’s the fastest we've biked since I got here, but I had so much energy. The whole time we were biking, I was praying that he would still be there and that we could help him feel hope. He was still there when we arrived and Chi Kim Thu pulled up to talk to him. I honestly couldn't hear almost anything. I only heard the word "hope." She gave him our card and we left. She said she'd asked if he had heard of Christ and he said no and she explained what we do and that Christ and our message can help him to feel hope about his son. She asked if he wanted to learn more, but he said he was going to his hometown and didn't know when he would be back. I don't know if he will ever contact us, but now he knows some about Christ and knows that He can help him. While we were biking back I prayed and thanked God for that amazing opportunity. I think that that might be the most sincerely I've ever thanked God for my chance to serve Him and His children.

I know that Heavenly Father cares so much about each and every one of His children and wants all of us to have joy in this life and return to live with Him in the next life. Because I know these things I would like to share two scriptures to end this weeks post:

First from the Book of Mormon, 3 Nephi 5:13

Behold, I am a disciple of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. I have been called of him to declare his word among his people, that they might have everlasting life.

Second, from the Doctrine and Covenants Section 18 verse 10

Remember the worth of souls is great in the sight of God

I know that God cares about each person individually and that's why he sends His messengers to the world. That's why He will answer the prayers of each individual. That's why He sent His son to accomplish the Atonement. I say these things in the name of our Savior and Greatest Friend, Jesus Christ, Amen.

I made It!!

I made it!!! I'm in Ho Chi Minh City, which is in the South.

It's hot, but  not too much worse than Virginia. It'll get hotter, but then monsoon season will start, so that should help. I love the food, but it's definitely hard to get used to! The rice dishes are my favorite. I also have a new favorite fruit! It's called man, with a hat over the a and a dot. It's so good!  I also love coconut smoothies! they're so good! Smoothies are really big here.

Despite the heat, I wear a sweater most of the time when I'm outside to avoid burning. I don't think I've burned yet! Maybe a little on my neck, but that's all. I do come back covered in sweat and dirt though. 

So, the traffic... Imagine a busy four lane highway. Now replace 80 or 90% of the cars with motorcycles. Now get rid of most traffic laws. Welcome to biking in Ho Chi Minh. Apparently here driving is more based on relationships than rules. So, as long as you don't do anything too unpredictable too quickly, you're fine. It's crazy, but really fun!

Our apartment is really nice. There's air conditioning, a thumbprint reader to open the door, and a balcony (we're on the 16th floor!) Luckily, there's also an elevator.  

There's a big river, River Saigon, that goes through the city and at night the lights reflect off the water. It's beautiful.

We just opened our area, and dubbed it Nebula, which means that we're both new. So we don't know where anything is and we don't have very many people we're teaching. We're biking around the area looking for markets and bigger stores we can go too.

We taught one chi last night and I think it went really well. She believes in God as our Loving Heavenly Father and Christ, so we taught her about feeling the Holy Ghost through good thoughts and feelings and also about developing a personal relationship with God through prayer. I think she really liked the idea of personal prayer and becoming closer to God.

We went a member's art show this morning and we talked to a lot of his friends who also had work in the show. I was able to share with them my testimony that my family has been helped by the Church. I know that the Gospel has helped strengthen my family and helped us through hard times. I'm grateful for the values of love and service that the Gospel teaches and I know that it can help us and those we care about find strength through any hard times we encounter.

I  know and testify of these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

That's all for this week!

2 Wintery Weeks in the MTC

Bad first: I've been pretty emotional and I've been sick the last few days; coughing, sore throat, runny nose. I almost threw up one morning, but I think that was unrelated. It was very random. Other than that, the week has flown by!

On Sunday, three of my favourite hymns were played/sung: Brightly Beams, Lead Kindly Light and I know that My Redeemer lives.

There's an amazing sister in our zone and she has a very sweet conversion story that she actually got up and told at the devotional on Sunday. She grew up a Quaker and went on a mini mission for 5 weeks during high school. At the end her leaders asked if there was anything she'd like to pray about and for them to pray about. She asked them to pray that God would help her find out more about Him and Christ and come closer to them. She prayed and after a while she felt like she should ask this boy to homecoming.

Totally unrelated, she thought.

He was Mormon and they talked about religion and agreed to pray about whose church was right. She prayed and, to quote her, "He was right" she started meeting with the missionaries and the boy was able to baptize her on her 19th birthday.

When she got here, the speaker said something about how a lot of times when he asked for stories, people from the conversion stories were there. When he said that, a bunch of elders started pointing at one elder, who was the boy the baptized her. He got up and bore his testimony about the amazing Spirit he felt as he baptized her. It was so sweet and such an amazing story.

The MTC Choir director is so amazing!!!! On Sunday he was telling funny stories about "man moments" from him going on the snow cave camp out with his deacons and having them act as the dogs on a sled they built out of pvc pipe.

On a more spiritual side, I love the stories he tells us about Joseph Smith. It makes him seem so much more real to him. He was an amazing man. This week we're singing, “Where can I turn for Peace”.

Every song is a story with this choir.

We're singing the first half of the song from the point of view of a couple of investigators who are looking for peace and comfort. And then the second half is missionaries testifying of Christ. In relation to the line "reaches my reaching" our choir director talked a lot about Peter when he walked on water and started sinking. He made the story a lot more personal. It reminded me that Peter was a real person and that he was unique, like each of the apostles must have been. He was the only one to ask to try walking on the water. And he trusted Christ to save him. The choir director likened this to repentance and said that we could sink all the way to the sea floor and Christ would still be there when we reached up for Him because He has descended below all things.

Phonomenal First Week

The week was good!

We have an "investigator" that we teach EVERYDAY in Vietnamese! The first day we taught him was Friday and we barely knew what we were doing. We still can't really speak the language, but I think you can tell that my English is already suffering a little!

The amazing thing is that in the first lesson I was still able to go off script and try to answer his questions! It's very hard to understand him, even though he talks slowly and mimes stuff sometimes, but we're getting better and trying really hard to understand him.

The MTC choir was amazing! We're singing Joseph Smith's First Prayer and it's beautiful! We're trying to sing it like we're telling the story to an investigator for the first time. My favorite part is when Heavenly Father speaks and we slow down a lot and focus on the words and how it must have sounded when He said it.

Vietnamese lesson: all words are one syllable, no matter how many vowels there are. A u with a little tail on it makes a sound like ooo, but then you close your teeth on it and make it into a bit of an uh sound. It'll sound really weird, but that's how it sounds!

Also, I will get a Vietnamese name before I leave the MTC!!! I'm so excited!