Nihao Qin'ai de Jiating he pangyoumen!
There is SO much to write I don't even know where to begin!
As you can probably guess my P Day is on Mondays so you can count on that.
This past 5 days has felt super long but has also gone by very fast. It has been one of the hardest experiences of my life but also one of the absolute best. The spirit is so strong here and the experience of being separated from the world without distractions has been a huge blessing for my learning and ability to listen to the spirit.
The first day was pretty intense they sent me straight to class and the teacher immediately started talking to me in chinese and I swear I forgot everything I had learned at home haha but I got into the swing of it pretty quickly.
Chinese is super hard but I have been really blessed to have had my dad show me the ropes before I came out already being used to the idea of tones and reading the romanization and everything has given me a valuable head start.
So we taught our first lesson on Friday after only 3 days of being there which for most of us was our 3 day of being exposed to the language period. Our Investigator is named Peng Yiting and she came from Hong Kong to study English at BYU. As far as we know she is an actual investigator who has about as much exposure to English as we do to Chinese and is Atheist. She has been very kind and willing to humbly listen to our message and bear with our bu hau de zhongwen (bad Chinese) which has been very humble.
The first lesson was pretty rough as can be expected, but I was still able to see how when all else fails, bearing simple testimony can really bring the spirit, who is the real teacher. She committed to pray and read about how to find truth through the sprit which is a good start to helping her answer any questions she has about why we worship Yesu Jidu (Jesus Christ) and come to know for herself who He and Ta de Tianfu (her Heavenly Father) really is. We teach her again tomorrow and I have faith that we'll be able to learn from our mistakes and invite the spirit into her life even more.
So cool experience with that really quick: one of the elders in our district and his companion were really struggling to communicate with her just like we were, but when he started to testify he found that his tongue was loose and he started saying words even he didn't know he knew. That was really cool to hear and that along with many experiences of my own have really grown my testimony of the gift of tongues.
Well, I'm just about out of time so I'll have to go into more detail about my district later, but my companion is named Elder Anderson from American Fork and he's really cool we get along well. He is super into wake boarding.
Zai Jian!
Love,
Ou Yang Zhanglau (Elder Ogden)
Pictures:
Our District in front of the Provo Temple
Elder Anderson and Elder Ogden
Elder Curtis and Elder Ogden
Elder Ogden and Elder Powell--together again!
Study Materials...(yikes, says mom.)
Elder Ogden's room at the MTC
("My bed is the clean one on top, don't worry, Mom," says Elder Ogden.)
Model shot of Elder Anderson
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