The big exciting thing that happened this week was that our friend was baptized on Saturday. It was pretty great to see. He is the first in his family so far. We had his friend from the priest quorum baptize him. The only problem was that our friend is like 7 feet tall and the priest is like 5'2". So he had to be dunked three times, the last one on his knees. It was really cool to see how he changed afterwards though. After the confirmation yesterday, he and his family came to practice fencing in the gym. Both Elder Sun and I noticed that he seemed more confident, stood a little straighter, and just seemed more sure in who he was and what he was doing. He's in high school so that is super important to have. Hopefully is family will notice too and follow his example.
Other than that it was a pretty normal week. Lots of time was spent on my part trying to follow conversations in Mandarin and trying to chime in every once in a while, but that's rare still. It's tough, I don't have nearly as much time as I would like to study, but I'm still getting better. Thank goodness for phones so that I can have chinese flashcards on me at all times.
On Halloween, we had to be in at 6:00, but as we were driving home, there was a huge house fire right next to the temple. It was crazy, there were a ton of fire trucks, the flames were super tall. Luckily they got it under control, but the house butts up right next to the edge of the temple property, it was pretty exciting. The house was abandoned so nobody got hurt. The mission office thought that since we had all this extra time on Halloween, it would be a great chance to deep clean our apartments. Gee... Luckily I still found time to put up some halloween decorations and carve pumpkins with Elder Sloan. It was a blast and our apartment is now sparkly clean.
Yesterday evening, Elder Tan (Elder Sloan's companion) and I went to a rehearsal for our Stake's performance of the Messiah for Christmas. Our ward mission leader was super kind and rented us instruments to play for this and service opportunities at senior care facilities. So I got to play cello for a while last night and meet some new people. There's a few members of another faith that came too so we got to chat with them for a bit. President Wahlen is keen on the idea of having us use this opportunity to reach out to people through music. In any event, it's just nice to be able to cello again.
But yeah. That's it for this week. Life goes on. I've got that 1/8th of the way checkpoint under my belt now so that's nice. Hope things are doing pretty good on the homefront. See you later!
-Elder Murray
No comments:
Post a Comment