Groomin'

Feburary 19, 2024

大家好！Hey Everyone! 

How has everyone been! Enjoying Lunar New Year? I knew it! 

We’ve been meeting with a new friend named Fred, who was passed off from the South area. He’s an amazing piano player! He’s also looking for a job right now so we’re hoping and praying for him that he can find something. 

God was really merciful to me this week and gave me a really nice Valentine's Day gift in the form of an exchange with ELDER CHAPMAN!!! Elder Chapman is one of our Zone Leaders in the mission and also a pretty tight friend. He taught me a lot of super cool stuff! It was a super fun day! It was also good to be back with Elder Bigler afterward and see how much he enjoyed his first exchange of the mission. 

Found a new Vietnamese sub spot where sandwiches are $8.00 CAD! That's like 5 buckaroos in the US! Super good deal. 

We spent about 5 hours this week trying to record a number for a zone conference slideshow…all of which did not yield any fruit. We’ll see what happens. In other news, I did do a musical number on Sunday, which now means I’m most likely doing every musical number in the month until I get yoinked from the Mandarin Branch. 

We were invited to dinner on Friday by the same family that had us for Christmas Dinner, and yet again they made some amazing food and a lovely atmosphere! Brother Hill is SO good to the missionaries! 

That dinner actually got me thinking a lot about Christ’s Second Coming and how often it’s related to a wedding (an event with my three favorite things: great food, great music, and people you love). A title for Christ is “The Bridegroom,” and as any bridegroom would do, he is inviting everyone in the family to prepare themselves to attend the feast (see Matthew 22 & 25). That led me to a few verses in Jacob 5, which I think I oughtta study a little more sometime soon. Verse 71 talks about the promises of gathering Israel, “and the season speedily cometh; and if ye labor with your might with me ye shall have joy in the fruit which I shall lay up unto myself.” The next verse has some imagery that really touched me, “And it came to pass that the servants did go and labor with their mights; and the Lord of the vineyard labored also with them.” Jesus is laboring with us. Essentially, when we help to “gather Israel” by sharing the gospel, and when we “Let God Cook”/”Let God Prevail,” we’re promised an amazing feast from the fruit of our labors. I’m glad I can be a part of the Lord’s Vineyard -- His vineyard makes the best grape juice. 

Great news everyone…Easter is in 41 DAYS!! While we’re trimming our lamps for the wedding feast, we can also prepare for Easter! I’d invite y’all to read Elder Stevenson’s April 2023 General Conference talk and then find something small you can do every day to prepare for Easter. It’ll make your holiday even better. 

Transfers are this week so I'll let you know what happens. Keep it up everyone! 

 爱你们! 

 –熊长老 

 

Photos: 

P-Day on the SkyTrail 

My Garlic, nourished by the word (Alma 32) 

 

Musical Number, More Holiness Give Me 

 

 

 

 

Now all of China knows you're here

[Title references this clip from Mulan.]

February 12, 2024

农历新年快乐！HAPPY LUNAR NEW YEAR!

Congrats everyone, We’ve now made it to the Year of the Dragon! If you haven’t already, go treat yourself to some good Asian cuisine and celebrate!

Great news everyone…

RODA WAS BAPTIZED!!!!  Boy, it was stressful and chaotic, but it turned out really well! She was SO cheerful yesterday! We’re so proud of her and her great faith in the savior Jesus Christ.

We had a pretty epic Chinese New Year party on Saturday! There was a ton of cool random food as always, and a bunch of people came, which was really cool to see. Our district was in charge of doing the Dragon Dance, a great Lunar New Year tradition that the branch always has the missionaries do. This year, however, the dragon was slain by a mighty warrior, one with great skill for being 1 foot tall and 3 years of age. The dragon finished the dance despite its wounds. Most definitely one of the funniest experiences I’ve ever had!

 

God manifests his love in so many ways! I was able to see quite a few of those this week! For example, on Wednesday I was having kind of a rough morning where I felt really alone and overwhelmed. We were driving to a market to hand out some English class fliers, and suddenly I heard a piece of music I recognized from a BYU music festival this summer! (Edvard Grieg’s string quartet.) I don’t know what it was about hearing this, but it felt like just a helpful nudge to keep going and know that things would be okay.

We also found a new favorite spot for donair/döner that’s right by our house! There’s a little hole in the wall place where this really nice guy makes a wrap for you!

Remember my challenge to look closely at art and scriptures? Well, unfortunately, I don’t have many insights from the scriptures this week (oops), but I do have one from some art! I checked out “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” this week, and I found some cool new symbols in there. Somehow this was the first time I noticed the boats in that painting, carrying some very frightened and distraught looking faces as the wave in the foreground is looming over them with claw-like sea foam curling over the top. Far in the background, however, there's a mountain that's calm, the one place of familiarity and stability in contrast to the boisterous ocean. This made me think a lot about Christ calming the storms of Galilee, and about the storms in our life. They sometimes feel so overwhelming, as if we’re going to drown for certain. But the gospel of Jesus Christ is always visible for us as a sure place to rely on in the midst of the storms. Times may get gloomy, but so long as we, like Peter, keep our eyes fixed on Christ, we’ll make it okay.

I’ll be sure to get some more scripture references next time. That’s it for this week! Happy New Year!

爱你们!

–熊长老

Photos (yikes I need to take more photos):

Roda's Baptism

Let God Cook

February 5, 2024

大家好！Hi Everyone! 

Wait a minute guys, this week went Fast! That’s crazy! What’s also crazy is that as of this next week, I’ll have been a missionary for 6 months! Which seems a little bit inaccurate -- to me it feels like I’ve either been a missionary for 3½  years or for 2 weeks   :P

Highlights of this week was mainly helping our friend Roda prep for receiving baptism next Sunday! We’ve made some miraculous progress so we’re just praying that we’ll be able to wrap up some of the last few small logistics this week! 

We also had Zone Conference this week! That was a blast! We had a very cool opening activity that involved a half hour of silence and some provided scriptures on a theme of “How do we deepen our relationship with God” -- more on that in a minute. The rest of the conference was good. There was a good example of how to plan out the day in the mornings, which made me want to improve the way we do it as a companionship! Hopefully we see some progress.

We had some wild service opportunities this week. The last three weeks we’ve been helping the same member move all of their stuff out of their house into a storage unit… and there is SOOO much stuff for a house that size! We then went in this week one day to help clean some floors and walls. . . although they were hard to get to because of the sheer amount of rat poop that was also found in the house (yucko). On the other hand we did get to help a different lady move into a different apartment downtown, and she was very clean, organized, and also kind of interested in the Church! We gave her a copy of the Book of Mormon in Traditional Chinese and promised the joy that comes from reading it, and she said it sounded really interesting! We’re hoping we see more of her soon!

We tried street contacting at a different university that is in the very south of our area. There weren’t a lot of people around that we were able to talk to, but there was a very fancy performance hall! Brought back a lot of memories for sure of different places I’ve performed, which was pretty cool!

Our car was parked on Saturday, because I didn’t update the log of how many kilometers we had driven, so we did a lot of walking around in the rain putting up English class flyers close by. A little unusual day, but it was really nice weather (at least, I think so).

Okay back to “How do we deepen our relationship with God.” There’s a lot of resources about this, specifically some words of our prophet Russell M. Nelson in speeches like “Let God Prevail” (or “Let Him Cook” as today’s slang might put it). One of the resources that I found was an article in last month’s Liahona magazine about “Slow looking.” This is a term used a lot by museums to try and encourage a new way of viewing art. I think we’ve all been to a museum and rushed through trying to look at every piece of art for a few seconds, but “Slow Looking” is a different approach: picking a very few artifacts and studying them for 5-10 minutes. This was really inspiring to me since I know there’s a lot that I learn about God from studying good art, but I don’t often take the time to do so. Similarly, we spend our scripture study time reading through all the material, but we don’t often spend a lot of time internalizing those scriptures and letting them sink in, and we may miss learning some valuable information. This week I invite you all to do two things that could help deepen your relationship with God. First, pick a piece of art in a style you like and find 10 minutes to really look at it and find some new truths about the Savior. Then, I also invite you to do the same with a few verses of scripture. I can promise that when we take time to slow down and look at the fine details, we’ll have an easier time seeing the hand of God as well.

Hope you all are doing well! We’re enjoying a lot of snow in Calgary right now, so let us know if you need some!

爱你们!

–熊长老

Photos:

rain :))

Elder Bigler and I at Mount Royal Performance Hall

What car is this? [it's a Porsche 911 Carrera 4S]

My celebratory Frosty after cleaning poopy floors for an hour

Sine Waves

January 29, 2024

 大家好！Hi Everyone!

W O W ! This was one of the most wild weeks I’ve ever had! Or, as the understated snob in me would put it, this week had quite the emotional amplitude! 

Let’s start with the highlights:

The Big news this week. . . RODA IS ON DATE FOR BAPTISM!!!! We met with her on Wednesday and she started asking some questions about baptism, but they were questions like, “So will the church provide a hairdryer or will I need to bring my own?” She has amazing faith and we are SUPER hyped for her! We’ve got a baptism lined up for about two weeks from now, and we are also kinda stressed because we still have a lot of principles to cover before baptism, so we’re praying we can pull it off!

A friend we stopped teaching earlier said they now had a driver's license and wanted to come to church! They were present at sacrament meeting, and I talked to them briefly before they were helping their son to Primary, but I didn’t get to see them again. Hopefully we can get some more contact with them again and see what their interests in the Church are.

I had a cool conversation with a guy named Benjamin at the train station who received a copy of the Book of Mormon, and had some interest in coming to church in a week or two once he’s done with some tests. At the same station we met an older lady who was super cheerful and so happy to talk to us (and maybe a little bit high on something?)

We had the thrilling opportunity of serving at the Calgary Food Bank, where we showed up quite a bit late due to a prior lunch appointment, which meant that we had to wait an hour for some people to get out of a meeting so they could tell us some “Safety Protocol” (aka don’t use your phone when you’re serving). I don’t know about my companion, but I thought it was kind of cool when all was said and done–which is great because we’re serving again this week (woot)

Remember the amplitude I talked about earlier? These past few weeks I learned a fun fact: training is kinda stressful, *insert Pablo panic attack from Backyardigans*, and I was definitely feeling a lot of that stress these past few weeks. However, I had a really cool epiphany during our last District Council that was super impactful to me. We occasionally hear a phrase in the Book of Mormon referring to us as members and missionaries as an “instrument in the hands of God,” and I've been worrying so much about whether I’m being an effective instrument or not. Then I realized a truth I’d been missing: a musician can play the same music on a $1,000,000 Stradivarius as they can on a $250 factory-made violin. Even though a cheaper violin doesn’t yet have the same capabilities as the Strad, that doesn’t prevent the musician from creating beautiful music for his audience. Similarly, it’s unnecessary for me to worry about if I’m a good enough instrument. God is an omniscient, omnipotent “Musician,” if you will, and no flaws in an instrument can prohibit Him from performing His music, which is perhaps the “Song of Redeeming Love.”

[....also another fun fact, the Mission President said I needed a chill pill in an interview, so I assume he'll be sending me some now :]

That’s all I’ve got for now.

[Many prayers for the Beazers from Southern Alberta]

爱你们!


Photos:

Lunch with some epic members

Elder Bigler, MVP

Rosemary Chicken

Chinook in the morning, sailors take warning

Our looney district

Gotta love the Chinese Christian radio :P