Guang (Light)‏

Hello everybody,

 

So I just finished my first full week in Taiwan. How do I sum it all up? I think usually when we write letters/blog posts/journal entries that supposedly summarize a period of time, they are more revealing of our current thoughts and emotions than what we may have actually experienced during the period of time. The past is so fluid, and always subject to being cast in a different light if something new comes our way and we start to look at things differently.

 

It makes me think about the importance of keeping things alive. Keeping the questions of what certain experiences are and who certain people are perpetually unsettled, rather than killing their potential and susceptibility to multiple interpretations with labels and routine phrases of description.

 

For example, my old companion and I, as all companionships do, ran into difficulties every once in a while. I feel a bit of guilt for how I handled things. I still think I could have loved her more and handled things differently in certain instances. There is a huge temptation now that we're not companions anymore to try to point to her quirks, flaws, and moments of weakness as evidence that she was just a "Tough Companion." Everyone had a "Tough Companion" on their mission, right? We all know or can imagine what they are, and what it's like to work with them. It's so hard, right? And we tried, we honestly tried, to make things better, but sometimes you just have a "Tough Companion." You know? (haha). But reducing her to that totally kills what our companionship experience meant every day. It makes to forget all the goodness, laughter, love, and support that filled every day, and how patient and merciful she was with me. And it makes me forget the responsibility I have to still love her, all because I don't want to admit that things were complex and that I am imperfect and probably harmed her a lot.

 

In some ways loving people really is just to have this kind of openness as to who they are and what our responsibility is to them. To always keep them alive in our hearts. Definitely hard, though.

 

Sister Kang is my new companion, and my trainer. She is a really beautiful Korean who grew up in Utah, but lived three years in Korea. She also took two years of Mandarin before coming on her mission, and she speaks the most naturally and natively of any of the American missionaries I've heard. I am so lucky to get to train with her! She has a very calm demeanor and is very patient. Sometimes I feel like I wreak havoc on lessons whenever I make comments because my Chinese is so choppy but she always smooths it over and keeps things on track.

 

I felt on and off about my Chinese this week. Progress comes so slowly. Also, I feel like I get less practice speaking than I did in the MTC, because my companion takes care of most of our interactions with people. Since yesterday, I have been a little more frustrated with it. Nothing special happened, I was just sitting in church with a feeling-sorry-for-myself attitude, and that always makes things worse. It takes so much concentration to understand people, and if my mind is distracted by how extremely special and pitiable I am, then it is really hard to concentrate. And it makes me miss opportunities to learn and practice speaking. Yesterday afternoon in studies I said a prayer to help me know what to do/feel/think, and I stopped to think about it and there was this clear line of logic that came that was something like, "Chinese will come as you focus on other people/your purpose." I definitely know that's true. The times when I've felt most comfortable with my weakness and also most confident in my ability are the times when I'm worrying about other people rather than myself.

 

This weekend was Mid-Autumn Festival, and the past few nights the air has been filled with barbecue smell. We passed dozens and dozens of family and friend groups huddled over their grills cooking shrimp, pork, fish sausage, tofu, corn on the cob, and just about everything else on skewers. A couple of random families we passed while street contacting invited us to join them. We were like, "Can we just have a bite?" But once you get invited to the party, they will keep giving you food until you have to leave. We even got offered beer! One lady gave us shrimp skewer after shrimp skewer, then fruit, then coke, and then was stuffing packages of pineapple cakes in our bicycle baskets as we were leaving. And she didn't even know us. People are so hospitable, here. We went home that night so full, and happy. It was fun to get to take part in the celebration a little bit.

 

Oh, I need to tell you about my biking experience! Ha. Well, you should definitely pray for my life every day, but maybe not as much as you might think. The first day of biking was basically terrifying. Throughout the day, I had to force my reflexes and nerves to forget a lot of the rules engrained in me since I was a child about how you deal with cars and traffic and roads. You sort of just have to play chicken most of the time. One piece of advice another missionary gave me was, "Don't look behind you." And it's true, usually it is better to count on them seeing you and moving around you because if you look behind you and think about how you really should be more than a couple of feet away from a car or scooter when you're going at that speed you will just start freaking out. Sorry Dad, you are probably really scared for me. But to be honest, I think doing that here is in some ways a lot safer than being ten feet away from cars in America. People expect to have pay constant attention while driving. There are TONS of people on bikes and scooters in XinZhuang. And the lanes are so fluid, so people typically have no trouble sliding back and forth on the road to not hit you. I also pray while biking and do (despite the missionary's advice) look around me and try to be safe.

 

There is still tons more I could say about life here. It is definitely hard. One of the surprising things about a mission is that you never are suddenly transformed or translated into a missionary. Or at least if was translated, I don't think I was translated correctly... (Haha... Mormon jokes.) You have to decide to be that person in every moment--to think about the spiritual needs of the person across the table from you rather than your own insecurity in the language, to think about the person whose house you are headed to rather than your own fatigue, to think about the beauty of the place around you rather than the people you miss back home. It's the tiny decisions I make nearly every moment in my heart that are the hardest, the ones that determine whether I will really be here now with the people around me or be somewhere else. I struggled a lot with having my whole heart in the work this week. But God is so good and patient with me. I read about Christ in the scriptures and I want to be able to "take up my cross" and bear the needs of others the way he did mine. He really is real, and in many ways more real than this tangible keyboard I have beneath my fingers. He enables me to do and bear and overcome so much--to really be alive and awakened to the world around me. He really is the "light and the life of the world."

 

I hope you all are doing well! Please email me or write me letters if you have time! And listen to good music on my behalf!

 

Sister Brown