Taifeng! (Typhoon)

Dear everyone,

First of all, CONGRATULATIONS for the fine production of Jesse Mark Atkinson!!!  I loved seeing pictures and hearing the story about him. He looks so adorable. I can't wait to meet him and Sparrow, and re-meet Chai and Akane. Babies. Such great things.

We had a typhoon this week! Taipei is not right on the coast, so we weren't too badly affected, but we had to stay inside part of Friday and Saturday. Our landlord also insisted that we tape large X's over the many windows in our apartment. We live on the 11th floor of our apartment, so she was worried we'd have windows break from the wind. But as you can see in this picture, we started running out of tape after a while and had to do rather small X's. haha.

Friday night, I had a spectacular view (as I always do out that window!) of the wind and rain attacking everything outside. Trees and shop signs fell down, the streets had small waves of water on them, and wind screeched at our windows all night long, so it was hard to sleep. But it cleared up the next morning, and something about the lighting made the world absolutely BEAUTIFUL. I took a million pictures--the colors of the rooftops and shop signs and the distant clouds and mountains were so vivid. But I already sent you guys a scenery picture last week. This is a picture of me enjoying the scenery while practicing violin before church yesterday morning (I played a musical number in sacrament meeting.) I think that window might be one of the best things about life, these days. I sleep with the curtains open, now, not caring that the light wakes me up pretty early.

The other picture is of my bike being freaking stylish. Isn't it beautiful? It is my most sturdy friend who these days really needs new breaks and air in its tires.

Challenges of the week:
1. Feeling like my Chinese is terrible
2. A bunch of investigators suddenly being too busy to meet or not answering their phones
3. Needing new music (Does anyone want to send me CDs? Hmm, yeah maybe?)
4. Not getting to go running in the morning anymore because my companion sleeps in every day
5. Trying not to get mad that my companion sleeps in every day and doesn't have a super high work ethic

Blessings of the week:
1. We have three investigators getting baptized on Saturday! (The two sceduled last week moved to this week because of the typhoon)
2. My companion and I always having so many reasons to laugh. No matter what is going on with the work, we are usually having a good time together
3. Fruit. I don't know how to tell you this, but you all may think you have tasted a mango, grape, or orange, but you really haven't. And you probably haven't tasted durian, dragonfruit, guava, lychee, among other delicious natural things that fill our fridge. I eat exclusively fruit for breakfast, these days. Taiwan's fruit is seriously so, so incredible. People serve it for dessert, after meals.
4. Feeling close to God. He is so mercifully there.

Thought for the week:
A mission is like a mini life-span that helps me see a lot of patterns in how we as human beings are born, grow up, deal with challenges, and die. Lately I have been thinking a lot about ideals; it is so easy when we are young and spry to live life with sharp, articulate ideals about the right way to do things. Like when I came on my mission I had a million ideas about how I was going to love all my companions and investigators perfectly, and I was never going to let my own needs or laziness get in the way of that. I had moments of success that sung to me the truth of what I believed, and my ideals really did carry me gracefully, mercifully through some very hard moments. I was able to see so clearly how I should change, whenever I tasted that toxic blade of bitterness on my tongue.

But as life goes on, it tends to beat on us a little bit. We have more and more moments of weakness, of not holding our tongues, and of getting so tired of trying. Our ideals were once a shiny marching band in our heads, tooting our philosophy at every corner,  but in time they become more like an ancient beating hope in our chests. I still believe in love, and in fact I understand so much more deeply than I ever did a year ago about why it is important, why it is the only way, and that it really IS possible. But I also have a much deeper understanding of the difficulty of it; my ideals now are softened by compassion for those who struggle to live up to them and humility because I struggle, as well. Life experience makes us stronger, and in many ways we could write the stories of our lives to prove the truth of our ideals. Yet we hear the other side of the story, too, the stories of our weak moments. So as life goes on we perhaps become more and more silent in the face of it.

So here is the question to think about: who is the stronger one, the young one with the crystal clear ideals, or the older one who can't explain it as well but has lived it more? I think they are both good, just in different points of a life cycle, and both have something to learn from each other. But one thing it helps me to see is that we always need to have compassion for the unspoken lives of people, the things they have seen and been through that have made them strong but will never get mentioned.  All of this I am writing, by the way, is recognizing that while in the mission life I am turning old I am also very young in real life and and in other cycles I am involved in. I don't know, what do you think of this idea?

If any of you want to mail me, it would be really cool... I don't need mail in order to be happy but it is really, really nice.

Love you all!

Sister Brown