xiexie nimen de zhaogu

Zao an!

My heart breaks with how much I love people, sometimes. You guys, and the people with me here, now. I wish I could just swallow all the pain I sense.
Being in tune with other people's suffering (which I am not always, but sometimes am) is obviously uncomfortable but also really freeing. It calls us out of our own caves of grief, into the foresty-jungle of trying to help others. It is an adventure with an unknown ending and sometimes you don't know if anything you're doing does any good, but there are large streams of light that hit you sometimes, between the trees.

Like seriously. I spend so much effort sometimes trying to make sure I am going to be successful at this and this and that, and then sometimes I do win--like for instance, I'll get a week with super high numbers, or I'll get praised by my mission president, or complimented in the way I wanted to be. And then afterwards I'm like, "Well, is that it?" And then there's other times when I want to eat the mango in the fridge but decide to cut it up instead for my companion to eat after she gets out of the shower. Or when I could count a new investigator for myself but decide to give it to the elders. Or when my old companion Sun Jiemei is so discouraged about her family; I don't know what to say sometimes, so I just sit by her side, rub her back, and reassure her that it's okay to be sad.

Really BEING there with her--even if I don't know what to do--brings a certain kind of hope in itself. It seems like most of the problems in the world come because we are living in our caves, always conniving how to secure our happiness, how to lock ourselves even further inside the mountain. But while that seems like a reasonable thing to do, when we get hurt in the jungle outside, it eventually leads to suffocation. If we at least try to venture beyond ourselves a little bit, risking vulnerability, we are at least allowing for the possibility of real happiness with others. I think all our small efforts to come out of our caves and really BE with someone do a lot more good than we think they do.

I have a new companion, again! It is Sister Huang. This is a picture of the two of us walking back from a meeting, yesterday. She is Taiwanese (YES!!! I love Taiwanese companions), but unlike Sun Jiemei she comes from a very supportive Mormon family and has a very outgoing, loud personality. We are always laughing. Sometimes it is really hard to focus during our planning or study times because she is such a talker. I love it. She eats a ton--literally twice as much as I do at any meal time. She will eat a huge plate of noodles for breakfast. And she has this really funny habit of stripping down to her garments every time we are in our apartment. She always does her studies just in her garments, and gets dressed right before we leave. It's really fun, how open she is. Most Taiwanese people, by the way, are totally not like that! They tend to be much more shy.

And the other picture is this morning, the sunrise, taken from a window in our apartment! So lovely.

So this week we have two investigators getting baptized. One of them is Weng Jiemei, who I want to tell you about. She is not one of the people who before my mission, I would have imagined myself baptizing. She is 29 years old, has no job and lives with her family. She is a very slow person, in her social skills, mannerisms, and ability to grasp things. It's hard to explain--if she were in the states she'd probably be diagnosed with a mild mental illness. Because of this, her family is really cruel to her. We have gone to visit her Mom a couple of times, and it's really crushing to see her Mom yell at her constantly. She will say that she's a failure because she's so slow, so stupid, and takes too long in the shower. (I told Weng Jiemei later that my brother Jeffrey understood well at least the last complaint, haha.)

Because of that, we have always felt so impressed while teaching her that we need to emphasize God's love for her while teaching. We have had such beautiful experiences in her lessons when she really, really feels it. Her eyes will start blinking really fast, like she is going to cry, and she will say in a firm voice that she doesn't use often, "I need this. I really need this hope in my life. I don't know, but I hope that God loves me. I really feel like you all love me, and it helps me to believe that he loves me, too." She was so incredibly nervous for her baptismal interview. But she was elated when she passed. I have never seen her so happy in my life.

There are other people I have taught and helped get baptized who are much more similar to me, who have much more of a gospel knowledge, who understand scriptures better, etc. But Weng Jiemei has such a special place in my heart.

I love you all so much! Hope you have a great week! Thanks so much for all your support.

Sister Brown