The happiest summer of my life!‏

Dear Family and friends,

This week I got to go to Yilan, a beautiful place on the East coat of Taiwan, to play violin with a missionary choir for a youth conference. It was so much fun! I was companions for the day with Sister Johanson, who is with me in the picture. She plays the flute, and people are always asking the two of us to accompany them or write harmony parts to their musical numbers. We always have such a fun time together, off to the side, chattering quietly behind our music stand about how I can bring a feminist voice to our missionary leadership meetings, or how to get through tough companionships, or joking about how everyone thinks we sound great even though we play different things each time we go through the song. I love her so much!

You might be confused at who my companion is, because I am going on exchanges all the time these days. It is the beautiful, hilarious, always-happy Sister Du, featured in the second picture eating her wonton noodle soup! And in front of her is the dinner I enjoyed that night, which was Papaya milk and a bowl of Tian bu La. Tian bu la literally means "Sweet, not spicy" and as I described it to another missionary the other day, is "a bowl of a bunch of things I never saw in America with a sweet sauce on top." I think some of it is tofu, some of it is fish sausage, and the white thing is some sort of boiled vegetable. It's delicious. My tastes have changed so much since coming here. I remember when I wrote home to you all, proud of myself because I had eaten squid. Squid and octopus and weird mushrooms are all just chicken to me, now.

But anyway, about Sister Du. I absolutely love being her companion. One of the best things about our companionship is how well we teach, together.

I sometimes get nervous before lessons. It's not that fluttery, in-my-stomach nervousness that comes from self-consciousness. It's the overwhelming, humbling nervousness of other-consciousness, of knowing I have a big responsibility in front of me to care for the person in front of me. I have to find a way to express the gospel to them in a language and manner they can understand. I have to get to know who they are, what they worry about, what they hope for, and then speak to those things. I have to ask the right questions, promise the right things. I have to really feel love for them.

But when I have the nerves of other-consciousness, our lessons feel like magic. I have a continual, searching prayer in my heart ,pleading for the right words to come. And they do! We go slowly through concepts, treating them like the precious things they are, and somehow come up with metaphors, real-life examples, and good questions to ask on the spot. I feel so engaged, so alive, so totally sucked into what is being communicated from us to them and from them to us. Our investigators get sucked in, too. It feels so awesome!  And I'm pretty sure what we say is always what the spirit wants us to say, not so much in the sense that what we say is what God had written in stone before the world started, intending for us to say, but because we pick our words carefully with love in our hearts. And whatever comes from us when we have that way of being is going to be the right thing to say.

Being close to the spirit, I think, is just about being alive. It means having this constant desire, this constant searching for how to solve problems, or how to communicate, or how to learn. It's amazing to me how easy it is to be a lazy or a selfish teacher. Sometimes we are lazy in that we don't WANT to think so much about other people, and how they need things expressed to them. It's hard work. Other times we are selfish, in that we insist that lessons need to go the way we had planned them. When the person we are teaching asks questions we didn't anticipate or doesn't connect with our examples, sometimes I want to be irritated and think things like, "But I studied this topic so long this morning! You just need to open your mind!" But that is blaming them.

Being a selfless teacher means forgetting whatever work I put into my lesson plan and being willing to reinvent it on the spot for the sake of the other person. When we're not willing to reinvent ourselves for others, it's because we're so committed to the ideals we have in our head, which don't really exist to anyone but ourselves. And that's why being a selfless teacher, being willing to adapt to the situation that exists before us in the moment, invites us to be continually alive, to be REAL. There are so many ways to look alive, but not really to be alive.

I love you all so much! Hope you all have great weeks!

Diana