Hello everyone!

I hope this week went really great for you all! And for some reason I almost spelled great totally wrong. I didn't think this was possible, but if you haven't been able to tell--my english really, truly has digressed. I don't really speak English much, anymore. I just write english, to you and in my journal. It makes me feel much more unarticulate and awkward when I write emails, but that's just how it is! Thanks for your patience. And also, seriously, thanks if you really do read my emails. I know they are long, but it's all I have to communicate this life with you all. There is so much to say.

Sister Du and I! We are the cutest! I can't express how much I love her, how thankful I am to be her companion. The first picture of us is from an outdoor zone conference we had this week. We got to go hiking with a bunch of other missionaries, and stopped several places along the trail to have a training.

The other picture is of us in an elevator of a rest home, about to visit a very special girl named YaFei. She just turned 25 on Thursday, but she lives in a rest home with old people because she can't move her legs. She used to be an investigator, so she has had all the missionary lessons, and still really loves reading the Book of Mormon, but because she is kind of... well, crazy, she isn't able to get baptized. I feel really bad for her; I think her loneliness has led her to develop some really terribly mainpulative social habits. Sister Du and I visit her almost every week, partially because it is a service opportunity (we know how much it means to her just to have someone talk to her), and partially because we are coerced. Like seriously, every time we leave she pulls out her planner to schedule another time. If we are unsure of when we can come, she starts telling us that we don't care about her and that we are going to forget about her just like this person, this person, and this other person in her life. So we go back week after week.

Every time we go to visit Yafei, we have to wear the surgical masks, (which people always wear here if they are sick or concerned about air pollution). Then we sit down at a table with Yafei; she wheels her wheelchair over to us. We sing a hymn, say a prayer, and she starts preaching to us about whatever she feels passionate about that week--usually about the Word of Wisdom. I don't know why she has a special love for that topic, but she does! She recommits us to keep it every single week! I am always shaking silently, trying not to laugh behind my mask. This week was her birthday, and we have been being commanded every week to visit her on her birthday and bring not only a card, but cake as well--ever since June. In her birthday card, I wrote that I was really thankful for her teaching me about the Word of Wisdom and that it had totally changed my life. She read the card out loud, and she was delighted! Then she pulled out the Word of Wisdom pamphlet, put on her best baptist-preacher impression, and taught us once more that we really ought to quit smoking. It was great.

But thankfully, most people we teach are not like that.

I have been feeling really, really humbled lately. It's hard to explain why.

I've been studying the Pearl of Great Price lately, and every day it blows my mind. It's been about two weeks now, and I still am not past the Book of Moses. Here is something I have been learning lately that has helped me a lot:

while I was reading, I was just thinking a lot about what makes God, God. I thought about the significance of him giving man their agency--him giving humans the capacity to do things he could not control. I think to be a God means to be able to create/oversee/deal with things we can't control but to love them anyway. And that is what gives him ultimate control, because such a perfect love is something that won't die when we disappoint him, and will eventually overcome all things. It's a kind of control that doesn't come for the thrill of having power or security; it is not sought after for itself, and is certainly not for God's personal benefit. The kind of control/power God has is a natural side-effect of his perfect love, and ironically can only come to us when we admit, accept, and continue forward in the midst of what we cannot control. It comes when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable in the face of another's agency. God is so powerful because he is so okay with vulnerability; he chooses to have this love for us that is never swayed.

And I thought about how so often we try to make others into objects we can control; like we talk about them as slaves, or women, or enemies, or dumb blondes, or less actives, or some other sort of category like that. Other times we use these categories to blame them, to insist that they really should be acting another way than they are. But these are all deceptions; they delude ourselves into thinking they are nothing more than what we say they are, when in reality they are infinitely more. And we also really try hard to control other people's impressions of us, to make them love us by acting in accordance with whatever categories they place us in.

I think I could do so much more good if I could just grasp the secret of seeking the control that comes from love/vulnerability. I want to love and be loved, but if I try to secure love for myself by trying to control others, I'll never get it. I want to choose to let love come, not make it.

Sorry that probalby made no sense. I love you all  a lot!

Diana