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

so thankful I brought my violin‏

Here are some pictures from the past week! In the first one I was on exchanges with Sister Peay. Here's what happened. We were walking along the sidewalk after dinner sipping drinks, and all of a sudden I noticed a mom and daughter behind me, the daughter (about college-age) holding a violin. I said, "You play violin? I do, too!" and her Mom, seeming delighted that an American was showing interest in them, said, "Let her play!" So the daughter took out her violin on the street and I played "Meditation". Then we started talking about the gospel. Turns out they are Christian, so we said a prayer, taught them about the restoration, and the daughter was HOOKED. She kept asking questions that sounded like she was a fake investigator sent from the MTC, like, "How do I know this is true? How do I know Joseph Smith really is a prophet?"It was a really awesome experience, and we took a picture together afterwards.

The other picture is also of a time I got to use violin while proselyting this week! We got invited to a dinner party that was on the roof of an apartment building. It was absolutely beautiful; we were surrounded by tall towers on all sides, and as the night settled in we felt like we were so small in the middle of a starry city and starry sky. The member with the guitar is kind of a hipster, and he has looked up Searching for Celia music because I told him about the band. We jammed together, and it felt like I was jamming with Seb or Robby, it was so beautiful!

I love life!

this week

Dear Family,

I feel so thankful to be alive!
I have learned a lot, on my mission, about faith.
The mission life, as a lot of you old returned missionaries probably remember, is really tough sometimes. They push us to always seek high numbers of lessons taught each week, investigators, baptisms, etc. Sometimes they give us invites to do things that we think are insane, like invite every person to baptism that we teach. And sometimes we fear that all of it is a cruel organization that is trying to impose on our ability to be human.

I have my days when I still feel like that, I'll be honest. But I also have learned an incredible thing over the past year. That when we switch our mindset so we decide to love rather than resent the organizational aspects of the mission, incredible things happen. And we find that maybe it is more inspired than we think it is.

This week, for example, we were invited to invite people to get baptized in every lesson. I heard this and felt nervous, feeling obligated to be obedient but not sure how I was supposed to manage doing this without scaring a million investigators away. So I decided to really pray and study about it. And I decided I would at least have the desire in my heart in every lesson, and determine by the spirit whether or not it was right to bring up baptism.

What happened this week? I found myself thinking of ideas to explain baptism, analogies to use, words to say, that I have never thought of before, even though I have been in Taiwan almost a year. I also found my heart to be humble and oriented towards obedience, even though there were some lessons when I decided not to mention baptism. And we also had SIX investigators commit to get baptized, including the family I thought never would, and a woman who we had asked before and she said no. Not only that, but they all seem to really GET it. The woman said, "Of course I want to get baptized. I want that clean start that Christ can give me."

That was really a beautiful thing.
I have learned so, so much on my mission about the importance of having a full-of-faith, problem-solving attitude rather than a complaining one. Missions, and the church in general, really do give us tough standards sometimes that we want to resent at times. We sometimes really just want to fight back and say its not fair. But when we switch our attitude to one of love, and try to at least do our best, somehow things really do work out.

I really love God. Like really. Sometimes I remember all the doubts I had about the church before, regarding hard-to-handle issues like same sex marriage and polygamy, and in many ways I still have them. But the overwhelming reality of my soul is just that God is real and I love him so, so much. I can't do anything to deny him.

Love you all,

Sister Brown

Ma Yoyo and miracles

Nihao-dy,

Thanks to whoever anonymously sent me the YoYo Ma CD! Or the Ma YoYo CD, as I now know his name is called. Du Jiemei and I love it!

This was a really great week.

Life goes best when I remember what matters, when I am connected to my purpose in life. In my  Sociology classes at BYU, we studied Weber's critique of capitalism. He argues that capitalist behaviors initially emerged out of protestant religion valued hard work, frugalness, dedication, etc.  So people lived pursuing these ideals, which made them great money-makers, but eventually these patterns of success became a more rigidly established routine and got separated from their inital purpose--which was to please God. He called capitalism an "iron cage"; "iron" because the system of capitalism became so powerful and established in society that it is nearly impossible to escape, "cage" because it traps us. He said because capitalism eventually became disconnected from its religious roots, it runs the risk of being an entirely meaningless, money-making system that doesn't bring real joy in life. Maybe this is too broad, but I think it's very similar to the argument Christ made against the Scribes and pharisees, or that Abinadi made to the priests of King Noah--that the systems they used to order life (Law of Moses), were empty and meaningless when disconnected from God. The purpose of the Law of Moses wasn't written on their hearts.

Anyway, my worst fear as a missionary is going along with the system while being disconnected with the meaning. It is surprisingly easy to slip into routine, and it is a daily struggle to counteract it with constant striving for personal improvement, sincere prayer, scripture studies that really engage my soul, and just trying to never, ever forget what I am really doing.

One of the ways I try to do that is by reminding myself to love and be happy. I think that is the purpose of the gospel, to teach us how to view every person, every flower, every piece of bread we put in our mouths as the incredibly valuable, beautiful thing God created it to be. To love people and things with the love Christ embodied. I On my mission, I have experienced that there is nothing more joyful then just sinking into whatever is around you. Sometimes I wake up early in the morning and pull myself out of bed just to take pictures of the sunrise, or of my slippers on the floor. I don't know why, but I just love it all.

I also really love sinking into lessons. Just listening to what others are saying. Listening with my whole being. Yesterday I had a lesson with a woman who moved from China to Taiwan to escape a terribly abusive relationship. She cried and cried. She talked  about how Chinese culture doesn't really value women, and her Dad never wanted her because she was female. She never graduated high school because of a lack of financial support from him. She works now in Taiwan selling make up, and is just thankful to be safe. I had no idea what to say, as I listened. But I felt so aware of her suffering, and my heart was frantically searching for the most loving, true thing to say in response. What I said probably was not perfect, but I tried to use a filter of compassion to understand her, and I think because of that what I said was good.

I have learned SO many interesting things about China, since coming to Taiwan. I think their culture is both awe-inspiring and terrifying. They are so brilliant--I have heard about how they manufacture and sell foods pretty much entirely made out of plastic or chemicals, but which look and taste exactly like real eggs, meat, vegetables, etc. That is an incredible scientific accomplishment that on one level really deserves to be admired. But selling this to ignorant consumers kind of manifests the danger of a culture that is so driven by money and so disconnected with things like religion, or questions that bring moral guidance to our lives. It seems to be all about money, for them. The woman we met with yesterday asked me several times if I was paid to represent the church, because she thinks I look like a model. She couldn't seem to grasp the idea that I really was a volunteer, acting in at least large part out of the sincerity of my heart, and wasn't receiving any financial support. And I can see why; she is someone who has lived in such desperate circumstances; I don't think she has been ALLOWED to conceive of her own life choices as including something like voluntary service.

And that's why the gospel is so, so important. Because if we are continually reminded of our purpose for living, which is to have joy, and to value everything around us, then this woman wouldn't be in this situation. Her dad would have loved her and treated her well, and her husband would have, too. And all China's cool scientific improvements could be used for the good of others rather than personal financial benefit.

Anyway, life is really good. I am trying to be happy and thankful at the end of each day, and the result is that things just feel magical sometimes! Stuff really happens that sounds like stuff out of movies. Last week I started talking to a woman at a stoplight. She set up to meet with us the next night. She said that night she had chosen for some reason to walk home from work instead of take the bus, and she didn't know why. She said she had been really sad and walking aimlessly, for an hour. When she saw me at the stoplight, she thought of all the times she had seen missionaries before but hadn't been interesting, but this time she knew in her heart that she was ready. So when I invited her to meet with us, she accepted.
Like really, she said all of that. The scary thing is I was almost too shy to talk to her.

I love you all so much! Take care,

Sister Brown

Qinai de jiating han pengyou,

I cried this week. But I also had nights kneeling by the blue comforter on my bed, looking out the window at the starry city before me, and as I opened my heart to God I felt so overwhelmed with gratitude, I could have screamed with joy. I didn't know what it was, but there was something inside me that I wanted to give-- that I wanted to give to the streets and towers and people outside the window. Maybe a smile, or a listening ear, or a comforting scripture. There was just a feeling of wanting to give everything I could to the universe, and just as importantly--as such grand thoughts often direct me--to the person sitting on her bed next to mine, writing in her journal.

My new Companion is Du Jiemei. She reminds me a bit of Dory from Finding Nemo--a tad forgetful at times, but bubbly, optimistic, and spontaneous. She has really cute sneezes that at first I thought were overreactions--her whole body folds in half, and she slowly lifts her torso in recovery as if coming up from a stretch. Then she goes on with her life as if nothing happened. Whenever she remembers something of slight to serious importance, she will jump and shout, "Ooohhh" so i think maybe she saw a cockroach, but no--it was just that she just realized we left the AC on in our study room.

She is relaxed about everything. Sometimes I can't decide if life is a big deal or not, but I tend to think it is. She balances me by reminding me that sometimes when you call a million referrals and no one has interest or you end up wasting half an hour finding lost keys or when you worry that none of your investigators are progressing--that life really isn't THAT big of a deal. When I'm tempted to be discouraged, she builds me up and makes me laugh. I feel kind of like I am companions with Mary. She is just such a supportive, loving, happy influence in my life. I think God sent her to save me because last transfer was super hard on me.

Here is something I wrote in my study journal this week, that I feel captures some of the things I think about on a daily basis:

"Often, I am confused at how I am to have any credibility to speak. If I haven't experienced all there is to experience in the world--old age, cancer, rejection from parents, drug or pornography addiction, the death of a loved one poverty, adversity of any kind--how do I have any credibility to speak to others who do have these experiences? To tell them they need the gospel of Christ sometimes seems to ignorantly pin a description and accusation on them, to totalize their experiences. As politically-correct modern society right claims, to pretend we can grasp and totally understand another person's experience is an immoral thing to do.

I feel like the atoment has something to do with this, and answer this quesion in some way. In the scriptures we learn that Christ literally, physically experienced all forms of suffering--not in a distant, abstract, imaginative way, but in the flesh. He bled, sweated, and cried. He "descended below all things, that he might comprehend all things, and be in and through all the things" (D&C 88:6. To me, this suggest the virtue of always seeking to understand, to comprehend the lived experience of those who suffer, to not make ignorant claims about their situations.

And yet I can't help but think that the human soul is such a precious, particular thing that even CHrist cannot control it. He cannot grasp it, make it do what he wants it to do. Instead, what he seemed to do was lower himself to our level of suffering so he coule be in partnership with us, on our way out of it. He descended to our lvel so he could provide a credible invitation to leave and overcome our suffering, the way he did with his. He did this by choosing to love, choosing to succor us instead of complain. Having suffering more than any single individual, he invites us to do the same, to be calle dout of our own sufferin gin order to feel sympaythy fo rhim. This is love. His suffering gives us something outside ourselves to seek to understand and lovingly respond to."

I have to go. Sorry for the typos.

Love you all!

Pic

Dear Everyone,

On Saturday we had three incredible friends of mine get baptized. Here is a picture. From left to right: Sister Yao, me, Sister Weng, Sister Zhou, Sister Lin, Sister Du, Elder Forbes.
They really are my friends. I don't like just calling them investigators because when I look at their faces I don't think about how many lessons I've had with them and how much scripture reading they've done this past week; I think about the time we went to visit Weng Jiemei at her house and laughed at her grandpa who had fallen asleep in the middle of the hallway, or about teaching Lin Jiemei English, and of Zhou Jiemei and all of us laughing so hard and getting excited about how cute her self-chosen baptismal clothes are. (She is the one in the middle.) I really love these girls and won't ever forget about them. They really are my friends. That being said, I feel we are friends because it started out as a missionary-investigator relationship. We teach the missionary lessons when we teach, of course, but teaching is also basically just an excuse to have really good, deep conversations with people. I have cried with all of these girls, and shared my troubles and my own process of faith with them, and they have shared theirs with me. I have gone out to eat with all of them, met a lot of their friends and family, talked about their interests and plans for their futures, made sure they had my facebook information so I can add them when I get back, etc.

One of the coolest epiphanies all missionaries hopefully wake up to at some point is the one about how they can be themselves and get the job done. They don't need to be an indifferent, formal, picture-perfect missionary. And our weaknesses totally find their way into helping people, as well. I have told people so many times about my companion who had depression. It prevented her from doing some aspects of the work (like finding) super well, but she had INCREDIBLE abilities to sympathize with and comfort people, in lessons. All weaknesses maybe shouldn't be called weaknesses and perhaps just should be called characteristics that have the potential to inspire or collapse the light of life within all of us, depending on how we use them.

I also have a new companion, Du Jiemei! We are Sister Training Leaders. (It's kind of like being a zone leader, a new position they made because now there are a million sisters in every mission.) She is really great. I will write more about her next week. She is also Taiwanese. (YES! CHINESE  IMMERSION!)

I am doing great! Sorry not a lot of time to write this week, I have to get going.
Love you all!

SIster Brown

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