Change, Challenges, and Fun P-day Pictures

Hello mother!

This week has been a bit of a struggle for me, but also pretty good. My new companion is Elder Barfuss. He tells everyone he's from Arizona, so he's not another Utah Elder, but it's like me telling people I'm from Washington :). I'll be honest, I forget his family members. I believe he has four siblings, two older brothers, and a younger sister, but I don't remember who the other sibling is. He's at about 18 months but it's really wacky because he started in Singapore/Malaysia before Covid, got sent home during the pandemic and has now come back, so he started again the same time I started. He was studying Biochemistry at BYU and wants to become a doctor. I like my new companion quite a lot, we talk a lot, but we're not quite where we need to be and I've been getting frustrated these last few days. I miss Elder Zaleski a lot and my last area. We had really worked our area up and it's been going off, but I feel like I just hit a hard reset and have to start over again on getting my companionship to work hard in unity.

I definitely got some reimbursements for travel to Singapore, but I can't actually check because I guess the church is no longer sending the weekly emails with pay/spending reports, or so the financial senior missionary said. Then I got a report for this week but I'm missing the three weeks before that which would have contained my reimbursements, so I'm slightly confused by that.

Hopefully we'll start having a YSA activity for this branch weekly starting this Saturday. It's pretty easy for us to plan and coordinate it, but it's supposed to happen by our YSA representatives. So we're going to get it started, but we're supposed to have them take over so it continues when we leave.

In terms of Chinese, language study has been worse since moving to Cheras. I've also come to find that I really need to work on my listening skills and my speaking skills. I have a good memory and I can memorize things relatively fast, but I cannot understand natives even when they're saying words that I know. Today it reminded me of my Chinese class at USAFA, I could memorize and ace everything on the tests, but no matter how hard I tried, I had to listen to audio clips like 10 times before I could understand what they said, so I didn't get the best grade since I wouldn't finish. Hopefully I'll start working on my Mandarin with a native from the branch soon.

I'm still struggling with a lot of the names, but I'm slowly remembering some. I haven't met most of our 'friends', so we'll probably start giving them back for God to work on them until they're more prepared. However, I have met two of our friends Wei Jie and Jim. Unfortunately, we'll be passing Jim off to another area since he lives in their boundaries, but I think we'll put him on baptismal date before we let him go. Also, in our lesson with Wei Jie this week, Elder Barfuss invited him to be baptized on August 6th and he accepted. He also came to church for the first time yesteday which was awesome.

We had interviews with the new mission president this week and it was actually really great. Our mission president, President Tolman, is massive and loaded. He's of Maori descent and is from America, but he's lived in Malaysia for the last 16 years. He literally just converted his own home into the mission home. I think he also has like 4 kids still at home, so the whole family is going to be helping out and he's super excited for it. He actually lives in PJ, Petaling Jaya, that's where the district center is and also where interviews were held. All of our stuff was shipped there too, so I was able to get my peanut butter and honey. I've used a bit of the honey, but we don't have bread, so I'll have to wait on the peanut butter.

Miracle:

We had put a lot of preparation into one of our lessons and had felt inspired to invite our friend to be baptized on August 6th. However, he hadn't been to church yet, and he will need to go at least three times before then. Before we began the lesson, we were talking to him about work and he told us he would be working on Sunday for the entire month of July and so he wouldn't be able to come to church until after that which kinda threw our baptismal date down the drain. However, as we neared the end of the lesson, Elder Barfuss just invited him to be baptized on that date anyway, and he accepted (not knowing he would need to attend church 3 times before then). Immediately after accepting the invitation to be baptized, and without any prompting from us, he goes 'what time is church again?' We say, "it's 10-12", to which he responds, 'I think I can get things running at work, go to church at 10, and then go back to work afterwards.' LET'S GO!!! (and he did come)

Challenge:

I need to work harder, nothing drains my morale more than not working effectively, and we've wasted a lot of time this week. I tend to either get impatient and contentious in getting my companion to get out and work or I permit it, our relationship is good, but we don't work hard, and I feel horrible about it. I need greater patience, I can't expect someone to go from zero to sixty. There's honestly been a lot of improvement throughout the week, and Elder Barfuss tells me how much better he's been doing and feeling since the exchange, but I'm not where I want to be and keep getting frustrated because of it.

Good News:

We have zone conference this week, and I'm super excited. Also, I think we have some good goals set in place and I'm anxious to achieve them with the help of the Lord and my companion.

Love,

Elder Wardle