Flight Plans Arrived

This week was super good, talked to a lot of people and got to go a ward 'bring your own dinner' with a some volleyball afterwards, so it's been fun.

Language study still feels insufficient, but I'm putting in about an hour everyday, so hopefully I'm improving somewhat. For Facebook work in our mission, each companionship is supposed to do a minimum of 1 hour on social media and a max of 2 hours, with some messaging throughout the day. Only one person is supposed to go at a time so companions can watch each other's screen and protect one another. I didn't know that was a thing for a while, so both me and my companion were doing an hour instead of splitting it.

We often just friend random people on Facebook who live in our areas and try to message them. We also message people who like the mission facebook page or its advertisements. We can also go in groups or post on our own page and we'll message people who like or comment on our stuff. I've been able to teach someone a little in Chinese, his name is Wang and he's from Bejing and we've been calling for a little while, but mostly just to practice, English for him, Chinese for me. His English is 100 times better than my Chinese. He's actually been keeping the first invitation I extended which was to start praying each night. He has been praying, so that lesson went pretty well, but they're fairly informal lessons, it's mostly just us practicing and me sharing little things and giving small invitations.

There's another lady I've been messaging, and we've sent her a couple of 2 minute videos of us teaching a principle, but we haven't done any video calls. We're also teaching a guy from Africa that Elder Winters started messaging, and I have a lesson with a guy from Pennsylvania on Wednesday.

Unfortunately, Nick got sick, but he's starting going back to work, so hopefully we'll be able to meet with him this Thursday.

I guess the bike challenge was for the first half of the week, last Sunday the neighbor let me use his bike. I've been using it everyday since, and I haven't seen him. The mission doesn't have a whole lot of extra bikes. Also, I did use my debit card today, and it works now for sure.

So, I did just get my flight plans, so as long as I don't screw up the instructions and nothing crazy happens, I should leave on the 4th. What's crazy though, the flight itinerary includes a flight back to San Fancisco on August 4th, so I guess if in the next 90 days, I don't get a Visa for Malaysia, then I'll have to go back to the U.S. 😬 😂

Yes, we are the mission social media trainers, so we basically just plan and hold a weekly mission zoom meeting on how to improve the mission social media work. It's only once a week and it's only 30 minutes. I'm not a fan of said meetings, but I've learned to be better at social media work by trying to prepare a training for our meeting each week.

We are teaching Jamie and Tammy. Brother Culsik is actually the nonmember in a different ward that I met on exchange. He has been married to a member for 40 years, but just two weeks ago during our lesson accepted the invitation to take the missionary lessons for the first time.

Miracle:

Tammy's son decided to sit in on the last lesson because he was going through some stuff, and he said he'd be there for our next lesson as well. Also, Tammy told us she wants to be baptized on May 28th!!!

Challenge:

Jamie is so ready for baptism, but has some court issues from a prior relationship that isn't allowing her to be baptized at the moment, so we're hoping that processes soon because she is ready to be baptized the day that goes through.

Goodnews:

I'm going to Singapore!!!

Love,

Elder Wardle