Reuniting With a Dear Companion

Hello, thanks for diligently reading my emails! This week was really good, with too many things to write about in one email. I forgot my journal as well, so I am just going off of my planner and will only be able to write about a few things. The subject line comes from a scare that I went through a few days ago. After biking 40 minutes away to visit an investigator, and then coming back, we were contacting and I went to point at my chest to show the person my name tag and I realized it wasn't there. We had biked so far already, that I figured there was no way I would ever find where it fell off. So, I just took out my all-Mandarin tag and continued with the day. That was around noon. The crazy thing is though, as we were leaving this morning, I found that name tag that I thought I had lost under my laundry! I guess I had forgotten to put on my tag a few days ago (how embarrassing, that is the first time that has happened and I can't believe I wasn't representing the Lord for like 2 hours) because I didn't see it and Elder Rogers didn't notice either. Anyways, I am really grateful that it is with me again because people here don't read Mandarin (only 50% of the Mandarin speakers can read characters), and because it has been with me since the MTC.

Well, that was a long story that most of you might not care too much about. A week ago, after we emailed on P-day, we went to an "escape room" with a lot of our zone. The mall it was in was huge and it had an indoor roller coaster (see pic). Elder Rogers crashed his bike the next day (his tire went in between the metal grates of a gutter) and our phone was destroyed in the process, so we bought a new one (Elder Rogers is Ok by the way, it happened at low speed). Yesterday, we had District Conference (think Stake Conference) so we had all the branches from the district, which encompasses all of Kuala Lumpur, gathered for a meeting. It was the biggest group of members I have seen since the MTC.

We also had some good lessons this week, one of which was with an investigator who is quite open-minded. His name is Alexander and we had already taught him the Restoration. We were planning on teaching him the Plan of Salvation, but halfway through, Elder Rogers and I both thought we should talk about Baptism, and so we did. The spirit was really strong, and we were able to get some good discussions going about baptism, and faith. We found out that his life goal is to help other people, and so we were able to connect that to serving God by serving others. 

My main take away from this week is the importance of loving others. I tried to focus on doing things out of my love for other people, and I found myself working more efficiently and effectively. The spirit was a lot stronger and I enjoyed myself a lot more when I was contacting. You may be thinking that this principle is only applied to missionaries in the field, but I like how it is stated in Alma 34: 27-29: once we have prayed for forgiveness, and have cried unto the Lord for our support, we should always have our hearts drawn out in prayer for our own welfare and for the welfare of others. We need to focus on building up ourselves in order to improve, but in order to reach our fullest potential, we also need to focus on others.

You are all great.

Sincerely,

Elder Allen

Pictures: Biking in the rain

A look at some Indian Food

The Mp3 I bought today for $3.75