Week 28: Butterworth, Malaysia

Pictures from zone conference

The Ballad of Butterworth

Hello everyone! It has been another exciting week of living in Malaysia! The biggest news is that I am staying in Butterworth with Elder Anglin! Woo hoo! I am excited to be here for another six weeks! 

This week was quite exciting! We did a hike on Monday in a really pretty town a little bit away from Butterworth called Bukit Mertajam, and it was so pretty and not nearly as intense! We got to the top, and found out that you can't actually go to the top, which was too bad. But, we saw TONS of monkeys (more on that later)!

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we had pretty normal days of missionary work. And then, on Thursday, the Elders in Ipoh and Sitiawan came and stayed with us for Zone Conference on Friday. When they got here, we went on splits, so Elder Bishop from Australia and I went together...we spent most of the night fixing my bike (we had to fix the tube two times!), but it was still fun!

The next day (Friday), we had our Zone Conference! Our zone is really small, which made it really fun (there were only 12 missionaries total, whereas when we did Zone Conference with KL there were around 40). Elder Anglin and I gave a training on how to be happy in the work, and we heard some other really good trainings. We also went to a really nice place for lunch, and they had unlimited ice cream! I wasn't a HUGE fun of ice cream in the United States, but it is such a delicacy here that I love it! They had one "corn-flavor" ice cream that tasted exactly like vanilla pudding to me and I may have had a few too many bowls :)

After Zone Conference, we did a "blitz", and so all 12 missionaries stayed in Penang and went out and talked to people. I met a guy from Xi'an, and it was so cool to talk to him! His Chinese sounded so nice...the Chinese here in Malaysia I also love, but it is nice to hear the authentic language too haha :)

On Saturday, the other tire on my bike went flat (3 more times!!), and so we had to fix it a lot. But, we were able to meet with these two really cool guys. One of them is named Mr. Zhang, and he just started randomly texting us, and so we met with him, and he is starting to read the Book of Mormon. The other guy was named Harry, and he is so cool! He had a dream where he saw Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother and lots of white horses and they him they loved him, and he said he felt a lot of peace, and so he was excited to learn more about God. Here in Malaysia, because the Buddhist and Hindu religions focus more on demons and dreams and stuff, all of the people we are teaching have had really cool, interesting experiences, haha!

Sunday was great! We had our 2 hour church service, which was so nice! We didn't even have to teach! Plus, Come Follow Me has been really great! I have been reading the scriptures in Chinese and Matthew 1 was a little confusing (because of the weird Chinese pronunciations of all the names), but I have felt the Spirit really strongly throughout the whole process. We also met with this cool guy named Niel from Indonesia!

I love you all so much! I am so grateful for all of your support and love! My mission has been some of the craziest six months of my whole life, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. I love this crazy old place and these crazy crazy people. And I love you all! I hope you had a great time with New Year and that you have some great resolutions! I love you all so much!

Spiritual Experiences

This week was awesome, as we got to start Come, Follow Me! I really like that the church is starting to move more towards personal conversion at home, and less from church, because a lot of the members here in Malaysia will come to church every Sunday, but they don't really understand or appreciate how the Gospel can bless them on every other day of the week!

So, I decided to hit Come, Follow Me in Chinese! There was one day that I was reading, and it talked about recording what impressions you had. I have always thought that it is really hard to hear/distinguish the subtle promptings of the Holy Ghost, and so I said a special prayer that I would be able to feel/recognize one while I was studying. And then, while I was reading, I had this weird thought that I need to speak more Chinese with Elder Anglin. It was weird because it had absolutely nothing to do with the scripture I was reading about the parable of the sower. But, I decided to follow it, and let me tell you I saw miracles! This week we got along so well and we had such a wonderful week. It helped me to grow my testimony that as we follow little promptings (even as little as speak more Chinese throughout the week), we will be blessed.

I love you all so much! I am grateful for these 2 years to grow closer to Jesus Christ, and learn how to follow the promptings to be better and to stretch more. 

Photos:

1. A picture of the place where we went hiking.

2. Another picture of hiking.

3. A final picture...isn't it beautiful?!

4. Us at the "top" of the mountain!

5. A picture of us with Benson, who is continuing to do well!

There are some other photos but they are too big to put as attachments, so you have to go and download them...but I promise you they are worth it! Here is the story: 

1. While we were on the mountain, we decided to share the gospel to some of the natives! They were not interested...

2. While we were walking back to our Grab car, there was a monkey taking a bath in this tub, and so Elder Anglin tried to take a picture of him, and then all of a sudden his friend jumped at Elder Anglin! Luckily there was a fence to stop him...Elder Anglin got a really good picture mid-action!