Flight Plans!!

Never thought this day would come! We finally got our flight plans for Taiwan this week! We report to the Travel Office at 7:20 am on July 25th. This is officially our final week at the MTC and we're all itching to get out! 

The Elder who joined our District from the other Zone this week ended up deciding to go home on Wednesday. There were several different things that influenced his decision, but we were sad to see him go even though we only knew him for a few days. We're now back in our previous companionship's instead of in a trio.

Since it's almost time to report to Taiwan, we've been prepping all of the different Missionary Lessons we'll be teaching to make sure we're ready to give them at anytime. We'll be doing a lot of street contacting in Taiwan, so we've been focusing on doing an entire lesson in only 2 minutes. It's tough but at the same time it is extremely powerful to teach simply. A lesson doesn't need to be an hour long to be effective. Teach with the spirit and a love for who you're teaching and the spirit will do the rest. 

At the Sunday Night devotional last night I was able to get one of the Mandarin Translation headphones and listen to the entire devotional in Mandarin Chinese! It was really fun to get to see how much of the devotional I could understand. I could still hear the actual speaker through the headphones so I was able to hear what they said in English also if I didn't understand the Chinese. I thought I was going to be completely lost but I ended up understanding maybe 20% of it... or maybe more like 10%...or 5%... but either way it was a fun experience! Once I get to Taiwan I already know I'm not going to understand a single thing anyone says, so this was a good chance to start preparing for that haha.

Since it's our last week of 9 at the MTC it's awfully hard to stay focused, so as a result we've talk a lot with our teachers on setting goals and staying focused not only in this last week at the MTC but for the rest of our mission. He challenged us to memorize 50 words a day for the rest of our time at the MTC. We're here for 8 more days... so I have 400 words to memorize over the next week. It'll be tough but at the same time help me stay focused and begin to memorize conversational type vocab instead of just Gospel focused. 

This week we watched a talk by Elder Holland called, "Open Your Mouth". After listening to it I'm more excited than ever to get into the field, but one specific line that has stuck with me was, "Truth, to be truth, has to be stated." My goal in Taiwan is to never be scared to open my mouth. Talk to everyone, even though the language barrier will be tough. If I open my mouth, it will be filled.

Elder Smith (Shi Zhang Lao)