"In Christ there is peace" & Job 22:21

What is up my party people! I hope you all had a fantastic week! Here are some of the Highlights for this week!

• We had two different exchanges and they were both super fun! I was with Elder Jenson on Wednesday and Elder Hancock on Saturday! They were both a blast!

• I got offered this drink this week called "Liquid Death!" At the start I was worried it was some sort of crazy energy drink of something. But come to find out its just water in a can haha! But that was cool! 

• We had a super fun lesson this week with our friend, Zhao Hong Feng. He loves basketball so we taught him about how Christ wants us to join his team against the adversary! And he really liked it! Still not interested in the Church much, but he did like that analogy! 

• The leaves have started changing here and they're beautiful! I'll try and get some more pics! 

• We are finding more friends to teach English! We've had a good little influx lately and so that's very very happy! Hopefully we can keep people coming back to our classes haha! 

Alright, this week we're gonna just start out with the low, shall we?! Because that's always fun to just kind of set things up! This week we were helping teach a college student some English. She kept on looking at me and speaking in Chinese that was pretty fast and had a weird accent. I tried my best to understand and would answer back in the best broken Chinese I could muster haha. But after all that, she finally looked at me and said "你的中文很差！你还没有了解!" Which translates to "Your Chinese is very poor! You still don't understand anything!" Sadly for her, but mainly me, that was one of the only things I actually did understand! To say that it was a hit to the ego would be an understatement. We finished talking with her and then came back upstairs and I went into our room feeling defeated and knelt down in prayer. In part of my prayer, I uttered something similar to, "Chinese is so hard, I'm never going to get it! It's just another stressor for me in this crazy time of chaos! Why can't I just learn faster?!" I was lost. I had officially given up all hope; my dreams were crumbling before my face. Obviously not really, but I was still pretty darn crushed and felt weighed down!

The next morning I woke up and thought, ya know, maybe my Chinese isn't great but I can at least try and just work on myself. So in Preach My Gospel there's a page that gives you a self assessment to see how you're doing with Christlike attributes. Looking to see how I could improve, I found myself halfway through the 57 questions feeling quite distraught. Come to find out, I'm nowhere even close to Jesus level! My score was lower in lots of areas than it was the last time I took the test right before I left the MTC! Once again, I sat in my chair and threw my head on my desk and said a prayer. "Heavenly Father, I am failing on all fronts. My Chinese is terrible. I can't teach in English or Chinese. I'm nowhere near Christ. Why am I serving a mission?!" And if you can believe it… I didn't get an answer. I didn't have anything crazy happen. Rather, I had the thought that I just needed to take it slow. And that the next day I should study about peace. 

In this time of feeling like I was failing in all fronts, I thought studying about peace seemed like a good idea. So that's what I did! I went to "peace" in the topical guide. But specifically I went to "peace relating to God." As I scrolled through the verses, I felt somewhat more peaceful. But it wasn't until I reached Job 22:21 that I felt God shake my spirit and say, "This one; this is what I needed you to read." The verse is this: "Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace: thereby good shall come unto thee." I love this verse! It has a very simple promise: Acquaint yourself with him (Jesus Christ), get to know him, be familiar with him and who he is. Then be at peace. If you now know who Christ is, have peace. He has overcome it all. And because he has done this, good will come! What a great message! When I read this verse I felt like the Lord had literally reached out into my life to bring me comfort! This life has some crazy times; there's no way around it! There are going to be times we get knocked; there are times we will have lots going on. Even just the world we live in has so many things going on all at once. But in those moments, if we can center our focus on the truth that in Christ there is peace, good will come! 

In President Nelson's last conference talk he reminded us, "As you let God prevail in your life, I promise you greater peace, confidence, joy, and yes, rest." Now those things are great! We'll have peace, rest, and good will come!... so what's the catch? Well, the catch is Satan! He's never going you want you to feel comfortable! He's never going to want you to feel good about yourself! He doesn't want you to get closer with the one person who's going to give you true peace and happiness. He's going to do everything he can to come at you! So we're still going to have trials. Good doesn't mean easy. 

I was listening to a BYU speech this week and it talked about how God communicates with us, spirit to spirit. But it's been a while since we've communicated like that and we don't remember it! We've been taught to just communicate in a lot of other ways so it's not easy to hear that guidance or always recognize that steady hand in your life! But it's always there. Satan is just good with distractions. However, when we try our best to get rid of those distractions and we start growing closer to Christ, we strengthen our spirit. Like a muscle, however, it needs consistent work! The more and more you use it, the more you will feel a change. I am not perfect at this at all! Goodness, my spiritual muscles are flexing as hard as they can but they're still not the strongest! But I know that as I, and each of you, work on strengthening that spiritual muscle, we'll feel God's peace more. Good will come, because this gospel is good! All answers to all questions can be found inside of this gospel! One day I'll learn Chinese. One day I'll be able to teach in both languages. And day by day, I'm going to work on drawing closer to Christ and demonstrating His attributes. 

I love and pray for you all! I hope you have an amazing week! There is peace in Christ! God is good! 

再见，

司长老