Elder Baird's Something About Socks: WEEK 7 MTC: Guess who's preaching false doctrine again? (If you guessed the world you'd be right (also if you guessed me you'd be right as well.....))

This one is long. If you just want something about socks. Please skip to the bottom at this time.

Welp. I'm hoping that one week will not entail me saying something completely untrue and hilarious.

Today is not that week...

Boom, what up, solo Elder Baird here back doing some more missionary action with y'all. (Maybe one day someone besides Roman will get my intros (today is not that day))

It's time again for a weekly synopsis. This is where I write a really long email in Hope's that someone besides my mom will read it. In doing so I make a bunch of stuff up so I sound cooler than I really am, because recognition is more important than telling the truth... Apparently...

Well I guess we should start at the beginning.

Or I could just talk about TRCs.

Actually, let's just start at the beginning.

So after getting done emailing all of you lovely and handsome people I continued my P-day as normal. Then once we got to class that evening we found out that we were doing a skype teaching in under an hour. They had forgotten to tell us and so this was kind of terrifying. This was our first one and so we had no clue what to expect.

It ended up going really well though so no worries there!

Wednesday. My first full day English Fast! Not only was it that, but it was our first non member TRC. This was going to be the first time that I had ever taught a non-member. In Chinese. OWIEHGOSGVS. (That was only about half of what I was feeling)

Needless to say it was terrifying.

We got there and the sister we were teaching, Hua Su Xin, just started talking in Chinese. And it was hard to follow her. Like real hard. I was very humbled that day. Like very very. We taught about how God is our Father and he loves all of us. To which she countered with "well if God loves me why have I never felt it?" To which I didn't respond. Well.. I did. But I don't remember what I said, and all I know is that I didn't know how to really respond in Chinese to her. It was very difficult. But we taught how to pray and asked her to do that so that she could try to start feeling his love.

I then proceeded to try to say that God is our father. 父亲 (fu qin) was the word I was going for. It means father, but respectively. What I said was 丈夫 (zhang fu). This does not mean father. This means husband....

So yes, I told her that God is our spiritual husband... whoooops. She laughed real long about it so maybe it made her happy!

After the lesson I proceeded to collapse onto the floor because I didn't breathe for 25 minutes straight. It was very difficult.

The next time we taught her (Friday) though we asked if she had prayed, she said yes but that she hadn't felt anything. And so that was hard. But then we explained about the Book of Mormon. And asked her to read that Alma 32, someone told me once that it is a good chapter *shrug* *wink* *nudge*

So we teach her again on Wednesday and so we will see what happens then!

On Thursday and Saturday we taught someone named Elanor (don't know her Chinese name) but we taught her about God as well and she also asked why she hasn't felt Gods love and so then we taught her about prayer. She said she would pray and we were like great! This lesson went so much better. Like so much better! I was able to understand and things went well.

When we taught her on Saturday we asked her how her prayer went and she told us that she was having really bad stomach aches and so that morning she had prayed and asked for the pain to go away and her stomach immediately started to feel better! That was a cool miracle to see in her life. But she didn't feel God's love for her in her prayer. So we also taught her about the Book of Mormon and the Restoration of the gospel. At the end of the lesson I felt prompted to ask her to say the closing prayer. So I did and she very happily said yes! So I was like cool! During her prayer I just felt the Holy Ghost like come foully into the room! Peace filled the whole room and I could feel God telling her that he loved her. So immediately after the prayer I asked her if she felt that peace and she said that she did. I then proceeded to testify that that was God's love for her.

I was on the verge of tears while saying this just because of how strong the feeling was. I'm not completely sure how she took it. But it strengthened my testimony for sure. And I'm sure it helped her.

Needless to say teaching her is going a lot better than Hua Su Xin, but I am still very excited to keep teaching her and try to have her have the same kind of experience!

So teaching is hard is basically the short version of all of that. But super rewarding.

Some other things that happened:

-Someone broke my water bottle. I had a funeral and buried it in the garbage can. It was very sad and now I don't have a water bottle. *sigh*

-the word sift is hard to say.

-on an unrelated note, I have not sworn while at the MTC

-one of our teachers left me and so now I'm depressed. She left the whole group of us, but I took it as a personal offense. Yes she is on this email. Will she read this? Who knows.

-The gospel is basically baby food. It's a real good analogy. But I don't want to explain that.

-Chinese is hard. Whoever wrote Chinese should be fired. Who thinks that it is a good idea to make the word excited (qi dai) and the word for umbilical cord (qi dai) the same thing with only one of the tones being different. Like seriously.

-My companion dropped burrito all over everything. So yeh. Now our room smells like burrito which just makes me hungry.

-If you have never listened to the musical "The Garden" you might be able to repent and you should listen to it immediately so that you can be saved.

-This email is very long and my hands are tired.

So yep! There you go! Good luck to the brave souls who read this whole thing. I hope my word throw up is good!

oh, also it snowed. It's funny to watch people who haven't seen snow before see it for the first time. Like lol.

I love you all!

百长老

Elder Baird

Something about socks!

To all of you who just skipped this. You have disappointed me greatly. As any good Smedry knows, you can't just skip to the end without there being severe punishment.

Good luck.

but also, yes these emails are long. I don't expect people to read them. They make me happy to write, so I hope people don't feel obligated. Cause these are more for me than for any of y'all. Just cause I think that I'm more important than y'all. :)))))

So today in something about socks I wanted to share an impression that the spirit gave me during one of my devotionals. They were talking about how David didn't need a sword to kill Goliath. He only needed a stone. The spirit then told me "The Lord has given me things, I don't need a sword if I have been given stones."

I loved that so much! It brought me so much peace and joy. While I may not have a cool flashy sword, I have been given a stone. And that will be the best thing for me to use to be the best instrument in Gods had that I can be :)

2 Nephi 4. That's this weeks scripture assignment. Have fun!

https://photos.app.goo.gl/TTYWoqiS1RYwhFge8