28th email from Hong Kong

Another week over before I realised. It seems like it's always Preparation Day, sometimes, the rest of the week flying by so quickly.

This past week was, of course, General Conference, here in Hong Kong. I'd been looking forward to it for a long time, and was thrilled to get to see it at last. We'd been building up to it for a long time, inviting people to it for pretty much all of the moves. We were expecting to have somewhere in the region of 6 or 7 investigators attending, but somehow they all fell through, one by one, until there was only one person who came for one of the sessions. This was not always their fault - for example, one man called Johnny is a Scottish Born Chinese who doesn't really speak Cantonese but is looking to move here permanently. We invited him and he was really thrilled to go, but somehow he got lost and ended up going to a Baptist church instead! He was surprised when a meeting he thought was going to be in English was in Chinese, and when it finished at 12:30 instead of 2:00. But he was really good about it and once we have the DVDs of Conference we're going to show a session to him. We really don't have any responsibility over him anyway, as he's best left to the International missionaries - but they're always so busy baptising all day every day that they don't have time to meet with people who aren't ready right then and there for a baptismal interview!

I exaggerate, but it's basically how it works.

As it happened, Conference was a really good experience for Lobo - the only investigator who attended. He said he'd have to leave after an hour, but ended up staying for the whole session and then running quickly out afterwards. He still has a really strong desire to develop a testimony - he's been losing sleep over it - but doesn't quite understand the way the Spirit will talk to him. We were supposed to meet with him yesterday, and he even moved his work appointments around to meet with us, but at the last minute something came up and he couldn't make it - he was really sincerely sorry, leaving 3 messages on our answering machine at home. Too bad we were at the church.

It was also unfortunate that we'd scheduled an Area Seventy to fellowship.

He understood, though, and gave us an interesting new insight into the way the Spirit works - he said that generally, the only people who get huge visions, like Joseph Smith, Paul, Lehi, Alma the Younger and so forth, are always required to do something specific. A heavenly vision is a call to action, whether it be restoring the church or a call to missionary work or to travel across the ocean to a promised land. Generally for the rest of us who aren't prophets, the promptings are a lot smaller so as to allow us to exercise faith and agency.

This past Monday and Tuesday was the Zone 24 hour exchanges. This time I was with a brand new missionary, Elder MacAllister, who is really cool. As we walked out of the chapel, I turned to him and asked, "What did you like to do before your mission?" He responded, "I was really into making movies."

I could tell I was in for an interesting 24 hours.

While I forbade us from talking about specific films or anything that would distract from the work, I did learn that he's pretty much thrilled to be in Hong Kong. He really loves Chinese films - Jackie Chan is his hero, and he's been buying and watching films made in Hong Kong for most of his life. Before his mission, he was working professionally on films in lighting, sound, camera operation and various other fun things, and even has a scholarship waiting for him when he goes home. He made a big sacrifice choosing to put his budding career on hold to come on a mission, and was astounded when he got the very mission call he'd always wanted.

Of course, that provides a lot of temptations as well, as Hong Kong is full of things he loves that he can't touch, like films and filming stuff. The Hong Kong film industry is the second biggest in the world (next to Hollywood) and as such, it's hard to avoid his greatest love.

We had a really good time together, teaching and street contacting and "Pak Muhn"ing (literally "knock door") and, he only having been here for 3 weeks, we did a lot of things he'd not done before. On the other hand, I learned a lot from his about being enthusiastic and happy to work, as he has a great fire and a love of sharing with people.

My English fasts have as of yet to succeed. I'm planning on starting one a little later today, but am still having a lot of problems talking to someone in Chinese when all of the other missionaries keep speaking English. But my goal is to have one completed by the end of the moves, so I'm determined to complete my goal. I'm starting it later today because we have a Zone Activity in a little while and I know it'll be too much of a tempation to speak English and I'll have broken my fast before I've started.

My other goals for the moves are going well, though - I've learned the first 200 character cards, from the thousand, and have been picking out character cards from the set that are featured in 2 Nephi 31, as my goal is to be able to read it before May. The cards I've picked out add up to about another hundred, so I've learnt a fair few. I need to spend more time on my spoken, though, as I'm still far from fluent, but I want to get my reading goal out of the way first. The biggest frustration is simply that the characters, being little pictures, stick in my head a lot better than words. I was learning 10 character cards at the same time as 10 words in my language study for a while, before I discovered that I could actually learn 50 characters in the time it took me to learn 10 words! Since then I've kind of been slacking on my spoken.

Anyway, so we're off in a minute for a Zone barbecue - on Monkey Mountain! I've heard legends of the excitement of this place, and all the funny monkeys everywhere, but have as of yet to actually go there. Supposedly some of the monkeys can be pretty vicious at times in their desire for tourists' bananas, but we'll see.

And with that, I'm off. Talk to you next week.

Elder Matthew Loffhagen

羅 長 老