Time Really Flies! - 26th email from Hong Kong

Dear Family,

It's hard to believe that it's Preparation Day again already! I guess that's a sign of having lots to do and actually doing it!

This week has been an interesting week. There has been a lot more fun finding with Elder Gwok, some teaching, and, a few hours ago, a fun trip back to the 1,000 Buddhas. We went as a district to go see it all, and I figured I had to take advantage of the little gift shop they have inside the temple (which is kind of unsual if you ask me, but perfectly in line with typical Chinese religious and business practice) and bought a little trinket to ship home for Christmas.

I had my interview with President Van Dam this past week. It went pretty well - President Van Dam asked me how I was doing with my new responsibility as senior companion, and asked me what new things I'd learned. We then both shared some scriptures about the Saviour from the Bible, and he told me about how much he felt I had improved, about how he could see in me how much I'd grown.

I guess I must be doing something right.

There are, in total, many, many thousands of characters in the Chinese language. Not sure how many exactly, but basically, a lot. The 1000 character cards I'm working on at the moment constitute a lot of the most basic characters, and there's an additional 3000 to learn after them for the next level of language pass-off. Also, the Book of Mormon contains a lot of strange and obscure characters that even natives struggle to read - unlike in English when we can sound out a work, they can only do that to a degree with characters, so it's very confusing.

It sounds like Jess's doing really well at the moment. Grandma sent me a letter this week (and $200, which got me through my last little bit of rough time before my new money came) and said that Jess seems a lot more grown up now - and pointed out how big Timmy is now! Keep up the good work everyone!

I hope everything goes well for Grandad and Grandma and they have safe operations. I'll put their names on the prayer roll when I go to the Temple.

It's funny Dad should mention hairdressers - I'm going for a haircut myself after email. Hopefully I won't find my future wife in there! :P

Just to let you know, the American Mother's Day, as far as I've been told, is the second or third Sunday in May - the Sunday after my birthday, I think. So I'll be calling sometime around then. I'll find out more as I get closer to the time. It's still quite a while away, but will probably come soon, and remind me again how long I've been here.

We had a zone conference last Friday, and it really confused me to discover that I was one of the oldest missionaries in the zone! There were all of these missionaries that I didn't know, who were younger than me! The count in the zone at the moment is 13 missionaries older than age as me, and 14 younger than me. Plus Elder Weagel, who came here with me. Interesting to realise I'm in the older half of the zone - but then I guess I should expect that, being senior companion and all.

I realised the other day that, now being General Conference, it was exactly a year ago that we were sitting in a caravan in Cornwall, and Chris texted me to tell me he was going to Manchester. I was pretty concerned that I'd end up staying in England too; I wonder what I'd say to myself if I could go back in time one year and tell me all the things that have happened this year? I'd probably tell myself not to worry, but to spend some more time memorizing scripture references, to make it easier to navigate Chinese scriptures where you don't have the luxury of reading the verse to check if it's the right one!

Then on the other hand, I wonder what I would say if I met the 2009 version of me - one more year ahead in time? Probably something very similar, like focus more on reading the scriptures in Chinese and be sure to keep moving forward and progressing in knowledge and teaching skills.

And then I dread to think what 2018 me would say. Probably "Stop wasting time! Soon you'll be 30!"

Unfortunately, this past week, we haven't been able to schedule Chan Jai. I'm worried that his interest in the church may have only come from really liking the Elder who was here before me, Elder Chan, who has since gone home, and he now has very little interest in hearing the Gospel. He won't pick up his phone anymore, so we can't get hold of him at all.

On the other hand, Lobo is really growing - we gave him a copy of Our Search for Happiness, which he has fallen in love with. He says the book touches on every question he had in his mind, and now he really wants to do what M Russell Ballard says to do at the end of the book - pray and develop a testimony. He really has a strong desire to develop his testimony, and is really diligent in keeping his commitments. He's read in the Book of Mormon (even though he finds it difficult because he wants to read in English and there are a lot of big words in it) up until Nephi cut off Laban's head, which he didn't like too much. He said he understood the importance of doing what God asks us to do, but thought it was cruel. I tried to explain that it was necessary for the Nephites to have the records, but he still seems a little hesitant about that. He currently has a much stronger testimony of Our Search for Happiness, but is still working on the Book of Mormon. He's off to the Mainland this next week for a holiday the people here have called the Ching Ming festival; a big Ancestor Worship thing, and is taking his mother to see their ancestral village.

Next week should be good; Mission Conference on Wednesday and General Conference on the Saturday after that - they have it a week later here because otherwise it would mean going to conference at 3 in the morning - and I thought 11pm was too much of a stretch!

I hope that you all enjoy General Conference very much; it'll be a great opportunity to hear President Thomas S Monson speaking to us in General Conference for the first time since becoming President of the Church. It'll also be good for a lot of our investigators next week - we actually have a lot of people we've been telling about it, who seem really interested to hear what a prophet has to say, including one Scottish man called Johnny we ran into a while ago - we gave him a little tour of the church, and taught him a lesson. He was so nice - really wanted to let us know he wasn't sure if he wasn't sure if he believed any of it, but was really interested to know more. We invited him to come to General Conference, as it'll be in English, and he can see a Prophet in action, so to speak, and he seemed really interested. That was about 2 weeks ago, but I ran into him on the street again recently and he said "I'm still up for that thing on the 13th - give me a call." So that should be really good. He's of Chinese origin, so his Cantonese is alright (when he lived in Scotland, his family ran a takeaway) but his English is his native tongue. That said, he has a job here now and is doing pretty well with things. It should be good to watch a session of General Conference with him next week.

Anyway, time's running out. I love you all and hope that you're all doing well. Keep up the good work everyone!

Elder Matthew Loffhagen

羅 長 老