Tired and fat right now - 15th email from Macau

Dear family,

We all just had a huge MacDonalds party. I just ate six cheeseburgers, so I'm very uncomfortable and losing consciousness, so this email may not be the most fluent of all time.

I'm sure that you'll be receiving a letter soon from President Van Dam telling you of my date to come home. I picked it last week but it slipped my mind to tell you last Preparation Day. I'll be boarding the plane on the 7th of August, so I have a little over six months left. I'm looking forward to the next half a year of service, but honestly not really looking forward to returning home. Work and school and all the hassle of life and the distractions of TV and computer games - I'd really rather not ever come home. But Mum, I did promise you that I'd come back eventually, so I will keep that promise. I look forward to seeing you on around the 8th of August.

This past week has been good. We've enjoyed a lot of success and seeing a lot of our good investigators move closer to baptism. We've been working with the W family for some time now and are going to baptize Sister W this coming Sunday. She has asked me to perform the baptism, which caught me by surprise a little bit. But I'm happy to do so, so I'll be donning the whites for the second time this coming Sunday.

Chinese new year is upon us, and it's very interesting to see how they are preparing for it in Macau. Last year on Hong Kong Island, the busiest part of Hong Kong, there wasn't all that much of a difference. There were decorations up and on the first day of the holiday, the shops opened a few hours later than usual. Macau, however, is notorious for being absolutely useless for missionary work during the holiday, and we've seen a fair amount of that. A lot of investigators and members are going for extended holidays to their ancestral villages in the Mainland and a lot more Mandarin-speaking Mainlanders are coming down for the holiday period. It's an interesting switch, but it makes things a little slower for us. Good thing that next week we'll be in Hong Kong for most of the main celebration days, because we have Mission Conference. Instead of a Conference, though, we're going to have an activity where we go to Big Buddha, a giant metal statue on top of a mountain. We went last year, too, and the whole thing is just a tourist trap disguised as a monastery. So it should be a lot of fun. Unfortunately, we won't have a Temple day this Moves because the Temple will be closed for New Year.

But we will have a Temple day right at the end of the Move, when we go back to Hong Kong for a special Missionary meeting with Russell M Nelson of the Quorum of the Twelve. He's coming to rearrange a stake in the New Territories and has called a special Missionary meeting, so Macau will be attending again. This means, however, that there won't be a Mission Conference next Moves, which is unfortunate because it means I won't get the chance to receive my language recognition for a while - my goal is set that I will be a language legend before the end of the Moves. We'll see how this goes, but I'm confident that I can push for it.

The challenge involves learning 3,000 Chinese Characters, including a lot that natives don't even use, so in many ways I've been questioning the usefulness of the test, but I'm too far through now to quit. I know about 2,100. Another part of the test is being able to read the entire Book of Mormon. I was talking with Elder Liu yesterday and told him that I didn't know if I could do this very successfully. I opened up the book at a random place and started reading, to show him how much I didn't yet know. To my complete surprise, I read the entire verse fluently. I opened up the book again in a random place and read two more verses without missing a character. This is particularly surprising because a few months ago I tried reading my way through the Book of Mormon and found that I couldn't do it very well - I didn't know enough characters. Now it seems that I'm doing a lot better. I'm feeling fairly confident about my chances for language legend.

When President Van Dam interviewed me to give me my departure date, he asked me if I was starting to get an idea yet why I was sent to this mission. I'm not really sure still. Considering all of the missionaries that go from England to England, why did God send me to the other side of the world? It certainly is a wonderful experience, and one that I'm very thankful for, but I still wonder sometimes why I was chosen to come here. I expect that in the Spirit World, we'll get to ask about these things and I can find out - but for the moment I'll just be content to enjoy my time here.

Happy Birthday to Jessie - I hope it goes well. Also, please send Chris my love via his mum.

Lots of love to everyone,

Elder Matt Loffhagen