MTC Week 7: Nitro Glycerin and Pending Change

My MTC experience is drawing to a close. I've got 2 weeks left, and it feels crazy.

Some more fun words in Thai:

"God" translates to "Holy person who is boss"

"Stranger" translates to "Person with a weird face", and probably my new favorite:

"Nitro Glycerin" translates to "light yellow liquidy stuff." Seriously.

We got Nong-Thais (new Thai missionaries) this week! We are now the Pii-Thais (old Thai missionaries). It's been a lot of fun helping them adjust and imparting our vast knowledge of MTC life. Once, we were telling them about how much we pray here at the MTC, and then my companion and I showed them the callouses we have on our knees as a testimony. I think it surprised them.

We found out that everyone in my district has had some experience with learning Chinese before the MTC except myself. That's kind of interesting. I feel like the language is coming along fairly well though, based on the progress of my peers.

We also found out that one of our teachers translates for General Conference, which is awesome.

One of our teachers gave us a quote from her companion that was really good. On page 120 of Preach my Gospel under Humility, there's a line that says: "[When you have faith in Christ] you are confident that you can do whatever the Lord requires of you if you rely on him." Next to that Highlighted line, she wrote "When I am nervous or worried about something, I realize that I am trusting in myself when I should be trusting in God. That is pride!" I thought that was really neat, and I know that God will enable us to do everything that we need to do. We can have great peace of mind in knowing that when we do the best we can do, God will make up the difference to help us get to where He wants us to be. And sometimes that may not be where we think we should be, but that's ok.

We got to practice teaching lessons in Thai over Skype with people in Thailand last week, which was awesome. And kind of hard, but that's kind of to be expected. Our volunteer kept making jokes that she thought were funny, but we didn't understand them until our teacher helped us out a bit. It was fun.

One of my friends used this talk by Hugh B. Brown in his farewell, and I requested the URL for it. It's called "Profile of a Prophet," (talking about Joseph Smith) and it's awesome. Here's the link if you want to read it: http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=114

Thank you all for your support!

Elder Parish

We got our name-tags!