Missionary Fun

Week 30

After Wu Ji's baptism fell through, I started to study a little bit more about baptism, why it happens, why is it such a big deal to us missionaries? I kind of just accepted it, I never really understood why?

I eventually ended up in D&C 20:37, and it listed all the things we do to qualify for baptism. I realized that remission of sins does not save us, that covenanting with God (no matter how blasphemous this sounds) does not save us. It is everything we do and learn BEFORE we get baptized that saves us and then it is the Gift of the Holy Ghost, the most amazing Gift from our Heavenly Father, that helps us stay on that path. (2 Nephi 31:17-18)

Look, before all the investigators get baptized, I want them to meet that standard in D&C 20:37, being humble, repentant, having a broken heart and a contrite spirit. Because these things signify they now understand that we can’t make it on our own. We cannot have a fullness of joy in this life or the next on our own. We are in a fallen state. But at the same time, the investigators (and ourselves) realize that we have a loving Heavenly Father, who we can trust. We can trust his commandments to guide us home, we have hope and joy. We know what we need to do and we know in whom we can trust. And at that point, we get baptized. And then the Holy Ghost can testify to us every day, we are on that straight and narrow path, we are the found sheep and the good shepherd has put us on His shoulders and we are among our brothers and sisters in the fold.

Baptism is just an appendage; the real thing (as it has always been) is being converted unto Christ. Is trusting in the arm of God and not in the arm of man. I hope I can strive every day to remember this, I am so grateful for this chance to bring people unto Christ.

I love you all, I hope you have a great week. That is so awesome you went to Hailey’s farewell, you guys are all so cool. Everyone looks so grown up! I miss you all more than you can know.

Love,

Elder Burrito Jr. (El Burrito Jr is a pretty slick restaurant, I’ll snap a pic next week)

What’s that movie with the white haired guy and Julia Andrews???

RUNAWAY BRIDE!!!!!! AHHHHH! -  more like runaway baptism. Worst P-Day of my life (so far). First Elder Yang gave me this haircut (see pictures) and then we visited Wu Ji's apartment because he skipped out on church Sunday.

So here is what happened. The lights were on so we knew that he was there, we knocked like three times and waited for 10 minutes and we didn’t get any answer. But we knew he was inside. So, being the fool that I am, I saw that the door was not closed all the way, so I decided to knock a fourth time, really hard, and see if the door would swing ajar. It worked, and next thing I know Wu Ji is standing in front of us in his boxer shorts. It was pretty funny and we all laughed it off and just let it go that he was ignoring us not 30 seconds ago.

But then Wu Ji went on to tell us that he just can’t stop working on Sunday. Now that alone isn’t that big of a problem, but he just expressed to us that Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father can’t help him if he is hungry, or they can’t help him keep his apartment, that they just can’t help him in these areas, so that make work more important. Now you see, that right there is a problem!! Because the only thing I ever, ever want to teach an investigator is that we need to humble ourselves before the Lord and realize that we just cannot do it on our own BUT that we have a loving Heavenly Father we can trust in, we can follow his plan, and he will provide.

Long story short, we asked him if he still wanted to be baptized, and he said he would be there on Sunday. He was not there on Sunday, we called it off at like 9pm Sunday night, and it was the worst experience having to call all the members. I never want to cancel a baptism again. We haven’t heard from Wu ji since that Monday, it’s a pretty weird situation. Man, I feel like this Letter is getting depressing, LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT SOME HAPPY STUFF BECAUSE MISSIONS ARE FULL OF IT!!!

So we have a land-lady, her name is Rosa and she speaks Spanish. But as missionaries, we need to open our mouths and talk to everyone and love everyone. Not just Chinese people, or Asian looking people (I still can’t tell the difference) but everyone. So we started chatting, and giving them cookies when members gave us cookies. And they started to warm up to us, and then eventually they told us they were members of the church, but they have been less active for 15 or something years, but seeing us (the missionaries) again inspired them to make church a part of their life again. And Rosa and her husband and their younger daughter and her son (who are super cool) went to church. And we saw Rosa after church and she said it was so amazing. She said she has been suffering with like an eye diseases for a while and it was pretty painful, but she went to church and all she felt was peace and calm and her eye didn’t bother her. And she told us that the Spanish sisters were going over to her house this Wed. AND she told us she has a Chinese friend she wants us to meet and teach about Jesus Christ. So that’s super awesome! That really got me through this week. 

It just goes to show, small and simple acts of good are amazing tools for the Lord to work with. Just like PMG says, if we pray for opportunities to do good AND pray that we will recognize those opportunities AND that we pray will have the strength to follow the promptings, we will be led to people that are ready to hear the gospel. I know that I have so much fear. Fear that I will not know what to say, or how to answer a question. But I know that through going out of our way to help somebody, we teach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not in some fancy word play, but through our actions. Through our action we stand as Witnesses of God, we fulfill our baptismal covenant to stand as witness of the God at all times.

I am so grateful God has given us opportunities to fall, so we can know exactly what it feels like to fail and be down trodden and when we see another person in the same situation, we will know we have to be there for them, we have to help them. I know this Gospel is true, and that people and families need it!

Love you guys so much, sorry if this letter was weird.

Elder Burr

My haircut

ElderYang

RainMan

HELLLOOOOO!!!( Mrs. Doubtfire voice),

I still cannot believe I have not seen and contacted and preached to a celebrity yet. I need Robin Williams to be a Boy Scout Troop Leader! I feel like I just described the plot of a summer family friendly comedy.

So it rained a lot! That was cool. It was a nice chance for a change up of weather and for service! Holding umbrellas for our English Class students.....but no one came so I didn’t get to hold it for everyone....BUT THATS ALRIGHT!!

Wu Ji is on his way!! I am so excited for him, put it on the calendars, March 16th!! He is such an awesome, loving, simple, sweat wearing man. He is so humble and relies on the Lord and is so late to all the dinner appointments with members. We had a dinner together with the Huangs at 5:30, so I told Wu Ji to be there at 5:00 in preparation for him being late and he shows up at 6:15! It was pretty funny, the Huangs took it in stride.

The most spiritual experience I had this week was teaching the Recent Convert lessons to Darren and Wenqi. All I did was ask them questions like "Why does God wants us to have the Gospel?" "Why did the Gospel need to be restored?" deng deng. Just to review and stuff. And hearing their responses and hearing their testimonies of the restored Gospel, was so powerful!! I can’t believe how much they have grown.

Testimony meeting in Church was awesome too! The guys started talking about video games and Half-Life, but it was still so spiritual. BUT the best part for me was when Tiffany shared an experience where she had a friend that couldn’t have a baby. And Tiffany then told her friend that God loved her and wants her to be happy and she will pray for her to have a baby. And like 3 or so weeks later, Tiffany’s friend successfully conceived (is that the right terminology??) It was such an awesome story of trust and faith, but what really, really touched my heart was that I realized, Tiffany knows that God wants us to be happy and she knows that everything we receive in life is from God, with the sole purpose of making our lives better. Everyone needs to know this, everyone in the WORLD!!!

We had the chance for a mini-missionary this week. It was pretty cool and President Weidman told us to look for miracles. The entire mission, it has been hard for me to understand miracles. I pray for them every day and I know with all my heart that God can do it, but a lot if things have not worked out with people that really need it, like Mia and I don’t really understand why. But it was cool, this week, so we had a pretty lame weekend with the mini-missionary. I really tried my best to give him an opportunity to see a miracle, but nothing really happened. But the last house we visited, the very last one. As we sat on that porch, I was praying on the inside that something would happen. So Lewis Hong opened the door. An American born Chinese that speaks perfect English, he is like 30 something and Buddhist. We didn’t go in and teach, but he said we could come back next week. Next week we will visit him and he may or may not be home. But I know God opened that door, and I know that he answered my prayer, in His own way, for my own good.

Love you guys so much!!

P.S. haha thanks mom for sending me a Taiwan travel guide so I know how much cooler Amanda's mission is!! haha JK LOLZ!!

I am finally a real missionary

Alright, I am still not a real missionary BUT I did real missionary things, like walking. So our car got snatched up by the mission home, so we were car-less for 3 days. And considering we cover half the mission and part of the Long Beach Mission, it was pretty interesting what we could do. I learned that the public transportation is super unreliable, Jehovah Witnesses come out on Saturday, and homeless become your friend if you give them granola (thanks Hayden) but it was super liberating to just get out and use my God given feet and my earthly father given Johnston & Murphys (thanks pops). I mean, I only talked to about one Chinese person the entire time, but I got to talk about the Gospel a fair amount and get some referrals for other missionaries so it was time still well spent.
 

We went to the Visitor Center with Wu Ji. He should still be baptized on the 15th of March. He had a Sabbath Day problem, but when we were at the Statue of Christ, and we could all hear his words from the Bible and the Book of Mormon, the spirit was just so strong and Wu Ji was like " it’s too much, I know I have to keep the commandment, I can’t not keep them, it’s what God wants me to do and He loves me so much, I just have to." It was super cool, He is a super awesome guy. Thanks you English class!!!

 

This morning, I read D&C sec 120 and 121, it’s about Joseph Smith in Liberty Jail. I guess for the past 2 weeks I have been feeling a little sorry for myself, these passages of scriptures really helped me. Heavenly Father gets really intense with the Prophet, like really terrible things will happen to him, and the Lord just ends it so strong, "The Son of Man Hath descended below all of these. Are you greater than he?" I was just bought to tears, Christ really did suffer everything, everything. Every possible thing that happens in our life, in our families, on the news on the other side of the world, whatever. He felt it all, for us. I am so grateful God gave me so many opportunities to remember this. I mean I have his name on my chest, I should remember it every second of every day. But just feeling my testimony get strengthen, is such a miracle to me.

Thank you for all the love!! I love you guys so much. Hey Dad! Learn some Cantonese and go to TRC! Lay Hou Ma? 

Elder Burr

Changes

Family,

So, I guess I should do some explaining' of what went down last week. So I was hanging out with Elder Lee, we had just POWED some MIAN, and warmed up some spicy tofu. We were super excited to have a relaxing P-Day and do some preparation to tear our area up, when I get a call from the AP's, so the first thing he says is, " Elder Burr, I’m going change up your day a little bit. And I start telling him, " don’t you do it! don’t you do it Elder Pollard!!!" and he is just like ,"BAHM your training!" aaahhhhh never a dull day in the CLAM. So my new comp is Elder Yang, I would send a pic, but I think he hates me so it’s not a good time for us to be standing that close to each other. so maybe after some love unfeigned and pre-bedtime hugs, I can manage a smile out of this lug. So he is 18 years old, straight out of Taiwan, when he was 14, he was the 2nd best League of  Legends player in Taiwan ( a videogame) so maybe we can finally convert all those Asian gamers we have been running into! 

So, our area, we finally got to make Terresa an investigator!! I have known her on and off since like my 2nd month in the field. What drove her to us was she found out a co-worker was practicing Voodoo and felt like her Agnostic ways didn’t quite offer her any protection, but hey! People have started investigation over stranger things.

Our new apartment is really spacious. It’s nice and old, like a church, whenever I shower, I feel like I am showering at John Hancock Charter School. There is like some Chinese secret Christian society that works across the street from us, we are going to barge in, Book of Mormon in hand and what not. Probably something a little more subtle. It is so terrible to run into Chinese people with a Christian background, because I couldn’t Bible bash in English, let alone in Chinese. A little old Taiwanese lady told Elder Yang he was going to burn in he-double hockey sticks but I was talking with some nice ladies from Beijing about English class so I am still in a state of innocence. 

So I gave a talk in the English ward last Sunday, it was about the family history work, I am so grateful mom sent me that story so long ago!! But I shared a scripture that I feel like affects us on a much broader scale, it’s in D&C 64:33 and it says “out of small things proceedeth out that which is great." So I really love this because, on my mission, and looking back on my life during late night mind TV time, my biggest problem is rationalization of little things. I would have this mindset that in the percentage of the world, there was going to be some bad that would have to happen and that it was alright for me to add to it because everybody else would add to the good. Little mistakes that didn’t even lead to bigger mistakes. Little mistakes that just stayed there. that become habit and rote. I realized my small mistakes, that I have every excuse to commit, were holding me back so much. And I know that God is so happy when we stop our little mistakes. Because He knows we have a million reasons to keep at it, but that our trust and love for Him is greater than them all. He is so happy. We really do express our love for God when we keep the commandments. 

I love you so much! Thank you for the valentines candy dad and grandma and grandpa and SISTER ARNOLD!!! I will give the candy to the nicest or craziest hobo I meet, whichever comes first. 

Tote Zeins

Elder Burr 

P.S. my comp wants the Best 2 Years soundtrack, this can be a peace offering!!!! 

A New Year

Hey Family,

Sorry about the lack of email's the past couple weeks, so we totally set aside time for emails last week, but we get to the library, and I get all settled in and ready to share my personal small plates of Alex Burr and we get a call from our Ward Mission Leader and the Branch President all wanting to move around our investigators baptismal date, it was an intense hour and a half but it all worked out good. So last week, I guess you could say I was too busy to email because I was baptizing, which seems like a pretty good deal!!!

So this Saturday, Lisa got baptized!! If you don’t know Lisa, she is Betal Liu's wife. If you don’t know Betal Liu, let me refer you back to my November emails. So about a month after I came to Los Angeles, Betal was baptized. He was taught by Elder Bergeson and Elder Bowman. A week after he was baptized, Elder Bergeson’s time was up and he went home, so Elder Bowman and I started to teach him the New Convert Lessons. And His wife started to sit in on the lessons! So as we taught the lessons to Betal and Lisa learned them for the first time because before she didn’t have an interest, but after seeing the change in her husband, she wanted to learn more and at the beginning of like our 2nd lesson she just comes up to us and said "I want to be baptized, I want to be sealed in the temple".  It was so awesome. It was such a miracle from the Lord that she turned towards the Gospel, because when I first met her, she had no interest at all. But she started praying with her husband, she came to church to see him get confirmed, she was touched by the spirit and she knew it was true. That was what turned her heart around, the spirit of Christ which is in all of us, that helps us realize our divine heritage!!  It was also so awesome seeing Betal baptized her! A complete family, that’s pretty cool to think about.

Sunday came, and it was Fast Sunday, Samson and Tiffany and Betal all shared their testimonies. Samson is so funny, he shared a story that they were up in Chinatown shopping on the day of Lisa’s baptism, and Tiffany wanted to go to this one shop or something and when they finally made it there, it was time to turn around and come to the baptism, and she did. Samson said something like, “changing a girl is hard,  changing a girl that loves to shop is impossible, but the gospel can do anything." haha it was way funny, everyone in the Branch loves them.

So Darren and Wenqi are getting baptized this Saturday, they are also a hilarious young couple that I love and care for with all my heart. So they were being taught back in like September and were all ready to be baptized but they had to go back to China and get married, so they left for China and when they came back in January, they were a little different. They had not been reading or praying and they really had lost their faith and didn’t want to be baptized anymore, but  it was such a miracle, we had Samson and Tiffany go with us to a lesson, and them sharing their own experience and their own testimonies of faith and enduring to the end, really changed them, and Darren and Wenqi started to coming to Church again and reading and they found their faith. It was such a miracle that Samson and Tiffany got baptized when they did, they are so similar to Darren and Wenqi and were the perfect match for them!

Well, transfers also came, Elder Bowman is going to UCLA and I am staying in the Branch down in Palos Verdes/ Torrance. BUT they are splitting our area so 2 Chinese elders will have PV and 2 will have Torrance. So I am moving apartments, which I am pretty happy for because I am sick of having to massacre the ants that invade our apartment every night at like 4 in the morning. My new companion is Elder Chun from Hong Kong, so his dirty Cantonese will corrupt my dirty Mandarin!! He came in a couple months after me, which means I am going Senior....whatever that means. JK I know what that means, ya li duo yi dian!! MORE PRESSURE!! But hey, if we never had trials or stresses in our life, we would never become the person God wants us to be. So many times we see people who are comfortable in their life. Whether you are on the mission or at home, the rule still applies, you are either moving forward or you are moving backwards. I am so grateful I have a loving perfect Heavenly Father who gave me the opportunity to have ETERNAL progression, and who gave me this time on Earth to prepare for that life. I am so grateful that he loves me enough to hurt me, so that when I return to live with Him, I am ready, and I become the person He knew I could be.

I love you all so much, I know I am forgetting something, but it will have to wait.

-Elder Burr

Betal and Lisa Liu