Feb 26 - The more we give, the more we receive

Nyob zoo

To start the week, we had some crazy weather.  We had freezing rain so the first day we pretty much had to stay in the apartment the whole day because they wouldn’t let us go outside because it was slippery.  We got a lot of our weekly planning done.

This week we did a lot of fun things.  We went to a dinner appointment on Wednesday at Sister Hoogstra and her husband's home.  She is a member but her husband is not a member.  He is super nice and he is a pilot.  He took us to the airport after the dinner and we got to go into a flight simulator.  You just fly - kind of like a video game in a way.  We got to do that and it was really cool.  It was just like you’re flying an airplane and it was really hard.  At the end, I was trying to land it and I was going to run into a tree so he quickly turned it off and he was like, “Good job!  You did not crash!”  It was funny.

On Thursday was Elder Vang’s one year mark which is close to my 6-month mark.  Here on the mission, they have a tradition that once you hit 6 months you burn a tie, one year you burn a shirt, a year and a half you burn a pair of pants and then two years you burn a suit.  So I got to burn a tie and Elder Vang got to burn a shirt and a tie because he never got to do that.  We did this at our ward mission leader's home, Brother Klunk.

On Sunday, one of the younger kid members named Tshwm Sim had a birthday and his family invited us over for his party so that was fun.  I didn't know a lot of the people because they were his relatives, but we had a lot of Hmong food.  That was good.

We also met with Ariel this week and she is doing super awesome and her desire to learn is there and she knows that putting God first is what’s going to make her the most happy in life.  After one lesson, it’s a little sad to say that she is our most progressing investigator at the moment.  But it is what it is.  Some people take longer and some people are faster.  But she is super awesome.

We also met with Melanie’s family this week and she still has the same problem of smoking.  She is super awesome and her family is awesome.  It will just take a little longer with her.

Yesterday in church we didn't have anyone to translate for so we were able to go to Elder's Quorum.  In Elders Quorum, a comment was made along the lines of:

"The more we give, the more we receive."

That really hit me in that lesson and I think it is so true for our everyday lives. The more we give of things like our talents and time, the more we get back in return. Something that I have definitely seen on my mission so far is - the more I give of myself to the work, the more I receive. It is still hard - don't get me wrong, but to see people so grateful and to see their smiles makes it all worth it. I love being able to have the opportunity to do this every day. It is a true blessing. These are times I will always treasure and remember. 

flight simulator

Me burning my tie

Elder Vang burning his shirt 

This is Butterfly - she is Tshwm Sim's sister.  She is an awesome member

February 19 - Missionary work and the Atonement

Nyob zoo

This week we spent a lot of time knocking on doors again and finding, but here in Sheboygan most people work, both the husband and the wife, so most of the time, no one answers because no one is ever home.  And this week I was getting pretty frustrated because it’s a lot of knocking and no one is there.

We do have some new investigators the last couple of weeks that I haven’t mentioned before.  

The first one is a young lady named Chong Dee. We just knocked on her house about 3 weeks ago and she was a former investigator.  We said we could teach her again and we’ve met with her a couple of times. Things are going pretty good with her but it’s kind of the same situation as a lot of younger kids. She likes learning, but her parents won't let her go to church really. But we are reviewing the lessons with her since it has been over a year since she has been taught. 

The next investigator is named Ariel.  She is a single mother with a couple of kids.  She is a former investigator too.  She has a friend who is a member in our church and she has been coming to church every single week ever since I’ve been here and probably before.  She used to be taught by the sisters about a year ago and then she stopped.  She was telling us the other day that she has completely flipped her life around.  A couple of years ago she was in prison because she was doing pretty much every drug you can imagine, but now she’s pretty much completely flipped her life around and has gotten her priorities straight.  

The 3rd ones are Mong Kong and his wife Amanda.  It’s kind of funny because they are a couple of Elder Vang’s friends from back home and he forgot they moved out here to Sheboygan. He ran into them at the Hmong New Year before I got here and he said he was interested in learning so it’s pretty cool.

This week also, Elder Vang has some family who lives out here.  His aunt lives here in Sheboygan and he has a couple of cousins.  We’ve stopped by his aunt’s house a couple of times and talked with them and they are super nice and they’ve fed us.  She gave us his cousin’s number and so we went and stopped by his cousin’s house this week and he opened the door and let us right in.  He was like, “Hmm….you look familiar.”  and Elder Vang was like, “Yeah. You’re my cousin!”  He was like, “OHHHH!!!”  There’s quite a bit of an age gap between them because Elder Vang is 19 and his cousin is about 38 so they are not super close in age but they are still family.  They invited us to stay for dinner and you can’t pass up Hmong food.  Hmong food is the best.  I love Hmong food.  So we ate with them and then he invited us to come back and teach his family.  I don’t know if it’s necessarily because he’s interested in learning about the church or just a curiosity thing, but hopefully, when he hears it, he’ll realize it’s true.

Like I said earlier I was pretty frustrated this week on Thursday. I was pretty mad, angry, and discouraged. Elder Vang could tell I was too. A little later in the day, he showed a part of a talk that helped me out and is really powerful. It is called "Missionary work and the Atonement" by Jeffrey R. Holland. 

"Anyone who does any kind of missionary work will have occasion to ask, Why is this so hard? Why doesn’t it go better? Why can’t our success be more rapid? Why aren’t there more people joining the Church? It is the truth. We believe in angels. We trust in miracles. Why don’t people just flock to the font? Why isn’t the only risk in missionary work that of pneumonia from being soaking wet all day and all night in the baptismal font?

You will have occasion to ask those questions. I have thought about this a great deal. I offer this as my personal feeling. I am convinced that missionary work is not easy because salvation is not a cheap experience. Salvation never was easy. We are The Church of Jesus Christ, this is the truth, and He is our Great Eternal Head. How could we believe it would be easy for us when it was never, ever easy for Him? It seems to me that missionaries and mission leaders have to spend at least a few moments in Gethsemane. Missionaries and mission leaders have to take at least a step or two toward the summit of Calvary.

Now, please don’t misunderstand. I’m not talking about anything anywhere near what Christ experienced. That would be presumptuous and sacrilegious. But I believe that missionaries and investigators, to come to the truth, to come to salvation, to know something of this price that has been paid, will have to pay a token of that same price.

For that reason I don’t believe missionary work has ever been easy, nor that conversion is, nor that retention is, nor that continued faithfulness is. I believe it is supposed to require some effort, something from the depths of our soul.

If He could come forward in the night, kneel down, fall on His face, bleed from every pore, and cry, “Abba, Father (Papa), if this cup can pass, let it pass,” then little wonder that salvation is not a whimsical or easy thing for us. If you wonder if there isn’t an easier way, you should remember you are not the first one to ask that. Someone a lot greater and a lot grander asked a long time ago if there wasn’t an easier way.

The Atonement will carry the missionaries perhaps even more importantly than it will carry the investigators. When you struggle, when you are rejected, when you are spit upon and cast out and made a hiss and a byword, you are standing with the best life this world has ever known, the only pure and perfect life ever lived. You have reason to stand tall and be grateful that the Living Son of the Living God knows all about your sorrows and afflictions. The only way to salvation is through Gethsemane and on to Calvary. The only way to eternity is through Him—the Way, the Truth, and the Life."

If you have time to read the rest of the talk, it is really good, but this was the part that helped me this week. 

Love,

Elder Tshxj Xeeb

They have lots of cool churches in Sheboygan.

We call them the temples since there isn't a temple in Wisconsin

Valentine's Day treats in the mail

Scarlett.  She is Eden's older sister.  I've sent a picture of her before.

Elder Vang and his cousin, Koua and family

February 12 - Staying in Sheboygan

Nyob zoo

Not happened this week in our area for missionary work, so I’ll just talk about some other fun things that happened this week.

This week is transfers on Wednesday, and me and Elder Vang are both staying here in Sheboygan so that’s good.  On Wednesday last week, we went and helped clean out the old sisters’ apartment that used to be in Sheboygan, so it’s official now that we are the only missionaries in Sheboygan.  This last transfer was a tough one. We didn't really make any progress with anyone and we really didn't find anyone promising. It is funny to me how many doors we knocked on. We could knock on doors for like 5 hours and not one person will answer but sometimes if we knock doors for 5 mins, we get 2 answers. It is just weird. We are still working hard, but no success. I am doing good though. I made a pretty good plan for my studies. I am hoping to learn around 2000 words in the next 6 months, so by my year mark it will be a lot of hard work, but very rewarding. I am excited about this next transfer and hopefully, we can start seeing some success. 

On Thursday, we got a referral from the sisters in Manitowoc. They are teaching a lady there and her son is in the prison here.  The lady wanted us to go and talk to her son., Devyn.  On Sunday, we left church early because that was the only time we could go.  We left and we went and talked to him at the prison and that was really interesting because I’ve never been in a prison before. He’s a super nice guy and he seemed kind of interested, so that’s good.  On the way home though, we were driving home after talking to him, and a car rear-ended us.  I guess that’s what we get for leaving church early.  Kind of funny. It doesn't look like any damage was done, but we will have to have someone look at it.

A new family, last name Prusse, moved in a couple of weeks ago and they invited us over for dinner last week.  We just had a simple meal - potatoes, sausage, and some salad.  I got some salad - I don’t like salad - but I was being polite.  So I put a little salad on my plate and I got the dressing and - I poured out about 1/2 the bottle on accident so… I had a lot of salad that day.  It was a good first impression I guess.  After the lesson, we played PieFace and that’s a game I think my sisters would like. I’ll put some pictures below. 

We went to another dinner appointment this week, and it was really cute because right when they opened the door, the little 5-year-old daughter came right to us and gave us little valentines and some stickers.  I put one of them on my name tag.  It was cute.

Also this week, we went to a house and right when we got there, the girl was crying really hard.  I won’t say who it is, but she was crying.  We started talking to her and she said that she isn’t satisfied with her life and she isn’t satisfied with who she is and wasn’t happy.  She always has these suicidal thoughts.  That was a really sad experience for me being there because she really is so awesome and no one deserves to have those types of feelings that they’re not worth anything or no one cares for them.  It just really made my heart sad.  We ended up showing her a Mormon message and shared a scripture with her and it cheered her up.  I think the lesson was really good because we just stopped by and didn’t tell her we were coming by and it ended up really helping her. It’s really sad that people in this world are mean, honestly, but she is super awesome.  Sometimes people don’t tell her that, so it’s good that we can go over and tell her how awesome she really is and cheer her up.

That’s what this gospel is all about is picking people up and helping them see how much they are really worth and how much Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ truly love them and care for them. The way they can feel this love is through Christ's atonement because he - Christ knows what we are going through and understands our pains. The atonement really does show how much Christ loves us because it wasn't an easy thing to do, but he did it anyway because he loves and cares for us so much. This scripture explains just that.

1 Nephi 19:9 And the world, because of their iniquity, shall judge him to be a thing of naught; wherefore they scourge him, and he suffereth it; and they smite him, and he suffereth it. Yea, they spit upon him, and he suffereth it, because of his loving kindness and his long-suffering towards the children of men.

Thanks for all you do for me.

Have a great week.

Elder Tshwj Xeeb

Another picture of all the snow

lots and lots of snow

Welcome to Sheboygan

Valentine heart sticker

PieFace

February 6 - Follow the Promptings of the Spirit

Nyob zoo

I hit my 6-month mark on Friday so I am now officially starting my “18-month sister missionary mission.”

This week, we had mission tour, which is why I am emailing today.  It was yesterday.  Basically what that is is a general authority from the seventy comes to our mission and, in a way, inspects us and sees how we are doing.  Elder K. Brett Nattress came and it was all day long conference yesterday in Green Bay so we woke up really early to drive up there.  It was combined with our Appleton Zone, Wausau Zone, and Green Bay Zone.  The other 3 zones will meet with him today.  That was really cool to feel the spirit that he brings to a meeting.  He was a super awesome guy and he was pretty young and even though he is a general authority, he still cracked jokes and was fun. But at the same time had the strong spirit with him. He told lots of awesome stories.

This week I also started reading the Book of Mormon in Hmong and it’s a good time because I got a whole 5 verses read in 30 minutes.  The whole time I was looking up words I did not understand.

We met this week again with Nuekue, Nou, & Cynthia and had a lesson.  The deadline for them to apply to BYU Idaho was also that day. We called our Bishop and set up an appointment for all of them with him and they got their applications in - the last minute too.  But that would be so good for them if they are able to get in there and go there.  It would be a good environment and a good school for them.

We all know the Super Bowl was on Sunday and that day is officially now the hardest day on my mission so far.  I wanted to watch it so bad.  When we were driving around in our car, we could see everyone’s TV’s on and no-one was outside. Everyone was home watching the game.  That was a hard day, but instead of watching, we had a dinner appointment and family home evening

Also this week we did exchanges with the elders from Appleton.  Elder Jeffs, who is one of our zone leaders, came here to Sheboygan with me and Elder Vang went there to Appleton.  We had a pretty cool experience when we were together.  It was around 8:00 and we had just finished an appointment.  We decided to go visit a random less active family so we opened up the binder and just picked a random family and drove there and they weren’t home.  We both needed to use the restroom, so we ended up walking down the street and into the woods.  On the way back, we were walking to our car, and we saw this guy get out of his car and go into his house in front of us.  And we thought, “Dang. We just missed him.”   We both felt the Spirit prompting us to go knock on his door, so we went and knocked.  Eventually, we got in and we taught a very quick lesson on the restoration and gave him a Book of Mormon and the whole time he was like, “Dang!  That’s pretty cool.”  He seemed pretty interested.  The craziest part of this is when we got back to the apartment, Elder Jeffs opened his scriptures to a random page and read a scripture and it pretty much just talked about following the prompting of the spirit.  It was pretty cool.

The thing that I learned this week for sure is to act on the promptings of the Spirit.  A lot of times, we don’t know necessarily if it is our gut telling us to do something or if it the spirit telling us to do something.  Elder Bednar says it pretty good when he said If it’s a good thought or good feeling, just do it.  That’s something that I need to work on too.  When I have that impression to go do something, just go do it because God will help us out and God will bless us for doing so.

Hope you all have a great week!

Elder Tshwj Xeeb

On a side note, I got a surprise visit from Brooke Brady who was in my home ward in Draper, but lives here now and is in my Stake.  She came with the Sister missionaries for an investigator's baptism interview with Elder Vang since he is our district leader.  It was a total surprise and it was really cool to see her. She gave me a lot of my favorite stuff.  It's too bad Jordan couldn't be there, but I got to facetime him for a minute.

Photos:(1)  Our investigator Chong Dee's birthday. We brought her a cake and celebrated with her (2) Sheboygan district (3-4) Superbowl Sunday. My mom sent me some Superbowl snacks to have today. This is me crying (almost) (5-6) This is a flagpole at an insurance company called Acuity I think. The building is just ridiculous. They are so loaded. It is the tallest flagpole in North America.  It was huge! (7) Picture with Brooke Brady this morning

Jan 29 - Grateful for my 6 month mark

Nyob Zoo

This week, just like the past few weeks, we spent most of our time tracting and finding people.  There is a list of a bunch of Hmong houses that we use, put them in our GPS and drive to them.  But a lot of them had either met missionaries before and had been knocked on before, so weren’t really having any success.  On Tuesday, for about an hour, we went on the computer and searched for new addresses and we got a list of about 100, and this week we tried them out.  We found a lot more success because they were new houses that hadn’t been knocked on for awhile or maybe ever.  So we had a lot more success this week with our new list of houses which was really cool.

Also, Elder Vang and I had one of the best door approaches this week, for sure in Sheboygan, maybe even the whole mission.  I’m not sure, but it was pretty cool because we flowed really good just going back and forth.   Elder Vang was just speaking so fast, it was almost like he was rapping - it’s so crazy.  I don’t even know how to explain, but it’s just so insanely fast.  We worked well off each other and we both spoke really good.  And I was able to understand it all, and what I said flowed well and it just felt… good.  It made me realize…Dang!! I’m getting the language.  After that, we were both pretty confident.  But 10 minutes later, you get humbled quickly.  That’s the language - you have high moments, then you get humbled.  You get another high moment then you get humbled and it just keeps going.  KInd of funny.

Also this week, we went back and visited the old lady I talked about 2 weeks ago in my email.  I cannot remember her name, but she was the one that just talked forever for like 2 hours about nothing.  So this week Elder Vang said, “Let’s go back and talk to her again.” And I was like, “Heck NO!!!  I do not want to go back.”  That was terrible.  It was torture.  But we went there and it was cool because Elder Vang had me practice teach.  I taught the whole Plan of Salvation lesson basically by myself and after, we talked to her (mostly Elder Vang talked to her) and got to know her a little better after I was done teaching.  We found out that her son was baptized and in the past, she wanted to get baptized too but her husband would not let her.  So we will go back and teach her again and we will probably have to reteach some of The Plan of Salvation because I missed some of the points and probably didn’t explain it the best.  It was cool to talk to her.  I don’t know if she’s interested anymore, but she was in the past so it’ll be fun to visit her again.

Now, it’s almost my 6-month mark on my mission.  This Friday I will hit 6 months which is pretty crazy. It just goes by so fast.  I have really seen my language progress, but at the same time, it’s really slow to see it sometimes.  When I look back to where I started and where I am now, it’s pretty cool.  I am getting pretty comfortable teaching the lessons, but I still need to practice them.  One thing that I really want to work on is conversation Hmong and the words that they use every day, instead of just gospel stuff.  When they speak gospel, I can understand, but when they speak other stuff, I just don’t understand and am not able to speak the everyday stuff, so that’s something I really want to work on.  But it’s pretty cool to see that if you keep working on it and keep practicing it every day, things just start making sense. There is a bunch of grammar stuff that I still don’t understand.  But over time, you’ll be talking to someone and all of the sudden you’ll start using it and you’re like, “What the heck?!! I never knew how to do that.  And I haven’t been practicing that in like a month.”  And then all of a sudden it makes sense and it’s just pretty cool.  When I think back on the last 6 months, I know that Heavenly Father has blessed me to learn patience and to trust in him. Those have been the biggest things for me - knowing that I will not learn everything overnight, but it will take a while and knowing that I just have to work day by day and I will continue to improve.

My mom asked me this week how I feel about reaching my 6-month mark.  Am I excited? Happy? Am I amazed because it's going too fast?  Am I sad because my mission is 1/4 over? etc  And the best word I can think of is  - grateful.  I am so very grateful for the time I have spent so far in my mission. I wouldn't trade it for anything. I am so very grateful for the experiences I have had and will have in the future. I have grown so much in so little time and it is all because of this gospel. I know this gospel is true and I am grateful to have the opportunity to bring it to others in the next 18 months I have remaining.

D&C 59:7 Thou shalt thank the Lord thy God in all things.

Have a great week,

Elder Tshwj Xeeb

This is where we email at the church

Taking pictures of Lake Michigan

I think this looks cool

More Lake Michigan

Having a little fun while out tracting