"The Process of Becoming Meek"

Note from Mom: Jonathan calls himself Elder Daniels thoughout the letter, so be prepared. :)

I finished reading the Book of Mormon in Chinese! Heavenly Father has blessed Elder Daniels a lot!!! Last week were president’s interviews, and oh man, Elder Daniels learned so much again. President instructed Elder Daniels on how to take advantage of every moment on his mission. President shared a lot with Elder Daniels, but what Elder Daniels took away the most was when president talked about the families he taught. That is what Elder Daniels desires most. Elder Daniels hasn't seen that much baptism on his mission, but President promised Elder Daniels that as he gives his time to the Lord, He will see that the families will start coming.

I've become familiar again with Jesus Christ’s gospel and the process of repentance, the process of becoming meek and teachable. It started last week during interviews when Elder Daniels and Elder Gong taught the zone leaders in a role play lesson. The goal: get the person we were teaching into the Book of Mormon. It didn't go very well. Elder Daniels saw a lot of his weaknesses and devised a theory to help him overcome the weaknesses. Elder Daniels is going through the Book of Mormon again and applying a whole new scheme to help him teach better while using the Book of Mormon and it has been AWESOME! I've been getting more out of the book than I ever have before. Preach My Gospel talks about the people who read the Book of Mormon and only get stories. My goal has been to go through each story and ask questions pertaining to some of the more important precepts that can be learned from each passage. You would be surprised by what the Spirit has helped me to learn. AWESOME.

I've been applying faith as I study, knowing that the words I read will need to be the words that our investigators need to hear and as I’ve gone through, I've been able to find perfect stories and situations for some of our investigators. This new way of looking at the Book of Mormon has brought even more excitement to my studies and has helped me teach using the Book of Mormon in a very simple manner. I love it.

Here is the big story of my repentance. Yesterday was Zone conference and everyone was excited because Elder Perkins of the seventy was coming to visit. (By the way, I have repented for all the time I thought "he isn't an apostle, he's just a seventy. Let’s listen to something else". Wow, I took the 70's talks for granted in the MTC so many times. Ah man, these people are AMAZING.

So I came into this zone conference with many questions prepared and I felt like the entire meeting was focused on Elder Daniels’ needs. And not only in reality, but it was literally focused on Elder Daniels needs! I'll tell you why. During the meeting they needed to have a companionship come up and do a role-play by teaching a first lesson to another companionship. Out of all 90 missionaries that were in the room, the names, "Elder Daniels and Elder Gong" were the ones to be announced for the role-play…ouch.

Elder Daniels was the senior companion and he needed to teach a ten minute 1st lesson with his trainee, to Elders Youd and Pullsipher, who were supposed to be 26 year old college students. In the audience was every single one of Elder Daniels’ peers, the mission president, his wife and a General Authority, who was boldly waiting to give us feedback. Elder Daniels had to represent the entire mission's teaching abilities and weaknesses in front of the general authority. No pressure, Elder Daniels.

It was a mess. I felt like a rambling monkey. It was almost as if Elder Daniels was under influence of the spirit to do everything wrong and go against the game plan he had made in his mind in order to give support to Elder Perkins theory for missionaries in their problems with teaching. I felt kind of like Christ, sort of, suffering the blow for everybody in that room. It was painful. But, I got the best feedback of my life. Elder Perkins started on how we need to "GET TO THE RESTORATION!” He asked us, “If you had to explain the gospel in six words, what would it be?” My favorite was, "GOD LOVES US and PROPHETS ARE BACK!"

That was a hard and painful learning process, and I was so nervous. By the way, it was all in Chinese! Elder Daniels was humbled and called to repentance again for sure. I learned so much from this experience. We bore testimonies afterward, and I had to share mine because the spirit there was too dang strong.

One big lesson was how I learned to walk away from the experience, discouraged or meek. I took a mixture and got humbled really fast again. Part of me was grateful and happy to have learned so much, and the other half felt terrible for thinking it went really bad, and it led to a tiny bit of discouragement. Elder Daniels didn't like that though. Last night in my prayers I said, “Heavenly Father, I can't do this on my own anymore, you win.” And Elder Daniels’ attitude changed. It was such an awesome experience, painful yes, but that is the process of becoming a more meek servant to the Lord, which is what we need to become to see those mei mei's and their families get baptized. Elder Daniels Faith is SO high now! Woooohoooo!! The Lord has blessed Elder Daniels beyond what he imagined.