18 January 2016

       Malo e lelei!

Time keeps on running! I've just come to grips with the 'year mark' thing and that was almost 2 months ago. Just 9 or 10 months left before I'm allowed to go find a wife.

We had zone conference and my companion and I shared 10 minutes teaching the (squabbling) missionaries about humility, patience and love. I get nervous teaching in front of large groups, but I felt confident, and I think that it went very well. 

The night before I overthought the whole thing and stayed up until midnight making a lame list of questions I would ask, thinking about what answers would be acceptble, putting it in order, and cutting it down to 10 minutes. The last zone conference, me and my comp did separate teachings but this time president told us to do it together and keep it short, and it ended up being really good. We shared Helaman 10:4-5 and based our questions and conversation around that. It was a verse and an approach I never would have thought of myself, and with my companions help it ended up being exactly what we needed to teach. And, despite the varying levels of English/Tongan proficiency, the audience understood well.

I feel like I'm in my comfort zone now; although I still have a ways to go, I feel like I can comfortably do missionary stuff in Tongan. Lack of knowledge/experience rarely seems to come into major play, and even if things aren't going well or change at the last minute, I feel like I can still stumble my way through anything. This is a really good feeling and I'm proud of the progress I've made. This last 14-ish was the hardest thing I've ever done, and I feel many of the things that made it hard have gone away or gotten a lot smaller. People have been sharing this with me for a couple months now, but I've only just started to feel it this week.

Daylight savings time switched again, which was really weird, I swear it only changed a few months ago

My companion finishes in a little over 2 weeks, and we're doing our best to keep the steam levels up. I love hime to death and I'll miss him a lot

Good week! I'll try to get more letters off later

'Ofa atu!

Elder Brown