365 Days...

January 28, 2019

365 Days...

This week was pretty good, it's warming up for some reason. Not gonna lie, I am a fan of the warm weather. Winter is tough, it takes so much motivation to go outside when it's -20, so the warm weather is way nicer. I hit my year mark this week as you know. It was weird. Looking back, it was crazy to think that I have been on my mission for a whole 365 days. I actually had my interview with President Harper on my exact year mark, and we talked a lot about missions and time spent on them. He gave a lot of good advice, and because he knows I like hiking, he told me the first year out here most missionaries spend it climbing the huge hill. The language freaking kicks our trash, it's hard to try and know what to do when we have no work. It takes time to adjust to not feeling like a missionary 24/7. But now that I've been here for a while, and can speak Mongolian somewhat, I can run down the mountain and enjoy the breeze the rest of my mission. He did a lot better of an analogy than I did, and made it less cheesy. But it's been weird to look back and think all that I've done, I've only done in a year. It's kinda scary knowing I really am halfway because I want to be doing more, and now I can. I just wish I hit this mindset and language ability earlier on in my mission. Other than that, this week was pretty plain. Next week is the Lunar New Year, and here they go nuts for it, so everyone is going to their family in the countryside right now, so we don't have many people to meet with. But during the New Year we will meet with tons of people, they invite everyone over to their houses for food and to visit. Next week will be pretty sweet.

Last week we went on this super dope hike too. I'll send you the pictures, but it was awesome. We chose a peak and hiked to it, made a fire, then on the hike down we took a new way down the mountain. We found a lot of wolf tracks, and some dead animals the wolfs got. I swear I'm in the 1800's out here. It was awesome. Sweetwood and I started running down the mountain (it's a new hobby of ours to run down mountains) and we found a little light through the trees, so we ran to it. Found ourselves on the edge of this cliff overlooking the valley. All the clouds settled in the valley and the mountain peaks were poking through them. It felt like we were on the beach of a huge ocean. Pictures can't do it justice at all, it was gorgeous.

We had mutual again this week, and we broke the ping pong table out again. It's pretty fun to play some kids. This one girl who was playing me had Drake playing on her phone while she was playing me. I was rapping along in my head, and then I started getting pumped up, so I played ping pong better than I ever have before. Then the girl was rapping too, and said a swear word. So I stopped, and we taught a good lesson on language and swearing.

We met with Shinee this week too, he also came to church! He seemed to really enjoy it which was really good. He told me he has been praying about the Book of Mormon a lot and that he hasn't got an answer. It's always hard to hear that. It says countless times in the Book of Mormon that if we pray, and really want an answer, we will get one. But a lot of people who are asking for the first time struggle with it. So I looked back on my own life, and the answer I received was never a huge lightening bolt of information, or a huge revelation that it's true. It just came slowly, and I realized that I could never deny the Book of Mormon. It was true, but I never was hit with a brick saying its true. And a big part of getting an answer is wanting this all to be true. I told him how I really want all this to be true, because I want to live forever with my family. And that's why I am doing the things I'm doing and living the way I'm living. So I tried my best to explain to him that's how I got my answer, hopefully it helps him. He's a pretty awesome investigator, and is really sincere about it all.

To celebrate our year mark we broke out the old Mongolian Monoply and I made a pizooki. It was pretty fun. Then we went to a fun restaurant, it was a chill celebration. But we enjoyed it.

We got a call from Bolorzaya again this week. She is on her way back to the city from the Gobi, and she still wants to meet with us. She hasn't called since, I think she is still coming back. It's a pretty long trip. Hopefully she is wanting to meet with us when she gets back.

Also pretty cool, so Battsetseg in my ward was talking to me and she told me how she does the Gobi motorcycle rally. 5000 km, and she gets on her bike and goes as fast as she can through the desert and the sand dunes. She is gonna do it again this summer. She is seriously the coolest, she fights corruption, makes soap, and races her motorcycle through the Gobi. Pretty freaking cool.

Also, we went with Sweetwood to meet a new potential investigator who is super solid already and wants to learn. We went to meet him, he lives in Sweetwoods area, and his phone wasn't in service. So we called his buddy and found out he lives at the very end of the bus route in this specific area. We went there and were told he would call us when he could find service haha. So we started walking around this place and up this mountain. It felt like real Mongolia, there were gers way up in the mountains and all in the middle of no where. It was awesome. We ended up getting a call from him, and he cancelled on us, so we decided to just go to the top of this mountain since we were already halfway. We were all church clothed up and everything haha. But we found a pretty cool Shaman Ovoo, they represent the mountain gods. And we found a pretty creepy animal sacrafice pretty close to it. So yeah, that was weird. But we made it to the top and rolled some rocks down the other side which was funny.

Cici and Bayarjargal were baptized this weekend too. It was nice to see them, they were pretty stoked for it. It's cool to know I had a little hand in it all.

Finally, we met with this cool lady in Sweetwood's ward (it touches our area boundaries) who makes some super cool Mongolian clothes and stuff. She started making some bags and backpacks I thought Sami and Ava would like, so I went to check it out. They ended up feeding us and we had a good time, but I got some pictures for you of the bags. They are pretty awesome.

But yeah, that's my week. Love you guys!

Austin

Pictures from our hike last week. We hiked to the mountain right above my head to the left a little. The peak.

"Deep well"

This is Sweetwood. We all said he looked like the Monopoly Man and he owns the valley haha

Huge ovoo. It's dedicated to the mountain gods. This must be a special mountain. Look up Tengerism. That's the religion that places these. It explains a lot.