Another P-Day, Another Email

(Picture of Elder Solano, Elder Stephens, and Elder Faulkner) 

(courtesy of Elder Solano)

Alrighty here we are again, another Monday over here in the Philippines means another email that I send out to all of you. I trust that you are all doing well, wherever it may be that you are. Life is pretty good here in the Philippines, nothing much has changed – although I am learning to become a better teacher and teaching to what people need in their lives.

      

Today I will include something about our purpose as missionaries in this email. Our purpose reads "Invite others to come unto Christ by helping them receive the restored gospel through faith in Jesus Christ, and his atonement, repentance, baptism, receiving the gift of the holy ghost, and enduring to the end." Now I am here to invite people. That means that through what I say, I should always be allowing people to make changes in their lives and inviting them to change themselves. Everything we do as missionaries is to magnify that calling. We become better teachers and learn the language, not to show off, but to allow people to understand the message and change themselves.

      

A true missionary understands that nothing they do makes the work successful. It is about the journey of the people that you teach. It is between them and God. We are here to show them how to communicate with God and how to get that relationship. But let it be made clear: all of my words are mostly useless for the people I teach.

       

Let’s think for a minute – because there are some questions that we should probably all answer in our lives. Keep in mind that the answers to these questions come from ourselves and for our own self betterment, so we shouldn’t really be shy in answering them:

• ·        Do I feel like anything lacks in my life?
• ·        How have I tried to fill that lack in the past?
• ·        Do I have a plan to fill that lack now?
• ·        Do I believe in God?
• ·        Why? Why not?
• ·        How close do I feel to God?

These are some of the things that I notice that a lot of people don’t know the answers to. Notice how all the answers come from yourself, it isn’t about finding answers somewhere else; it is about learning from ourselves. When we enable ourselves to think freely and take time to reflect – our entire outlook changes.

God's Grace is not about filling the gap in our lives, it is about filling us with an abundant life. Show me one person who doesn’t want an "abundant life".

These are the things that we search for here. If there is a higher purpose here on this earth, we better be searching for it – otherwise we probably won’t find anything, and that lack will always be there.

     

I have learned that questions like that are very important. In teaching, you have to lead the person to learn from their own words and thoughts.

Culture: Engilsh again. In the Filipino culture, people use English to show how educated they are. It can be a real problem. English is a big source of pride here. Being good at English shows that you are pretty educated. Out of fear of offending people, we seldom use English – even among close friends

    

Tagalesson: Taglish is acceptable in most circumstances, as long as the word is well known by people. Okay Taglish:

Handa: Prepare

Inihahanda- preparing

Ipiniprepare-preparing

Conjugate the word the same way, but you use the English word instead of the Tagalog root. You can conjugate a whole lot of English words like this!

Keep on keeping on. Keep up the good work and keep on learning Tagalog so that when I go home I will have some people to talk to. It will be sad if I have no one to speak with when I get to America.

Don’t forget to self evaluate, it is an important thing to do in life.

Thanks muchly for your support and your emails. I hope you are doing well.

Love

Elder Faulkner