Elder Zach Blankenbiller

To explain the title of this week's email, Jēun sām is my district's new motto, in Cantonese means to focus, or lock in. Cause we be LOCKED IN right now. We started Cantonese immersion classes this week and it's actually going way better than I thought it would! I've been able to understand a ton of what my teachers are saying and I've been learning so much.  My companion and I had a really cool experience this week. We had a fake teaching appointment thing where we teach a lesson to someone pretending to be a non-member a 25 minute lesson. They send you a bio with what questions they have so you can prepare a lesson specific for them, so my companion and I spent a bunch of time prepping a lesson on the Plan of Salvation, and then we get into the appointment and he says he wants to know more about prayer. Hmm. So we started rapidly improving an entire new lesson guided completely by the Spirit and ended up teaching a 20 minute lesson!! It was insane, we talked about...

Hey everyone! It's been a WILD week starting at Provo MTC, honestly no idea where to start! Okay so I guess first of all this week was seminar week, which is where they train all the new mission presidents, and all the quorum of the twelve and first presidency were here at the MTC! There were also a bunch of area seventies and my district and I ran into Elder Shumway, who gave my favorite talk this last general conference, the talk that I based my farewell talk on. Which was pretty awesome. And then the next day we ended up at the right place at the right time and got to see pretty much all the quorum of the twelve walk out of a building and walk right past us! They all waved at all of us missionaries, and Elder Gong came up and talked to my district for a bit about Hong Kong and speaking Cantonese, it was so crazy!!!  Being at the Provo MTC has been AWESOME so far, I'm loving it! I've run into so many friends from BYU, it's actually nuts. I love getting to see them all...

Heyyy, what's up, everyone! Well I had my first week as a missionary! I'm pretty much done with Home MTC, I have like one more class tonight and then I get to go to Provo! I'm really excited cause Zoom is the absolute worst, the only reason I could sit down that long was cause I had a Rubik's Cube I could mess with. I mean Zoom and I have never been good friends, but the beef is real now. The classes were super interesting though and I've learned a ton! My Cantonese classes, however, have been absolutely kicking my butt. Turns out that taking two years of Spanish in high school shockingly does NOT carry over to learning Cantonese, so we've started from scratch. But with many prayers and lots of practicing tones, we're getting there! Prepare to be unable to understand me when I get home.  I also got around to some pretty fun stuff in between all the Zoom classes and devotionals and everything, including a quick ice cream trip to Handel's to try their new ...