Let’s have a talk. I’m going to keep it real with you guys. I am not sure why, universally, missionaries have decided to sugarcoat missions and everything about them but I intend to be completely honest for the next 18 months. I stayed true to this my whole mission and I am so glad I did. Obviously there are some things I kept to myself for various reasons but for the most part I gave it to the people straight and many blessings came from it. So please, don’t be worried about me. Don’t think that I’m complaining or that I’m having the worst time and definitely don’t think I’m trying to scare anyone away from serving a mission!!!!! I love the week and a half that I’ve been serving one so far! But, it would have been nice to have been warned about some things, instead of thinking it was going to be rainbows and butterflies! I felt this so strongly for the first six ish months of my mission. Things would come up and I'd be like... uh... no one said a word about this?? I felt betrayed hehe. That being said, noooooooo onnneeeeeeee, not one single missionary friend warned me about how brutal it is, sitting in classes and lessons and studies and workshops for hours and hours each day. The saying that "days feel like weeks and weeks feel like days" could not be more true. Sister Nielsen and I were talking to our teacher about a discussion we had last week and then he kindly informed me that the discussion I was referring to happened JUST THE DAY BEFORE. I was seriously so shocked. It felt like we had talked about it days ago but it was just the previous day. Time is unreal.Yeah this is an entire mission thing. Time was so different on the mission. Sometimes in good ways, sometimes in bad ways. I’ve been told that as soon as you get adjusted to it, it’s totally fine and I want to believe that. I really do. For all you future missionaries, make sure you take every opportunity you get to stand up/walk around, and go outside! (That is if you’re doing the online MTC. I'm not sure what it’s like in person) I don't think this is a thing anymore #covidmissionary. I'm pretty sure everyone is back to only 2 weeks online and the rest is at the in person MTC... I'm not jealous about that...
Again, I am loving it. But you can love something and it can still have parts that are kind of the w*rst.. ;) Word. Theme of my mission pretty much.
Fun little story time. We were doing some teaching role plays and the elders we were with were pretending to be of a different faith. At one point in the lesson Elder Taylor goes "Well what about the dead sea squirrels?" When I tell you that I was so genuinely confused and lost. I was like what on EARTH do dead sea squirrels have to do with this conversation? Why are they dead? Why is no one addressing the fact that we're talking about squirrels? Does "squirrel" stand for something? Is that a Muslim thing? I did not know sea squirrels even existed.. Why is no one else confused?? Stuff like this happened a lot on my mission 😂😂😂 For the most part I'm fine but sometimes I have a hard time hearing because of past ear issues and it's like my brain tries to compensate for what I didn't understand so I would "hear" the weirdest things.
I didn't talk at all after that because I was just so befuddled by these dead sea squirrels and what they had to do with anything.
Come to find out, over an embarrassing amount of time, he said the dead sea SCROLLS. I'll just say it, I don't know much about those either... Yikes. Still don't. Those came up approximately never on my mission haha maybe I'll do some personal study on that.
You’re probably wondering what the heck Spanch is or if you know me well enough you already know that it’s Spanish and French put together. Learning a third language is definitely easier in so many ways but harder in a few that I wasn’t expecting. First of all, I cannot compartmentalize Spanish and French from each other. I just can’t do it. Still can't to be honest. Someone asks me “Comment ça va?” (French) and my first reaction is “¡Muy bien! ¿Y tú?” (Spanish). Yup. Unfortunately once I think of a response in Spanish there's no turning back. My mind is then in Spanish mode and I can't think of a French response to save my life.
“Pourquoi” will always be “porque” to me and there’s nothing the French can do about it.. (Except maybe kick me out of their country). I guess they did kick me out ;) but that changed. I say pourqoui and quoi all the time even being home HA.
I think because my call was to speak Spanish I’m giving myself a lot of grace and time to learn French. I don’t feel stressed about it and my mindset is, "it will come when it comes". Ask me how that’s going though when I have to do a TRC in French or I don’t know how to simply ask for directions when I’m in France. That “grace” will go flying out the window. It's like I could see the future. I did struggle giving myself grace but it would go back and forth. Sometimes I would be chill because French wasn't my call and then other times I would just feel super discouraged by my level of French. Constant battle.
Speaking of TRCs!! Me and Sister Nielsen did our first one (in English) this week and I love hate to be that person but we actually killed it. lollll, conceiteddd. It went so well! Way better than I was expecting and it was so much fun (which I also wasn’t expecting). It’s so cool to get to know people and to share with them something you love so much. I also didn’t realize how awesome it would be to get to start from ground zero with someone. There’s so much that this Gospel has to offer, it’s so exciting to be the person introducing it to someone for the first time. I know, I know, you don’t have to tell me. The TRCs are fake and it’s all just to practice BUT STILL! Getting that little glimpse of it made me ready for more! Plus, the spirit that was felt was very real. Wow, that was a great perspective. Crazy side note, I met so many people who had encountered the missionaries already at some point in their life which was always nuts to me. A lot of the people I taught had met with missionaries back in their home countries. But it still was cool to be the first person to tell someone about something in the gospel they had never heard before, it just didn't happen as much as I thought it would.
I am so grateful for ma collègue, Sœur Nielsen! She is one of the funniest people ever and we get along so well. Somehow every time we talk, we end up laughing ’til we cry. I really hope that someday we can be companions in France too, that would be so fun! We were never companions but we did serve around eachother for a bit and that was the best. It was like what I said everytime we met up on the mission too. We could just TALK for forever.
Shout out to my momma for getting accepted to student teach as a seminary teacher this week!! What the. She's done a lot since then hehe.
I think that's pretty much it.
¡Les quiero muchachos!
Passez une semaine incroyable!
-Sir Beck
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