Life at the MTC continues!

Another batch of missionaries is preparing to head out into the field next week and an elder who joined our district this week (he was in the advanced program and his visa didn't come in time) will be heading out to a temporary re-assignment in San Diego tomorrow morning at 4am. Elder Schaffer was great and we're all going to miss him. They are rearranging the companionships for the elders in our District now to accomadate his companion, Elder Chow who is from Hong Kong.

"Plague" struck the Chinese zone here at the MTC, but despite the fact that there may or may not be chunks of lung hanging out in the classrooms, we're holding up. The weather has warmed up the past few days and we've been studying outside, so that seems to be helping kick the colds.

Perhaps because things here are starting to blur together and we're getting antsy for the outside world, Sister Hibbert, a sister in my room going to Taipei, and I have made a pact that we will take a year after graduation to travel the world. We have a running list of all the places we are going to go. On my honor, this will happen!  ;)

You may be wondering why this post is coming a day early, and that's because they've completely changed our schedule. With many of the teachers (they are all BYU students) leaving for the summer and the huge influx of missionaries expected to enter in the next few weeks (thanks to the end of the semester), everything is getting switched around. My Preparation Day, or P-Day as we affectionately call it, is now on Mondays. Yay!

I had the opportunity this morning to go to the Temple and it was amazing. I love how strong the Spirit is there. We met a sister who had just got back from a mission in Taiwan on Saturday and saw two couples getting married! 

In really exciting news, our Branch President promised us on Sunday that Mainland China would open to missionaries at some point during our lives. While I don't expect it soon, I am still so excited for the time when the people of China can have full access to the Gospel. I met so many people in China, and I can't wait for them to have the blessings that this Gospel brings into my life.

Also, fun fact, one of my teachers, Brother Lonsdale will be transferring to the Naval Academy next semester. You meet so many interesting and exciting people on missions!

Love, 
Sister Makena Bauss

With my new P-day schedule, I have tons of extra time! Which is wonderful...if you have letters to write! So please feel free to send letters and give me something to do during my free time! There's a button at the top of the page that links to my Facebook account and you can find the address to write me there. And don't forget return addresses so I can write you back!

Hello real world!
Hope everything is going well for all of you outside of the MTC, or as we jokingly call it, "Babilun" (the Chinese translation for Babylon)! Things have been busy since I last wrote. Our zone has a new batch of missionaries who will eventually be heading of to Taizhong, Taiwan. Among them is the most amazing sister. I'm not sure if I mentioned this in my last post, but she's from Korea and hardly speaks any English. But she is still managing to learn Chinese with the rest of us. I really look up to Sister Park and her hard work. If she's able to learn two languages at once, I can at least learn one! She really is an inspiration.
 
With the influx of new missionaries, the oldest "generation" in our zone headed out to the field. It was sad to say goodbye to many good friends I've made over the past few weeks who I won't see for another couple years, but I am so excited for them and the work they are headed of to do! It really is strange to realize that my generation is moving up in seniority here though. Getting old!
 
This past Saturday my companion and I taught for our first time at the TRC (I'm forgetting what the acroynm stands for), which is an area where people from "the real world" come in and volunteer for us to teach to them. For the most part, they are students at Brigham Young University. Because of this, I saw three of my good friends who speak Chinese who had come in to help out us Chinese speakers. It was so good to see Daniel, Jasmine, and Vince. I sometimes forget how close I am to my usual stomping grounds and many of my friends. The MTC really is a world of its own.
 
During our teaching at the TRC, we taught two sets of people. The first were members, one a returned missionary who served in Taiwan, and the other a convert from Taiwan who joined the church when she was 18. Both of the girls are students at BYU. Our second set of volunteers also consisted of two girls who go to BYU, both of who were RM's who served in Taiwan, and one of which who was native to Taiwan. However, with them was the girl from Taiwan's cousin who is not a member. I have offically taught my first real investigator! It was a lot less scary than I expected, but I still have a lot of room to improve. Constant progress!
 
My friend Ryan who was working with the Chinese zone has now left. We said goodbye to him yesterday. It really was a tender mercy having him here for the first few weeks. I had been missing so many friends for so long that it was good to see him.
 
Last Tuesday for our devotional, Elder Richard G. Scott came and talked to us. The spirit was so strong here and it was amazing to hear an apostle of the Lord speaking to us in person. He spoke about prayer and its importance. Always a good reminder to know that our Heavenly Father is waiting and eager to hear from each and every one of us.
 
On a less spiritual note, I hurt my jaw this week and have been taking Aleve to keep the TMJ pain down. I think this may be why I managed to run between 5 and 6 miles on Saturday. I'm now working on being able to run that far without the use of painkillers to make me forget how sore I am. But, either way, thanks to running, weight training, and the occasional game of volleyball, gym time is now one of my favorite times of the week. I'm just excited that they have now opened up the outdoor fields and I can play soccer. Yay exercise!
 
A thing I've realized in the past few months. The world is small. It's even smaller within the Church. And it's absolutely tiny when you speak Chinese as well. A girl just entered our zone this week who was in my branch in Nanjing and another girl entered who is good friends with one of my classmates from China, Andrew. It's always fun to see the way people can connect. 
 
All my love!
 
Sister Makena Bauss

Hey all! Week number two out of nine here at the MTC is complete! I've really gotten into the swing of things, and as of tomorrow will no longer be the youngest "generation" in the Chinese zone. A new batch of Chinese speakers will be coming in tomorrow which is really exciting, but at the same time is a bit sad since some of the good friends I've made here will be leaving this week. But, they are off to do the work and that's great!

The Chinese study is coming along well and is proving to be a really good review for me. It's giving me the opportunity to really fix up my tones and sound more fluent. I'm also doing a lot of self grammar study.

We've had some great devotionals this week. For those who recognize the name, Gerald N. Lund came and gave an amazing talk on personal revelation and how to differentiate between your own thoughts and promptings from the Lord. It's always been something I've had a hard time figuring out and it was really cool to have it explained. He talked about looking at the emotion driving the thought and evaluating if what you are feeling is spiritual revelation or hormonal "revelation". 

We had another great devotional this week from one of the directors of media for the Church. He talked about the "I'm A Mormon" campaigns online, in New York, and in London, and the "Christmas Is____" campaign they had in New York city. For someone interested in public relations, it was right up my alley. Loved seeing how the things I love can all come together to bless lives.

I recently discovered that one of my roommates used to live in Ohio, and as a result is a huge Buckeyes fan. We've now made it a point to find more Buckeyes fans or Wolverine fans respectively. I have to admit, the Wolverine fans are acting a little shy and falling behind in the running. But it did get one of the Elders in my zone to wear his Michigan tie as a show of support. Go Blue!

Funny story. An Elder in my District was teaching a lesson (always in Chinese) when his investigator asked him how much of a paragraph he wanted him to read. When he indicated the correct amount, the Elder confirmed by saying yes. The only problem is, this Elder not only speaks English and is learning Chinese, but is fluent in French. So instead of saying yes in Chinese, he said "oui". Now this would have been funny enough if it had ended there, but nope. He panics and realize, "no, not French, can't speak French." So what's he say? "Si." At this point both he and the investigator start cracking up and end up giggling for the next couple minutes. He never did manage to say "yes" in Chinese. C'est la vie!

Wo ai nimen!

Sister Makena Bauss

Bao Jiemei

Hey guys! Man, does it sound weird saying that! We're not allowed to use that when talking to the Elders or Sisters since it's so informal, but as all of you Michiganders know, "you guys" is the equivalent of a southern "y'all". It's a hard habit to quit!

Things have been going well in the week I've been here. My companion's name is Sister Willoughby, she's from Texas and we get along great! She loves Science Fiction (Especially Doctor Who!) and sings opera among other things. Sound like anyone you know?

I'm in the Chinese zone here at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, UT. It's strange to be so close to BYU (technically this is a part of campus) and to not be going to classes there. My zone has several Districts within it, which are basically our classes. Mine has a total of 7 people, 5 Elders and 2 Sisters. Four of the Elders are heading to Taiwan after the 9 weeks we will spend here and one is heading to Lyon, France. Both my companion and I are heading to Toronto. As far as we know from what we've heard from others who have served there and our Branch President who sees all the Chinese speaking missionaries, we are the first Chinese speaking sisters being sent to Toronto who've gone through the Provo MTC.

The food here isn't bad, but it's not home cooking. Who serves chili without cheese and sour cream anyways? 

My companion and I have taught our "investigator" twice now. He's a volunteer who comes in and role plays with us so we can practice teaching techniques and using our language. But the best bit is that he is actually my good friend Ryan who studied with me in China! We were both really surprsied when we saw each other, and it took some work to stay in character and see him as someone else. But we're getting there! It's amazing how much and how quickly we've come to care about "Guan Chen", our investigator. The spirit is so amazingly strong here!

This weekend was General Conference and it was such a cool experience to get to see it here at the MTC, surrounded by missionaries from all across the world and heading out everywhere. After the Sunday session, my companion and I went to choir which was a lot of fun.Strange to think that it's been nearly two years since I've been in a real choir!

That evening Vocal Point came and held a fireside for the missionaries and I saw Elder Peay! He served in Detroit and spent a lot of time in my ward. It was really nice to see him. He introduced my companion and I to another member of Vocal Point who served in Toronto Mandarin speaking. It was great to hear about the mission first-hand. And apparently there is a decent chance of me spending a transfer in Windsor, so close to home!

Zaijian!

Sister Makena Bauss

See photos page for new pics!

For my first post, I thought I ought to post the talk I gave in Sacrament Meeting before I left on my mission. I gave this on the 24th of March. I've put an audio file of me reading it up here for a more "authentic" experience, so read, listen, or both. Your choice. This isn't the live recording from the original reading, so you're spared the laugh track.

Lets start with a brief rundown on who I am to satisfy the required “for those of you who don’t know me” portion of this talk.

My name is Makena Bauss. I am almost 20 years old. I am a student at Brigham Young University. I currently help teach the CTR 5 class here in the ward, which has truly been the highlight of my past three and a half months back from school. And most significantly to my talk today, I have been called to serve in the Canada Toronto mission speaking Mandarin Chinese and will be leaving in 9 days.

Several of you have asked me whether I’ll be speaking in Chinese at all during my talk today. And I have to admit, I was seriously tempted to do so. My figuring was that if I spoke in “Chinese”, I could just make a bunch of random noises and no one would know what I was saying and I wouldn’t have to worry so much about preparing this talk. My plan was foiled, however, when I remembered that there are some of you who do know enough Chinese to catch me on this, and I decided getting found out would be more embarrassing than giving a poor talk in English.

I was asked to speak today about why I chose to serve a mission, and as I got thinking about this, the more number of reasons I came up with. So let’s look at this chronologically.

I can trace my earliest desires to serve a mission back to when I was in Primary. I remember singing rousing choruses of “I Hope They Call Me On A Mission” eagerly awaiting the extra foot or two that missionary work promised (I’m still waiting) and brandishing a fake sword back and forth, pretending to cut my friends arms off while singing “Army of Helaman”, confusing the Stripling Warriors with Ammon. In my mind, missionary work was exciting. It was an eagerly awaited benefit of growing up.

During this time, my family frequently had the missionaries over at our house. As a kid, the missionaries were cool, and more importantly, they always made me feel happy. Really happy. As I grew older, I came to recognize that feeling as the Spirit. This interaction with the missionaries from a young age gave me a real-time object to look up to and aim for. The missionaries knew me by name and would greet me in the hallways, always letting me know they cared about me, and the drawings I would make for them.

While I knew that my father had served a mission, and I looked up to him for that, here were people in my life currently serving missions, making the idea of serving a mission much more conceivable to my young mind.

As I entered the Young Women’s program, new influences and reasons for serving a mission entered my life. I became closer with women serving as my leaders who had served missions and looked up to them. I heard how they spoke about their missions and the blessing that serving had been in their lives and I wanted that for myself. Their example taught me that missionary work was in no way only for boys, but was a viable possibility in my future to be prayerfully considered.

During this time, my grandparents also went off to serve a mission in Nigeria and Ghana. As I talked with them and heard about their experiences, my desire to serve grew. They spoke with me about not only the blessings that came with missionary work, but the challenges as well. This helped me to gain a more holistic view of missionary work, which helped me to better understand its value, because as we all know, the best things in life aren’t free, especially from trials and hardship. Ever since my grandmother entered the MTC and sent me my very own missionary badge saying “Sister Bauss”, I have kept it on display in my room as an active reminder of my goal to serve a mission.

But the most influential factor at that time in my desire to serve a mission was perhaps my friends at school. During high school, I was blessed to have close friends I could talk about religion with. While few of us held the same beliefs as each other, we were interested in what the others had to say and together would examine the beliefs of each other and ourselves.

I remember one particular instance where a friend and I began talking outside of our classroom at the end of the day. Through some course of conversation, religion came up. As we got to talking and other friends of ours got out of class and began to walk by us as they left school, more and more of them stopped to join in the conversation. Eventually, after we had been talking long enough to prompt us to sit down in the hallway and had continued for some time, a teacher walked out of their classroom and asked us what was so interesting that a group of ten or so students would be sitting in the hallway talking well past an hour since dismissal.

Discussions like these became commonplace between my friends whether at school, in the car, or at people’s houses. Through this process, and simply from being a part of my friends lives, I began to see what a profound effect the Gospel had on my life, and the beneficial knowledge I had as member of the Church and how the lack of that knowledge caused my friends grief that they unwittingly marked up to the natural pains of life. It was in this way that I practiced sharing the gospel and through a love of my friends wished to share it with them.

As I moved on to college, my love of the Gospel grew through my involvement in my ward, my religion classes, and weekly devotionals. The more I grew to love the Gospel, the more I wanted to share it. Throughout the next year, many friends left to serve the Lord, so much so that mission call openings became a near weekly event. Each Sunday these friends and others and I would go together down to the tunnel by the Marriott Center where we would gather with a wide number of other students from all across campus to sing hymns for an hour, rain or shine. Halfway through, the leader would ask for anyone who had received a mission call that week to announce it to the group. It was amazing to hear the places all across the world that the Lord was sending our peers. After this, we would all stand and sing “Called to Serve” at the top of our lungs. Experiences like this and the examples of those around me further increased my desire to serve.

Living in China, I grew to have a very new perspective of the Gospel and its importance. Here was an area starving for the Gospel. Even the knowledge of the reality of Christ as our Savior, of the existence of a Heavenly Father, was rare. This spiritual drought was never more evident to me than when my classmates and I entered the Muslim Quarter in Xi’an China and we were struck by the strong increase of the Spirit we could feel simply because we were around people who believed in the God of Abraham. We had truly been living in an area of spiritual drought. And for many of us this broke our hearts because as we came to love the people we met, we wanted to share the Gospel but couldn’t because of the restrictions of the law. My desire to serve a mission at this time had never been stronger as I realized how the Gospel is for everyone and how much God loves each of His children.

It was while I was living in China that the announcement was made allowing sisters to serve at a younger age. It was late at night thanks to the time difference between China and Salt Lake. I was in bed starting to fall asleep, as were most of my seven other roommates. One girl was up, however, quietly Skyping her boyfriend as he gave her a play by play on conference, the rest of us content with getting our sleep and watching conference the next week at Church. Right before dozing off, I was a suddenly woken up by a loud scream from my one conscious roommate. Rather perturbed, I asked her what in the world she was screaming about with all of us sleeping. Needless to say it wasn’t long before our apartment went from one screaming girl, to eight. Almost immediately my mom and I simultaneously began trying to Skype each other from across the world. I had been told in my Patriarchal Blessing that a great opportunity would be provided to me to serve a mission. In so many ways this announcement was an answer to prayers. I knew, more than ever that Heavenly Father wanted me to serve a mission, and that this was the time.

Now, throughout my life I’ve gathered many reasons for serving a mission, all of which I hold with me now and have helped lead me to this point in my life. In a talk given by Elder Dallin H. Oaks in a 1984 conference address, he said:

People serve one another for different reasons, and some reasons are better than others. Perhaps none of us serves in every capacity all the time for only a single reason. Since we are imperfect beings, most of us probably serve for a combination of reasons, and the combinations may be different from time to time as we grow spiritually. But we should all strive to serve for the reasons that are highest and best.

Of all the reasons anyone or I serve a mission, the highest and best can be derived from the two greatest commandments: to love thy God and to love thy neighbor.

The greatest motivation we can have for serving a mission is charity. Charity is the pure love of Christ.  On LDS.org charity is introduced in this way:

The Savior wants all people to receive His love and to share it with others. He declared to His disciples [in John 13:34-35]: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another”.

Because charity is meant to be shared, charity and missionary work are inseparable.

In Moroni 7:45, it says:

Charity suffereth long, and is kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, and rejoiceth not in iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

All of these traits are traits that make up a successful missionary. If charity is made the center of your service your service will be more effective in bringing others (and yourself) to Christ.

In many ways we can look back to Charity as the reason we should follow all of God’s commandments. We should obey out of love. And while I’m not saying that everyone is obliged to serve as an official missionary for the Church, we are all commanded to serve as missionaries in some way in our lives. Whether it is through a calling at Church, a bible study class with friends, or simply discussing your observance of the Sabbath with coworkers, the motivation behind all of this should be charity.

It is our duty to serve as missionaries of God and we preach out of this duty and out of love. As is said on LDS.org:

Love is one of the chief characteristics of Deity, and ought to be manifested by those who aspire to be the sons of God. A man filled with the love of God, is not content with blessing his family alone, but ranges through the whole world, anxious to bless the whole human race.

I would like to close by bearing my testimony.

我想分享我的见证。 我知道耶稣基督的福要保佑你们的生活。 我知道摩尔们经是真实的经文。 我也知道小约瑟斯密是一个天父的先知之一。 我也知道我们都是天父的孩子也知道我们的情爱的天父真的爱每个他的孩子。 奉耶稣基督的名，阿门。