My "Gam ma" Moment

In Hong Kong, "gam ma" means 'duh...' and this week I had a very VERY big "gam ma' moment. My sister, Jessica, sent me a package this week, which was much needed! She sent some talks, including "The 4th Missionary" talk.   I can’t even begin to describe how this talk has changed my life this past week!  Thursday I got the talk. Friday I started reading it. Saturday I realized I was the 3rd missionary.  Sunday I decided to give up, and give God my will, 'because that was the only intelligent thing to do”, as the talk says.  It has now been 12 hours since I decided to do that, and I can’t even put in words the differences I have felt since I decided to give Christ my agency. It's been the only thing holding me back for the past 18 years of my life. He's had everything else accept that one thing. So this was my “gam ma” moment.

The things that let up to my “Gam ma” moment:

Monday night:  A good native friend of me and Sister Flynn told us that we need to work harder on the language and she was really worried for us. We cried when she left.

Tuesday night:   We found a man named Michael. He has lived an interesting life.  He's 52 years old and was very interested in why we would give our lives up for as long as we did to do such a strange thing. We scheduled him for next week.

Wednesday:  Crossroads (where we volunteer each week) . . .  we got the number for a lady who works at Crossroads, called her up this last Sunday, asked how her worship service was, told her about ours, and said we wanted to spend a P-day with her this coming month.

Thursday night:   We met a woman named Malish. She is 20 and a home worker (we called them ‘helpers’ when we lived in Singapore) for a family here but lives with her own family.  Her parents don’t want her to meet with us, but we scheduled to 'accidently' run into her next Wednesday night at the train station at 8pm . . . miracles of the faithful.

Friday night:  An old investigator came to English class and scheduled us for next Monday!

Saturday afternoon:   I talked to a lady at English class who is interested in our message. She said she will be out of town these next 3 week, but said when she returns she is willing to meet.

Saturday night:   We went to go find Malish because she called and wanted to meet up, but she never showed up because her parents wouldn’t let her leave. As we were about to leave the place we had planned to meet her, the Spirit told me and my companion first to stand up and stop sitting.   Then we felt impressed to move over to another area and stand. Nothing happened for about 5 minutes. Then a boy sat down in our exact seat and we knew it was who we needed to talk to, so without hesitation we walked right over to him.   We didn’t know what to say so we just started talking.  It turns out he is a Christian,  he would love to do what God wants him to do,  and he goes to a different church all by himself. We got his number and asked if we could meet with him this next week

Sunday:  Three new people came to church this week . . . a record number since my first transfer!

So overall, I know this email was long BUT this is to show you that God knows when you will decide to give your will to Him. He knew that Sunday afternoon was when I would surrender. He knew that by the end of the week I would have given him my all. And so what did He do?  He helped me and my companion be ready to prove He understands our righteous desires and wants to give us the things we are asking for. He helped us find these 6 new potential investigators, and I know it’s because He could finally trust me as a missionary.  He knows I will listen to Him now.

So I want to extend a challenge to all of you . . . It’s just a flip of the switch-change in your mind-and we give our will to Him. But then it’s a constant effort to keep your will in His hands.  The longer the Lord has our will, the easier it will be for Him to bless us with the things we need. Don’t hold back from Him. I wish I would have learned this 6 months ago, but it’s better now than never!  Stop doing your own thing, put everything on the table, and say, "I GIVE UP!  Take it all!  I surrender my will to Yours!”, and I promise you that you will also have this “gam ma” moment (:

Love you all!!

Love Sister Webb!

Fun on the train!

This week in English class we taught our students about Superhero's!

Captain America, Missionary Style!

Cutest Goliath ever!  I threw marshmellows at him as hard as I could!

The kids here are so cute!

No One Goes His Way Alone

“No one goes his way alone”

This quote kept me on my feet this week!  I would say this has been one of our harder weeks. We lost all of our investigators and our members this week were straight 0's. Not that numbers matter, but that also means we aren’t reaching any of our goals.  It’s been really disappointing. I was reading in “The Teaching of President Hinckley” this week and he writes a letter home to his dad about similar problems he faced on his mission.  He was concerned about wasting the Lord’s time and money and feeling quite useless (which that is a feeling I can relate to this week).  He dad responded by telling him to “lose yourself and go to work." I set my mind to do just that!  The next day there was a typhoon and we were stuck inside from 7am to 4:30pm.   That made “getting to work” really difficult!  This put me right back into a dark place darnet!  Overall I would say Satan got a hold of me this week and shook me pretty hard, so that was kind of mean of him.

One of the highlights of this week was the blessed opportunity to go to the temple. I can't even begin to express the gratitude I have for the temple. I am trying not to envy you people who can just go whenever you want. I remember before my mission, my visiting teacher at BYU telling me that I would have hard days, sometimes weeks, in my mission.  One thing that helped her when she had those days on her mission was to close her eyes and remember the peace and love she feels in the temple. The next day she took me to the temple with her and sat with me in the celestial room and said, “This feeling is the feeling you need to always have with you!”  How perfect is it that on such a hard week we physically got the opportunity to go to the temple!?   Amazing tender mercies of the Lord.

Anyway, I've been watching lots of pioneer movies lately and keep being reminded of the fact that 'no one goes his way alone.'  No matter how hard the trek, how desperate the emotions, or how negative the attitude, you will never have to do it alone.   That has kept me on my feet this week. I have an incredible companion and I have God on my side, so eventually things will work out! (even if we did have a really hard week!)  I refuse to lose faith!!

Love you all

Love Sister Webb

On the bus heading to the temple

One of my favorite companions from PG!  It's really HOT here!!

My companion, Sister Flynn

Our third companion for the next 3 weeks.  She is darling and is helping us with Cantonese so much!

Humbled One Way or Another!

This week has just flown by. I feel like there is no time to reach our goals or accomplish the things we plan in weekly planning! It just FLYS!!!  Speaking of time flying, I hit my 6 month mark!  I’m sure when it’s over I'll look back and it will have flown by.

Anyway, I’m super excited for this next week. We have a summer missionary (a teenage member from Hong Kong) staying with us, not over night, but all day.   We are really excited and it we are hopeful it will also help out our Cantonese!

So this last week has been really humbling.   First I was chastised because of my attitude towards finding. They asked us as a district what we thought of finding in Hong Kong, and they went around the room and asked each person and I said it is 'really hard, and not very effective.' This got a response out of some of the 'older' missionaries. They told me that what I put in is what I'll get out, and that it all depends on my attitude towards finding. I felt very small in that moment, and a little embarassed to be honest, but I learned that sometimes the guilty take the truth to be hard. GUILTY! So then the next day me and Sister Flynn went out finding and I had a new attitude about me to actually meet people and accomplish something.   Things went much better!  We taught one lady the plan of salvation and we got the number of these two teenage girls who didn't have a religion but were interested in coming to church. Then we ran into a less active member who (surprisingly) was really happy to see us and said she will be coming to church next week.  We ran into one lady twice and the 2nd time we were able to talk to her a bit about the church and give her a pamphlet. SOOOO moral of the story, if you show God your effort and work your hardest with an attitude to accomplish something, God WILL provide.

This week we also had the chance with our investigators and recent converts to watch the Joseph Smith Restoration movie. WOW!   That movie is something else. I cried and cried and just couldn't stop haha (: AAHH!   I just felt the truthfulness of the story of the Restoration!  So because I'm on a Joseph Smith high, I want to share a quick testimony on the power of the Book of Mormon:

Growing up, my family always read the Book of Mormon and prayed together and we held regular family home evening.  I’ve learned that these things are not something to be taken lightly.  A family united in prayer and scripture study is the most special thing in the world. It allows the children (me) to see our parents testimonies close up and observe their teachings.  It allowed me to hear learn the feeling of the Spirit and learn to recognize His voice. But not only is family scripture study and prayer important, personal scripture study and prayer are as well. I know the scriptures are something special. not just a history of the Americas, but of Chris’ts people and His hand in their lives. It’s a special book full of truth, wisdom, knowledge and love. So FAMILIES, TAKE THE TIME to read to read and pray together! Take the time INDIVIDUALLY to read daily and pray morning and night . . . EVEN when once you know it’s true (:  Our beloved prophet, Gordon B, Hinckley once said, “ So many of us use our lives as if they were entirely our own.  Ours is the choice to waste them if we wish, but that becomes a betrayal of a great and sacred trust.”  So don't waste your life away!

Love you all

Have a good week!!

Love Sister Webb

FUN P-DAY ACTIVITIES!!

BEAUTIFUL SUNSETS IN HK!

Angels

This week I think it rained every day. ALOT (: My mom told me once upon a time that when we see lightening to smile, because the angles were taking pictures of us!  When we heard thunder, stand proud below it because the angles were clapping for us! So it’s been a good week. All week angels have been thundering us along and taking pictures of our every effort!  They’ve been such a good support group (;

This week’s email will be short, but this week just seemed to FLY by. I felt so much like a missionary this week and the language study is becoming more and more effective each day!  Just a few things I learned this week...

Sometimes God prepares people for you, but some will only be ready for the seed. If you can plant the seed, then you have given them a building block for their foundation. I also learned that each person, individually, is the gardener of their own seed. God is the “Gardener” of us all if we're willing to give up our will for His, but we personally are the gardener of our own seed. If you don't work hard to nourish it every day, if you don’t let others see it grow, if you don’t encourage it . . . then nothing will happen to it. It is on YOU how fast or how slow your own seed grows.

I also read a quote this week, "We can only change perception through experiences. We all needed these lived experiences because they cause us to change." If we will look day to day with this kind of perspective, be open and humble to learn and understand truth, and not be afraid to experience the things God has in store for us,  it is MUCH MUCH MUCH easier to submit our will to God’s will. Sometimes we just have to live through it and then that personal change comes in the way we perceive things.  So here I am, living it (:

For all my friends going out on missions this month, "You might flail, But you WILL NOT fail!"   You’ve got this!!! Pray and read EVERY day!!   I am praying for you all specifically this week! Love you so much!

Love Sister Webb

For anyone who knows me well, I can fall asleep just about anywhere in any position.  It's a curse and a blessing!

Love our apartment and roomates!  We have so much fun together!

 This week in English class we celebrated the 4th of July and summer in the USA.  Kids learned  items you take to the beach and adults learned how to celebrate the 4th of July and make hot dogs!

You can't have hot dogs without tons of ketcup!!

Happy 4th of July!

Amanda keeps talking about recent converts she is helping and teaching.  I haven’t seen any pictures of baptisms, so I asked her about this.  This was her response:

You are lucky if you get 1 baptism in the HK mission.  It’s not about baptism though.  God promises He will provide prepared people if we are doing what we need to be doing.   Sometimes . . . actually most the time, those prepared people are the ones who are prepared for a seed or a root to take place.  Not all at once will the flower bloom and truth be recognized.  Yes, this is a converting and baptizing mission, but they need to be converted first and that’s not up to us how long it takes . . . that’s up to God. So right now I have come to a happy conclusion that I am planting seeds that hopefully will one day be realized.

Now here is her weekly update:

Monday:  We attempted to go on a hike by our apartment, and we made it up about 1/8 the way BUT way to many GINORMOUS spiders appeared all over the trail!!  So we turned around and came home! BUT we got some good pictures of them!

Tuesday: We had district meeting with our new district for the first time. Super fun district! Then we scheduled a member later that night with the Elders, but she "forged" us (didn't show up) so that was  "chaam" (to bad).  We also visited another member and brought him flowers (: Cute old guy.

Wednesday: CROSSROADSS!! I love love love crossroads! This week me and Sister Flynn’s job was cleaning out an old office and painting it! I had paint all over me... What do you do (: Then one of the workers at crossroads took us to her house for ice cream (: YUM!!  Then we went out to visit a Less active, Luk mouth Lam, and she wasn't home, AGAIN!  But her cute 9 year old was, so we got to talk to her a bit (:

Thursday: We tested out pretzels for English class, and they were SOOOO GOOD!! We woke up the next morning and all the dough went bad. SO we had to start from scratch for the actual English class and it turned out BROWNIE MIX was all we had, so we make “Pretzel Brownies”. . . you can imagine how gooey that was..

Friday: Weekly planning.. took us a while.. Then we did a study class with some youth in our stake going on missions. We did our personal and companion studies with them, and it was a mess! I was just a HUGE flirt fest, and they were on their phones the whole time. So... this week I think we'll change a few things up.. Then we had English class . . . the messy sticky brownie pretzel English class . . . but it was fun (:

Saturday: We taught our recent convert, Leung Hing Daih. We taught him at a member’s house and they made us cinnamon rolls!   YUMMY!(: Then we went to the church and taught kids English class. I fell asleep the whole time . . .  oops.

Sunday: Ward correlation at 7:45am, so we woke up at 6:15 and left at 7:10.  I tried to curl my hair, but when I walked outside, “BAM”,  no curls. Love Love Love the humidity! (;  I could've slept in till 6:45  . . . pity.  Then we had a member invite us over for dinner (: the KINGS! . . . an amazing family in our ward. They are so cute!  They made us french toast and it was so good !!

This week was pretty good. I learned a lot about how to manage stress, cuz yes, a mission is stressful. who'd of thunk?!   I also FELL IN LOVE with the Because of Him video. That part where the camera turns on Christ after He's resurrected and he takes a step towards Mary Magdalene.   Oh It just gets me!! We're also in the middle of 17 miracles in honor of the 4th of July and the 24th of July.  Levi Savage is one AMAZING missionary. Much recommended video for those of you about to go out on missions!

Love you all!

Have a good week!

Love Sister Webb

Ice Cream with all of the missionaries who help at Crossroads.  Sherry, the supervisor, had all of us over.  She's so nice and so appreciative of all we do!

Celebrating Sister Groberg's ONE YEAR mark!  (She's from Pleasant Grove and has become a best friend to me!  She's in the red shirt)

We may have eaten a bit too much in our PARTYING!!

Accidentally sent this text to the Ward Mission Leader . . . oops . . . Book of Moron:O