"His Only Perfect Son"

 Malo soifua!!!

This week was full of grammar, memorizing, and teaching, and it was awesome. My Samoan is coming along much better, and I can actually almost talk to people! Very exciting stuff. It's a little frustrating that I've learned and memorized so many words for preaching the gospel, and they are all very important, but I know so little about just casually talking to people, which can be just as important for regular people and missionaries alike. BUT, I'm only halfway through the MTC 

(Missionary Training Center) time (povi pa'ia (holy cow) that's crazy).

As far as language studies go, we've now learned all four sentence structures (equitive, transitive, intransitive, and auxiliary), and we're beginning our Intermediate Core. My district set the goal to have the vocab for the first three lessons in Tala'i La'u Talalelei (Preach My Gospel) memorized by the end of the MTC, so that's what we're gonna shoot for. We still have a lot of grammar rules and sentence types to go over, so I'll have plenty to study these next three weeks.

For our doctrinal studies, we began going through each principle of the Gospel of Christ, one a day, and diving deep into the doctrine and scripture to fully understand (and know how to teach) each principle. So far we've covered Faith in Jesus Christ, Repentance and Baptism, and each one has been incredible. The insight that I've received from my teachers, fellow elders, and the Holy Ghost have been amazing. I've had a lot of eye-opening experiences, and more faith/testimony building than I've ever felt before. One of my favorite lessons was on Wednesday with Sis Long. It was her actual and official last day of teaching us, and she decided to go out with a bang. She showed us a BYU devotional from 2011 with Brad Wilcox called "His Grace is Sufficient." (I strongly encourage all of you to go find it on YouTube or whatever and watch it). It was absolutely incredible. Wilcox explained Grace in a way I had never thought of before, and it felt like every other sentence was a quote worth writing down and putting on your wall. We also had an awesome discussion about it right after, and we all left feeling the Spirit on a crazy level.

As far as funny stories or shenanigans for this week go, we had a blast. It's kinda hard to goof off a whole lot or have a ton of fun together when we're all hundreds of miles apart, but we make do. Three or four of the elders in our district can play the ukulele (I'm starting to learn it as well), and they'll play hymns, or fun songs, or goofy ones in our free time in class. Elders Brown and Prince learned the Kahoot! theme song, and play it almost nonstop when there's a break in any of our classes. Uso Tepa also shared in the fun times when he was talking about goals and plans. He was talking about how we set goals, but our plan to get there doesn't always work. Instead of changing the goal we set, change the plan to get there. Tepa then related it thus: "What's every single return missionary's goal? Marriage, right? So if your goal is marriage, and you're in a relationship that isn't working, don't change your goal, sui le teine!" ("Change the girl!") We all laughed pretty hard at that one. (If you don't think that's funny, please just remember there's only eight of us elders, and three male teachers, so we kinda goof off on occasion).

In other news, for those of you that don't already know, I was reassigned to the New York ,New York City Mission!! I'll be leaving the week of October 12th (don't have the exact date yet), and I'm sooooo excited. It'll be a struggle to keep learning and studying Samoan while I'm on the wrong side of the country lol, but I know this is where I'm supposed to be going, and I can't wait to get out to the field.

(As far as reassignments in my district, everyone but Elders Wilson and Aloisio has one. Kauer is going to Minneapolis, Minnesota, Brown to Los Angeles, California, Mckrola and Prince to Independence, Missouri, and Tenney to Albuquerque, New Mexico). They're trying to break up the Sam Fam, but it ain't gonna be that way for long.

Finally, I have two spiritual thoughts from this week that I would like to share. The first one was from our discussion in class about repentance, and something that Uso Tepa said that never clicked for me before. He was talking about Christ's Atonement (John 3:16 type stuff), and he said "God loves us all so much that he allowed his only perfect son to be killed so that the rest of us may live again." I don't know why I never saw the importance of that before, but it hit me like a cement truck. God loves all of us, everyone, the sinners, the apostles, you, me, everyone that ever was, is, or will be, SO MUCH, that he allowed his ONE perfect son, the one person to ever lived that never broke the law, or made mistakes, or sinned, or failed to keep his covenants, the ONE man that was actually worthy to live God after this life, to die. Christ was the only person ever actually worthy to live with God again, but He died so that the rest of us sinners could have a second chance. If that doesn't make you want to rethink your life, and start repenting on the spot, and make His sacrifice really worth something I don't know what will (other than the Holy Ghost, but that's not important right now). I absolutely loved this insight, and I hope you all take the time to really think about it.

The second experience I wanted to share happened yesterday (Friday). All of us elders had our first Samoan TRC lessons yesterday or Thursday. We had to teach a young woman named Mariah a lesson for about 20 minutes, entirely fa'aSamoa (in Samoan). After our lessons we reflected in class about how we did. We realized that our lessons were majorly unsuccessful for one main reason, with a few subpoints. We were too afraid of the language, and so we never ended up making any sort of personal connection. Our lessons turned out stale and not very effective. Uso Tepa helped us realize what we had done wrong (gently of course, but he made sure we knew), and he helped us correct our mistakes. He said two things of note, the first being a well known saying, the other being something of his own composition.  "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." And, "Put less trust in yourself, and more faith in God."

The first one was pretty self-explanatory. We had never connected with her, never really came to love her and show her our love for her. The result was an awkward, stale and uncomfortable lesson for everyone. The second phrase was a little more interesting to me. Tepa wasn't saying not to trust ourselves, but the problem we had faced came from us only relying on our knowledge of the language and not at all on the knowledge of the Lord. I need to put less reliance and trust in my own knowledge, and focus it more on trusting the Lord to help me know what to say. (studying the language is vital, yes, but the Spirit is more important). Like it says in MF&F (Doctrine and Covenants):

"Seek not to declare my word, but first seek to obtain my word, and then shall your tongue be loosed; then, if you desire, you shall have my Spirit and my word, yea, the power of God unto the convincing of men" (Doctrine and Covenants 11:21)

"Neither take ye thought beforehand what ye shall say; but treasure up in your minds continually the words of life, and it shall be given you in the very hour that portion that shall be meted unto every man" (Doctrine and Covenants 84:85).

The work of the Lord is moving forward, and I'm eternally grateful to be a part of it.

Alofa atu ia outou,

Elder Hill