Merry Christmas from Chan

So let me answer all of the questions before i tell this awesome story. YES i would love to have you video tape Christmas with the family and send it over. I could definitely watch it. We come home and watch the church history DVDs every night on our TV, so that would be cool. And yes you can call me when you are ready on Christamas to call me. I don't know when we will be calling so If I don't call when you are ready, just call our number and we will see if we can work it out then. Our number is 808-561-7631.

And thank everybody so much for all of the letters and packages. I really enjoy it so much and i appreciate all that you have done for me. Nothing beats coming home and having mail and especially a package!!! SO THANK YOU!!!!! I saw the pics of granps lights, they look awesome!!!! Anyway i gotta tell this story, so i if I don't get time to do it i want to wish you all a merry christmas right now!!!! Okay now its story time.
So as you heard this week we got a new elder from the MTC. His name is Elder Beattty and he is from St. George, Utah. His call was changed in the MTC from Guam to Hawaii and it was because of medical reasons. Anyway it hasn't been so good. At least not those first couple of days. He is very very very very very prideful and doesn't take advice very well. He thinks it is his way or the highway and if he doesn't get his way he gets mad. We had companionship study and he was like lets sing a song. We told him okay and he picked one. Lets sing all 4 verses he said. I told him we had a lot of lessons to plan and that we only had time to sing 1 verse. He then looked at me and smirked and quoted DC 25 about how the song of the rightouess is a prayer unto God and it shall be anwered with a blessing upon those who sing His words. And then he smiled at me. I wanted to punch him seriously. I was like okay big guy, lets sing all fetching four verses just like you said, becuase you obviously know more about missionary work than me. You run the show i guess. Then as we studied he mentioned all of the things we were doing wrong and how we needed to fix them. He then gave a description of how he would do things and how that would work better than what we were doing. Biggs and i just looked at each other like what in the heck is going on? who does this guy think he is? And now in that setting, here is how i learned a HUGE LESSON.....................(I typed this next paragraph before this first one when i had time so that is why it seems a little choppy and not connected to the first paragraph.)

So this week I was blessed with yet another awesome learning experience! I really am amazed at the miracles I have been blessed to be a part of. It has been interesting with the whole tri-ship thing with the three of us here in Mililani. Elder Biggs and I have learned a lot with this new greenie. He is really a difficult kid to get along with. I fully understand the term "Greenie Pride" now. I have never even seen it close to as bad as this case we have here, not even close.... And because of that, I immediately let my pride grow, and I just felt, I guess, a little tension with him. He tries to always tell us how we need to do missionary work and that we should always do what he says and that we need to change how we do work because it isn't the best way to do it. And you can imagine the looks those two Elders gave, who have been out a year and a half, to this greenie who has been out under a week and at that time under three days. I must admit that after hearing these comments from this greenie and having him whine and complain about doing it his way, i really kind of shut off towards what he had to say and I didn't want to listen to what he had to offer anymore because of the comments he was making. He would say something and I would just ignore him and nod my head.... Elder Biggs was even worse, ha ha, he would just straight up pop Elder Beatty's bubble and tell him he was wrong and that he needed to sit down and be quiet and be the greenie, not the trainer. And it was in this fashion that the Lord taught me a great lesson, a lesson that can be applied with a scripture in Alma 1 concering the teacher and the learner and how both of them can be edified and neither were better than the other but both equal and both important towards progressing in the knowledge of the Lord.
This was like the second or third day of having Elder Beatty come in from the MTC. We had just had that companionship study with the whole singing thing, and I was a little upset about this little guy coming in and trying to run the show. We had planned to go into this area near our pad. It was an area in which resided a family by the name of, 'Takahata', a family that I have just felt like we needed to go and see the entire time Elder Biggs has been here. For some reason we had not been able to make it to their house and see who they were and meet them, but I had put them down the night before to go and see in the morning. But after that eventful companionship study, I couldn't find the name in the area book. I knew it was in the ward list but i just could not find it. I started to believe that i was going crazy and that the name just didn't exist. Had i really seen that name, 'Takahata'? Was it really not in the ward list or on my planner or on any paper that i was frantically looking through to find the name? I finally just gave up and didn't know what to think about it. Maybe i was just losing my mind I decided.
We decided to walk during the morning and leave the car back at the pad. The entire time Elder Beatty was just nagging and nagging and nagging about knocking doors. I swear he wanted to knock every single door that existed here in the islands of Hawaii. We kept telling him that we can't be wasting our time all of the time knocking doors and that we need to see these names that we had planned for, but he was just getting upset that we weren't listening to him.
After seeing most of the names we had planned to see, we started to knock out this apartment building, looking for a name that previous missionaries had not left a complete address of. They had left only which building the person lived in and not what door. So we began to tract it out. After knocking out the first half of the doors i was tapped on the shoulder and Elder Biggs just smiled at me and pointed towards Elder Beatty headed up a set of stairs to go and knock on some door. He rolled his eyes and gave me 'the look' and I did it back to him and with that he gave me a sarcastic thumbs up and he vetured up the stairs. I just waited at the bottom not wanting to scare away people with three young boys dressed in white shirts and ties in Hawaii, two is bad enough!!!!! We had knocked plenty of doors previous to this one and I just took a deep breath and started to ponder on how we were going to get a hold of this greenie and knock some sense into him. It was beggining to be too much.
About a minute later i heard Elder Biggs call down to me," Hey man we are going in!" I couldn't believe it! Here we had just knocked on all of these doors and all of the sudden this one actually answers and they actually get to go inside which is a very rare thing to have happen in this part of the town because of how rich the people are. And it was one that Elder Beatty had really fought to go and knock on. I admit i was a little irritated that it had happend, "Now that he sees this work, this greenie is gonna have us knock every from here to Kingdom come, " I thought. "Now he is never going to listen to us and he won't be teachable at all as he has seen that his way worked and our way didn't... "
After a little bit of thinking this, i was shocked and realized that I needed to submit my pride again and be so grateful that we actually got inside a house!!!! It was a miracle that we had gotten in a door at that place in Mililani. But still I was worried that the greenie would just take this little experience and run away with it. I sat out of the lesson for fear of intruding in on them and her not knowing that there were three of us, but Elder Biggs and Elder Beatty came out of the lesson on cloud nine. They said that there was an awesome lady they had just taught and that she was super nice. They said she had told them that she was married in the temple a few years back, but that she only did that and became a member to please her husband. After they got in a divorce she quit going to the church and her husband now was Anti-Mormon. She said it was good we had gone over then in the morning and talked to her while her current husband was gone to work because he would've yelled at us and told us to go away. She said that her last name was Pratt, but couldn't remember ever hearing that name.
I started to think that maybe this Elder Beatty had been prompted to go and knock on this door. But still i wondered why the Lord would do this and why I or Elder Biggs hadn't been prompted to go and knock on this door? Why had the greenie been prompted and not us two 'SEASONED' elders? Weren't we in tune with the spirit? Did the Lord not trust me with knocking on that door? Why did this happen? Now that this greenie sees this he will take even more adavantage of us and try to do his own thing and not listen to us and it is just going to be a huge pain in my side.
So we walk back to the pad and the whole time i am just wondering and gettting kind of discouraged about the whole thing, of course I was excited to have found this new part-member family, but I was still bitter about the new guy calling us out after having been in the field like two days!!!! Who did he think he was?!!!? But curious as i was, i decided to look up this lady that they had just found. Pratt..... I thumbed through the pages of the ward directory and came to the name, Pratt. I was surprised it was acutally in the ward list. And every fiber of my being felt as if it was being shocked when i came to that name, Pratt.
Because the name, Pratt, was crossed out and written in pen by a previous missionary in the right side of the list was the name, 'Takahata'. I was dumbfounded... That very name that I had been planning to go and see was right there and the reason i couldn't find it in the morning was becuase Takahata wasn't acutally in the ward list with all of the names starting with "T", it was written next to the crossed out, Pratt, after missionaries had found out that this was the new last name of the young lady we had ran into. The Lord had prompted Elder Beatty to go and knock on the very door of which I couldn't find the address to earlier in the morning. And even before that we had always had things come up to where we couldn't see that name in the previous weeks. Things would just come up in the evening and we couldn't ever visit them.
Was i prompted to see the Takahata family? Yes! But why couldn't the Lord just help me find the name in the area book and make it easy? I knew i was prompted to visit them, why did God have to let me frantically search for it that morning and not find it and then in turn lead us to the very apartment building to where that family resided and then not prompt me or Elder Biggs to knock on a door, but this new greenie who had hardly even pulled his lips off of the bottle when it came to missionary work? Why would He do such a thing? The answer simply is because i needed to learn a lesson. First, the Lord could tell that I was judging this new missionary straight from the get go. He had hurt my pride a little bit and i didn't like it. So the Lord put the name, Takahata, into my mind and then let me search for it all morning and not find it, so i could not deny the fact that i was looking for such a name. Second, he prompted Elder Beatty to go and knock on that door, and neither one of us, the more experienced missionaries. Third, he gave me some time to think about what had just happend. And when i thumbed through those pages and found that the very door Elder Beatty had been prompted to knock on was the very family I had been searching for, I was completely overcome and shocked and i learned the lesson that was intended, like it never could have been learned had it happend any other way than the way it had occured.
God is no respecter of persons. He loves all of His children the same. He will do His work through His chosen servants, REGARDLESS of how much experience or how talented a person is. God could care less if we are the prophet of His church or a deacon passing the sacrament. He doesn't care if you are a Mission President or just a faithful visiting teacher. God doesn't even care if you are out on your mission for 2 years, or 2 days, (HA HA REALLY! As you can see.) He will still carry out His work through His servants in the way and manner that He wants it done. We have never ceased from being teachable and from progressing in the knowlede of our God. And i had to learn it the hard way, through a great young man, Elder Beatty, the "Greenie" from St. George who could count on his hand the days that he had been on his mission.
LEARN FROM EVERY SINGLE PERSON YOU COME IN CONTACT WITH! And never make the mistake like I had and think that we are too good or too smart or too experienced to learn from all of our brothers and sisters that surround us in our daily lives.