OK, so blandness and romance are probably the worst words ever to describe my experience so far (virtually nothing is bland, and literally nothing is going on in my love life right now). I saw the phrase on a box of cookies at the house of a family that let us in while we were tracting (knocking doors to find people we could teach). I forget the brand name on the box, but the color scheme and choice of font indicated to me that the company was going for an overall impression of elegance and upper class-ness. I'm not sure how the word "blandness" got mixed in amid the poshititude, but I suppose it won't detract too much for the average Taiwanese person. More importantly, it was a real blessing to be let into this family's home to get to know them and see how our message could meet their needs. We're going back next week.
Last week English class got switched up a bit. Sister Stratford doesn't like teaching children, and I happen to be the English leader in our district, so I switched us with the elders. They are very good-natured, and so were willing enough to oblige. Now my companion and I team teach the middle-level group. There's a local church member (who lives here, but is American) who usually comes to teach the 5 or so upper level students. The middle level is a wide range of abilities, and quite a change from teaching the little friends (in Chinese the direct translation of "little friend" means child), but I like it. I think I mentioned before that we focus on teaching English for an hour, and then do a gospel message for 30 minutes. Sister Stratford introduced a new format that I like a lot: Break the share into three 10-minute segments, and intersperse them throughout the lesson. This integrates the share with the English, and helps keep our students attention throughout the entire hour and a half. My favorite part of last week was our 10-minute segment of teaching a primary song in English to our class. The lesson was on family, so we taught "Love is spoken here", because it's about family prayer. Sister Stratford and I wrote up the words on the whiteboard, explained some of the more difficult words and phrases, and then sang it for them. When we invited them to sing with it, we were surprised by their willingness to do so. Of course there were a lot of mistakes, but as we sang together the Spirit really came in quickly. I know my companion and I both noticed it, and some of our class members did as well; they commented that while we sang, they felt peaceful and happy. Music really is amazing. We sing at almost every teaching appointment, and sometimes we sing for people while we're tracting. It took me a couple days to get used to, but now I really love it because I think songs that are sincerely written and sung to express sincere conviction can always invite those same peaceful, happy feelings.
