Blog Post #62: Culture

Dear People I Love,

Last week we went to the Hong Kong Culture Museum, and it was pretty awesome. At first I was thinking "Yeah, whatever, I don't really want to go, but it's only 20 minutes away and only $10, and it'll make my companion happy, so whatever". My enthusiasm was pretty low, not gonna lie.

IDIOT! I had the time of my life! I already knew that I loved the Lingnan School and their painting style, but now I know that Gao Qi-Feng is my favorite artist that was ever born among the children of men! He blends the old-school chinese with more modern techniques in ways I didn't know existed!

rooster and chicken in the rain


 monkey in the moonlight

Until further notice, he's not only my favorite painter/artist in modern times, but he's who I want to be when I grow up. Especially bespectacled, and living in HK wouldn't be bad either.

There were other awesome things there (like finding out that Tai Po was the center for the resistance against the British when they tried to take the New Territories), and I'll probably go again when there's a cool featured exhibit! How many awesome things are in your backyard? Go find out! Go see a museum this week, everybody loves museums, it just has to be the right one!

ANYWAYS,

On a Missionary note, I've been tearin' it up with Sugar Baby! We've been doing a lot of work trying to find and identify/bring back people who have fallen away from the Church, and while we haven't seen a ton of results yet, I know from my time in TST that miracles are right around the corner! Regardless of how long that takes, I'm still going to have a lot of fun here!

Yesterday during my Personal Study I was reading Alma chapter 49, where the good guys fortifying all the cities so the bad guys can't annihilate them, and I thought "What does this stuff have to do with me?". Then, out of nowhere, the the dews distilling from Heaven, I recieved personal revelation in an analogy.

You can't just say "I'm going to be strong in the faith of Christ and be protected", it doesn't work that way! You've got to strengthen every facet of yourself and ensure that it can withstand a war. In Preach My Gospel (kind of like the Missionary training book), there are a dozen or so Christlike Attributes that we're encouraged to study and develope, like Charity, Love, Patience, Humility, Faith, etc. Each of these parts of ourselves has to be strong enough by itself to withstand anything that Satan can throw at it. I'd love to elaborate more, but I'm out of time for today, so I'll leave you all to ponder it out for yourselves.

Love,
Elder J.E. O'Gara