Nov. 21, 2011

So this last week has been pretty hectic, well actually today was pretty hectic. I thought that there was no way I was going to get transferred this week because they have a new greenie training that they do which is 12 weeks long so I thought I was going to be with my trainer for a while, but the President made some pretty major changes and now Elder Farrell is going to be zone leader and since I've been only out for 1 transfer, I am too young to be an assistant zone leader so I am going north to Suwon in the Shingar area. I'm happy because my new companion will be Elder Williams and he is really awesome, but I'm sad at the same time because we had so many things lined up for next transfer and I finally felt like things were really going to get going, but I'm being transferred now so my involvement in these plans will be no more. I am excited to go up to Shingar though, it is in city area so I'm excited to be back in the city again and it is also right by Korea's Disneyland, Everland. So I'm really excited to be going up there. Last week I also went on splits to the countryside and I absolutely hated it. I loved the Elder I went on splits with, his name is Elder Hwang, but he just tells people to call him Elder Wayne because Americans just butcher his name when they say it. We pretty much taught English to a lot of different people who had absolutely no gospel interest so that wasn't really that fun. I did meet a lot of interesting people, but it was just lame teaching English the whole time I was out there.

Nov. 14, 2011

 

Things this week were good. We had Zone Conference down in Daejeon this week which was good, it was nice to see a lot of missionaries from our mission. Definitely the best day of last week was Sunday. We had 2 investigators come to church this week which was really awesome. It was the primary program this week so they had the chance to see a bunch of cute Korean kids singing and they were able to hear a simple gospel message from them. Afterwards they attended a baptism with us and during the baptism the girl getting baptised bore her testimony and her conversion story which was really good for them both to hear. We are planning on setting dates with them both in this next coming week so we are really excited. We are worried about one because he is extremely shy and he really only stays around his member friend, but he has a real desire to learn about the gospel and he has the member support which is really good. His friend brought him to church last week and that was the first time that we met him. His name is Yu Kyu Dong and he is pretty much a genius. He is 35 years old and is studying pharmacology at the Harvard of Korea. He is getting Masters at the moment. His member friend is actually a Professor whose family lives in Provo right now so he speaks fluent English which is really nice for us. That's pretty much all that happened last week though, we took some time meeting certain investigators for the last time and then dropping them to our weekly English class because they had no desire to listen to our message, all they wanted to do was to learn English.

 

Nov. 7, 2011

So this week was a little slow, Elder Farrell was sick for the first part of the week so not too much happened then. My Aunt Linda gave us a referral of a girl who lived in her ward in Albuquerque who is a member, but didn't know where the church was in her area in Korea and my Aunt told me to meet her if she was in our area or refer her to missionaries in her area. Well, as it turns she lives in our area which was really awesome. We met her and she told us up front that she really didn't want to come to church unless her parents (non-members) came to church with her because she doesn't know anyone here which we totally understand because it's hard moving to a new ward by yourself and not know anyone there. I certainly wouldn't want to go to a new ward by myself and not know anyone there. We told her that our ward was really good and filled with a lot of foreigners and that she would love it and that we would be there with her always. That seemed to open her up a little bit to the idea of coming to church. She then told that she would come on Sunday if she could, but unfortunately they celebrated her mom's birthday on Sunday so she wasn't able to come. It was ok though because she said she would come next week. Another cool thing that happened was that we were able to meet our investigator U Won Te with our bishop and he is showing more and more interest in the church. He came with his scriptures marked with questions to ask us and the bishop was able to answer them no problem with his testimony and brief history of the Book of Mormon. Unfortunately he hasn't come to church with us yet because he has been busy, but he sent us a really cool text on Saturday night saying that next week he has to come to church. We were going to invite him to be baptized last lesson, but the bishop kind of took over the lesson (in a good way) so we didn't feel right extending the invitation. We're planning on inviting him this week so hopefully he will want to be baptized. Final cool thing that happened last week was that we got in a bus crash!!! It was insane, we were going out to see the Chungju Elders because Elder Farrell is the District leader and he needed to do the baptismal interview for them. So we are going over this hill and then our bus driver slams on the brakes and then we hit the car in front of us. It really wasn't that insane, but now I can say that I have gotten in an accident on public transportation!

Oct. 31, 2011

Last week was a good week for missionary work and for Elder Farrell and I. Last P-day we went hiking all day and it kind of sucked because we were super tired all throughout this past week. We were expecting a little hill because that's what Korean people call hiking. It's really funny because they get decked out in Northface clothing gear and have hiking boots and walking poles and all they are doing is walking up a paved road that is just slightly going up hill. Anyways, that's what we were expecting and our potential investigator, Birdman, takes us on this extremely steep 8 mile hike. We were just so dead afterwards and it kind of threw off last week, but we still did see so many wonderful things. Anyways, we didn't have time to buy groceries or anything like that so we were going to HomePlus (Korea's Walmart) and we get a call from a former investigator who we hadn't met yet and he was like I want to meet you guys, when is the soonest time we can meet? We immediately got on the bus and went to the church and met him there and the dood has so much potential. He's 20 years old and the only reason why he stopped meeting us in the first place was because his dad hates our church and told him not to meet us, but now that he's in college he wants to meet with us so we are super stoked. We met him twice last week and gave him a BoM and he seems super interested so we're super stoked. We're trying to build a relationship between him and some of our ward members so he has some incentive to go to church. We also met another investigator on Wednesday named Kim Sang Gyo and he is pretty awesome as well. Him and I get along really well and he seems interested in the gospel which is good. We also met with our favorite investigator U Wan Te and he just shocked us with how much he wants to know about this gospel. We invited him to Friday night basketball and afterwards we talked with him for a little bit about his Book of Mormon reading and he said that he had read everything we asked him to read and he had so many good questions. We asked him to read 2 Nephi 31 and in verse 1 it says something like Nephi couldn't write everything down that he wanted or something like that and U Wan Te was like "Why couldn't Nephi continue writing in the Book of Mormon?" It took us back because we had never really thought about it that much but we just explained that sometimes they can't write down everything God reveals to them because God tells them not to and that because he was about to die that he didn't have too much more time to write in the Book of Mormon. He is awesome though, he said his first prayer with us and we hope that he gets baptized because it will help our other investigator, I Je Hun, get baptized because the two of them are really good friends and I Je Hun isn't as interested as U Wan Te. That's pretty much the main cool events that happened this week though, we had a crazy halloween party that was super fun, we had a spook alley and we made some kids cry so I considered it a success. I was at the end and I popped out of a door and would scare people, it was super fun.