Hello Family & Friends,
Happy Easter everyone... I already had mine... Like I said I'm the cool kid. Haha I promise I'm growing up out here but it's pretty slow. Well anyways I had such a great week in Gwangju. Since it's Korea they have Conference a week later so that they can translate it. I can't imagine a better way to spend my Easter Sunday than listening to conference. There were so many amazing talks and I had such a great time with all of the other Elders.
So on Saturday we had english class at 11 and that's always fun. We have two grandpa's and a younger mom who come to our class. Their english is amazing so it's pretty fun to teach them and just have conversations with them. Well we invited the trio of College students to the first session of conference and they all said no, so we weren't really planning on having anybody go with us. After english class Elder Allred checked the phone and we had a couple missed calls and a text. Sister 노애란 (no-eh-ran) texted us and basically said she was on her way to the church and she wanted to go to conference so that was awesome. We are about 45 minutes away from the Stake Center so we showed up pretty late but she actually really enjoyed it. She kept on asking questions like why are we serving missions and she asked a lot of questions about the prophet. She said he looked so old and cute haha. But it was kind of cool to talk back to her in very simple Korean and tell her why I wanted to serve a mission. Pretty much whenever Elder Allred is having a normal conversation I'm completely lost but if we're in a lesson and talking about church related things I can usually follow along. Except I wasn't able to understand a single thing that was going on in General conferance so I haven't seen the first session yet. After that we went over to the 시내 which is basically the coolest place ever. It's like the gateway but more stores, more people, and more of everything. We ate real fast and started a survey booth. We just set up a table with a bunch of surveys on it about english and we start speaking english to everyone. They love English here so we had 150 surveys filled out in 45 minutes and it was so much fun. All of the Missionaries love doing surveys in the 시내 (sorry it's pronounced she-neh). After that we went back for the second session of conference. It was awesome to see the MTC choir there because we knew so many of those missionaries and Elder Anderson and I were standing super close to the TV and we would lose it everytime we saw somebody that we knew haha. But I loved Elder Holland's talk about the workers all getting paid the same wage for the day when some showed up for only an hour. I'm not going to lie my mind went straight to that's not fair and than Elder Holland basically gave me a good old spiritual check. I love Conference for that reason. I'm just some 21 year old kid who can be quick to jump to conclusions so fast. I'll be the first person to admit that I need to work on a lot in my life but I know that I can't fix all of it over night. It's learning experiences like I had during that talk that just shows me that I'm human and I'll always have room to improve. Like Elder Holland said the Workers who recieved the work in the morning didn't have to worry all day long about finding work. They agreed to the pay for that day so they knew what they would recieve. The workers who had to worry all day long trying to find work were truly blessed by the employer. They were blessed even more by the genourous wage. And after the morning workers argued to the Employer he responded "why should you be jealous because I choose to be kind?" It's the strangest thing out here in Korea for me. I spend all of my study time focusing on how I can better teach these people that we're meeting with and all of my focus is on them. It's amazing how I focus on them as much as I can and I have been learning so much for myself. I think this principle could have been applied to my entire life. Reaching out and always trying to focus on others I'm sure I would have learned so much more in my life. I hope I'll never pass up an oppurtunity to help someone out.
So after that session I was given permission to go on a split... With Elder Anderson (The same Elder Anderson who came to Korea with me a week ago haha) We basically can't say anything and the area we were in was new to both of us. We knew enough of the 시내 to get around but that's it. We were laughing so hard that we had both been there a week and we had permission to go walk around together haha. Well we actually ran into Sister 이보배 (ee-bo-beh she calls herself my mom) and she was so mad at Elder Allred and Elder Anderson's companion for letting us go alone. She followed us to make sure we didn't get in trouble or get lost. It was such a fun time with Elder Anderson and it's always nice to see people from the MTC.
Anyways I have to get going I'm sorry I can't tell you more about my weekend. It was such an awesome weekend and I'm sure this week will be just as great. There's just so much I want to tell all of you but I hope that the one thing you can get out of this e-mail is that I'm having the greatest time out here. Sure it can be hard to get out of bed some mornings but by the time bed time rolls around I have so much to write down in my journal. I love Korea and the Korean people. They treat me so nicely mainly because I'm a foreigner. The best thing is is when little kids call me a foreigner in Korean and I respond back in Korean and tell them "no I'm Korean" they lose it everytime haha. Well I love all of you and I keep all of you in my prayer's. Have a great week!
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