Elder Ryan Jensen: Thirty-Second Week Email

Dear Family & Friends,

So this has been a super interesting week in Korea. I had a two and a half day split with my District Leader and splits are always super fun especially when you just got a new companion to the area haha. lets just say there could be better times to do splits. Anyways after we got done with that we have just had our days packed. I love the days where I leave the house after study time and I don't get back home until 9:30 because of appointments. And that happened 3 days in a row this week so that's always fun.

So a pretty fun thing that happened this week was we got a call from one of our members who owns an english academy. She was super stressed because her foreign teachers all couldn't show up that day and she had a client who drove half an hour to talk to a foreigner. Well she contacted us and sent him over to the church to meet with us. Well in our mission we have to do this program where we teach 30 minutes of english and 30 minutes of gospel. So we told him about it and he was just super happy to be talking with foreigners who could also speak a little korean so we could help if he needed it. Well after we finished up the english part we started teaching the gospel. It's hard to explain but he was happy when he got there and started talking to us but during the gospel discussion he just had this blank look on his face. He wouldn't really respond back to our questions and all I could think about was that he only wanted to meet with us for english. But we continued on with the lesson the best we could and just like in many other lessons, just as soon as we were closing up we pulled out the Book of Mormon. He sat up a little and you could just see the interest that he had. He asked the usual questions like do we believe in the bible? does the bible talk about this book? and we just used the scriptures to teach him about the Book of Mormon. I'm so jealous of how well the scriptures can speak Korean haha. But we read Moroni's promise together and just asked him to read the introduction later. I still wasn't sure what would come out of the lesson but we really did everything we could to teach simply and have a good time. Well today I walked into the library to write this e-mail and guess who was sitting at one of the tables with a smile on his face and showing us the Book of Mormon he pulled out of his bag. He showed us how far he read into the Book of Mormon after reading the introduction and all of the witnesses. And I'm still just in shock. I can see him right now and it's just the coolest feeling watching someone read the Book of Mormon for the first time. I can't even begin to explain how much I have learned about the Book of Mormon on my mission and how I'm continually learning new things everyday.

Well as always I love all of you and I hope you had an amazing week. I'll try to make this next week a lot more exciting so I have more to write about.

Elder Jensen