What a wonderful week. Transfer weeks are always fun and this transfer brought a lot of great changes so we're all happy. And I don't know what happened but it seems like everything fell into place for every companionship this last week and there's just so much excitement going on in the Daejeon Stake for missionary work.
Well we started off the week in a trio with Elder Peterson so it was basically a small version of the MTC. But between the Sunhwa schedule and the Doonsan schedule we were all over Daejeon for three days. Last week we ended up going to every area in the Daejeon zone except for one. We were just all over the place and had no time to do anything it felt like but it ended up to be a good time. Right off the bat on Monday night our schedules clashed and we decided to go with the Doonsan missionary's schedule. So we went to go visit a member and her husband who was in the hospital. They told us that they would be moving back to the area where she was baptized in a couple weeks but that her husband wanted to start taking the lessons and to be baptized. He told us how religion has been important to him his entire life and he wants to be with his wife in everything so he'll get baptized. It was so great to see them make that decision and we promised him how happy he will be with all of it. And this entire time their young little boy was just running around jumping on us and trying to beat us up. If you weren't looking he would kiss you on the cheek and just be a crazy little kid. So we just talked with them for a little while and headed out for the night with a great feeling knowing that an entire family will be living in the gospel together.
After that we just had appointment after appointment. We went from last week with only one to this week with having our days planned about 90% of the time. We met with Brother Shin who is our older Jehovahs Witness. We have been having some great lessons with him and he's so excited to hear our messages. He does reassure us every time that he has been in his religion for 40 years and knows the bible forwards and backwards but he has really enjoyed the Book of Mormon lately. We had given him some of our family english pamphlets and when we met with him last week he introduced us to a family that he knows and we are planning on meeting with them this week.
We also had english village out in one of our countryside branches last saturday. We had rooms set up like post offices, clothing stores, restaurants, and movie theaters. People would come in and we would only speak english and they would pretend to be in america for 3 hours. It was a ton of fun and Elder Gibbons and I were in charge of going out on the street and wrangling people in haha. And there we met Karen who lived in Texas for a year and was basically from america. She has studied about so many religions and she had some LDS friends back in Texas but she knew very little. She had actually started looking at the church websites a little over a month ago and reading a little bit about our church but she was surprised when we stopped her on the street. She stayed for all 3 hours and was happy to get a Book of Mormon and set up some times to meet with the Sister Missionary's down there.
That night we had to hurry back in time to make it to Joon's baptism. The Elder's in the office have been teaching Joon for a month now and I have met with Joon on splits about 3 times. I was also able to do his interview and saw him come out to all of the events we had this past month. But I couldn't believe how fast he progressed in the Gospel and was so prepared by the time he was baptized. I was sharing an experience of how I felt the spirit that week one time and it made everything completely worth it. And he stopped me and asked if the Elders had told me about his prayer experience and I said no. So he told me how he was praying 3 weeks ago and he just got the weirdest most comforting feeling and ever since then he decided to read, pray, and come out to church and he said that he's still getting used to that strange comforting feeling but he's going to do everything he's been taught to do so he can continue to feel that way. He also bore an amazing testimony at his baptismal service and now he's just part of the ward. Already has relationships and friends in the ward. He's been marking his scriptures and I'm not going to lie when I looked around the room at all the investigators there I saw young kids with piercings, old men who said their hobby was drinking, and others who have more than once told the missionary's that they are only there to learn english. I thought of how different they are in every way and Joon was the exact same with his beard and lifestyle. And all I could do is just remember what President Uchtdorf said during genreal conference. The church is designed to nurture the imperfect. These people don't have the dockers and button up shirts that most people assume we wear haha but these people are making the biggest changes in their lives to live according to the gospel and they slip up sometimes. But we can still see what direction they are heading in and I couldn't be more excited to see a room filled with all of those different people. And then I thought about how I slip up most of the time but I'm happy I am now in a place I need to be to learn the absolute most that I could from those experiences and have so much help from everybody around me. And now I'm happy for Joon and he seems so happy and is about to face some of the challenges that come with change. But he's in the perfect place to make all of the changes that he wants to make.
Sorry i'm getting into the mood again where I'm just typing everything that comes to mind. There's so much that happened this past week that I want to tell you but times up. I have to get going but I hope all of you have a great week and I love all of you.
Elder Jensen
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