Sixteenth Week Email

Dear Family & Friends,

 hmm... What can I say about the last week.... I broke my camera, I can't speak the language, and I eat the strangest things.... I love it haha. I don't really love the fact that I broke my camera but I just laughed so hard when it happened. I also had my first split this week with Elder Smith who is our zone leader. It was so fun to work with him and go out and teach a lesson and 전도 (proselyte (jun-do)) I'm starting to lose some of my english vocabulary. I'll try to say proselyte sometimes but I can't think of the word in my head so I just say it in Korean. A pretty fun word is 가가호호 (ka-ka-ho-ho) haha it means knocking doors. 

 

I also had my first interview in the field with President Furniss. He is the most amazing guy and I respect him so much. I also love talking with Sister Furniss and she usually brings sweets and feeds us so it was pretty nice. He gave me so much to work with and he's just full of so much wisdom, which always makes me think of how much growing up I still have to do. I just love President Furniss and Sister Furniss.

 

This week was an awesome week with Missionary work. It's been a little frustrating because most of our investigator's are student's and they have had testing this week. Korean's take their education very seriously. Growing up they go to school and usually after schools or on weekends they go to an academy. So when it's testing week they basically don't look at their phone. But we still had so many awesome times with 전도ing and teaching lessons with less actives. There's a couple less actives who just love us. I was walking down the street with Elder Smith and I just heard someone yell 장로님 (Elder) and it was a less active Sister and she would not let us leave without buying us a ton of fruit. She found out that Elder Smith was going back to his area the next day so she bought him some fruit and bread haha. She is just so nice so we stopped by her house and heart attacked her. That's when you hang all of the cutout hearts on their door and leave messages on them. We also taught her and her family a quick message and invited them back to church. So we'll probably just give her a call every saturday and invite her to church.

 

 We also have an older man who is great friends with the Bishop and the Stake President. We randomly stopped by his house one day and he was just so happy to see us. He runs one of the most successfull english academys in gwangju while working at his other job. He's a very busy man. But he's trying to meet with us twice a week and he stopped going to church a while ago. He still talks about the church with such great love and faith. He stopped going to church when his son was young and is actually going to try to come meet with us with his son. We had a chance to talk with his son who loves to speak english and seemed to really like us. But anyways we met with him last Friday in the church and he just wanted to ask questions about why we were serving missions and a lot about the church. He told us that he loves to meet in the church because it's so peaceful and he actually brought his old Book of Mormon wich was an old translation. He started to look through it in front of us and there were a lot of notes from his friends (The Bishop, and the Stake President) and it really got to him. He had forgotten about the notes and it really made his day to talk about all of the amazing experiences he had growing up in the church. I think it was a great time for him to reflect on all of those times that he had with his friends and in the church and he's going to try to make it to sacrament this week. He also took a new Book of Mormon because he was really interested in the new translation. We'll actually meet with him tomorrow and I'm so excited because he's just the nicest guy ever.

I love my mission so far. It's crazy and sad to think I have almost been here a month already. Time seems to be flying by. I love this Area and I love all of our Investigators. I love our Ward and they treat us so nicely all of the time. I catch myself thinking sometimes that I don't want to leave this area but at the same time I look forward to all of the new experiences and relationships I get to build in the future. I just hope I never let a second go by without appreciating the time I have.

I hope all of you never forget that I love you and I pray for all of you. I hope you have a great week and I'll talk to you next week.

 

젠슨 장로