Sixty-Fifth Week Email

안녕하세요?

   Well it's raining really really hard outside right now and guess which companionship left their umbrella's at a store last Saturday? haha anyways what a wonderful week to be in Korea. Not a whole lot happened this last week but we were still able to see so many miracles.

   My week started off with a split with my zone leader. I always love splits because they are never just a normal day. Something always happens while you're on a split and these days I'm doing splits once a week. Anyways every single one of our plans fell through for two days straight.... I had no idea what was going on but Elder Crowther and I still managed to get so much done and it was so much fun. Our teaching styles are completely different and it worked out really well.

   After that Elder Hughes and I went all the way up to Daejeon for a meeting with all of the new trainers and new missionaries. It was a pretty interesting meeting... They separated the new missionaries and the trainers and started asking them questions about the training program. But we all learned a lot and it's always such a great time to receive training from President Furniss. Especially because he is leaving very soon and we will get our new mission president who is President Shin from the MTC Korean District Presidency.

   But by far the best part of my week was Sister Go and Geehyun coming out to church yesterday. They showed up and pulled out their Books of Mormon and their little note pads and just waited for anything to come up so they could take a note and show me haha. We also had Sister Jang, who is always trying to help us with anything, sit next to her and they had such a great time. But probably the best part is that I went with Geehyun to primary.... haha that was super interesting. I honestly don't remember anything about Primary other than the song scripture power. But the Primary teacher Sister Hwang is a elementary school teacher and she knows how to handle children haha. I even got yelled at once and called on a lot for answers. I felt just like a child but Geehyun had such a great time. We learned about the Priesthood and the spirit and he was so involved. Sister Hwang would hold up pictures of Joseph Smith receiving the Priesthood and she kept on asking who gave him the priesthood and Geehyun would just ask me who gave it to him, and I would tell him, and he was the only person who would answer haha. It is a pretty hard question for such young kids but that's when Sister Hwang told me there's no cheating haha. We also sang a lot of songs and he really just had a fun time with all of the youth in the ward. And everything I heard was that Sister Go just was so involved in relief society and Sister Jang took really good care of her all day.

   Well that's my week in a nutshell but it was filled with so many more miracles and I just want to tell all of you about them all, but I'm out of time. I love all of you so much and I hope you have a great week.

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Sixty-Fourth Week Email

안녕하세요

   Well as always I had another amazing week in Jeonju this week. And the week ended in a perfect way with Conference. And honestly Conference was just so amazing. Our district was focusing on preparing our investigators for conference and also preparing ourselves for conference and it was just such a great weekend. As always we watched it a week later and we all met in the stake center. All of the missionaries all watched conference in english in a separate room while all of the member's watched it in Korean in the chapel. I think the best thing about this week though was a new Mother and Son that we met.

   About two weeks ago Elder Hughes and I were walking back from church when this women yelled at us from her care and motioned for me to come over. I said hello and she asked if we were LDS missionaries. She used the old Korean name for the church but I still said yes and she said she was very busy and had to get going but she use to go to our church when she was little with her Mother and older sister. But she told us that she wants her son to start going to church and she asked for our pass a long card. So I gave it to her and she had to drive off real fast. Well last monday she gave us a call on our ride home from the P-day activity and wanted to meet. So she asked if we had time that night and just like that we had an appointment in 2 hours, not dressed, and needed one of our Member's to go with us to visit haha. Well luckily every part about this wonderful ward is so strong, including the Priesthood holders. The first Member we called just asked us when and where and he would meet us. After a great time with Sister Go and Geehyun (her son) we set up appointments for the next night and the next week. We found out that she was really young but she remembers the foreign missionaries coming to her house to visit her Mom and older sister and she just remembers how much fun she had back then. She has just been so accepting and was so willing to start reading the Book of Mormon and she really wants to be a good example to her son. She also said that she would come out to General conference so we were very excited for that.

    Then yesterday I realized that the church in Korea is the exact same church as America. Of course the Gospel is the same every where but the first session started at 10 and at 9:58 here comes that caravan of minivans and small suv's full of our member's families all running into the building haha. Anyways that made it a little difficult to get Sister Go and the family that we are going to be working with to sit together but it all turned out great. And this Stake has just grown up together and it's honestly such a great feeling to be sitting with all of them in between sessions and eating. It just feels like we are at a giant family reunion and it was really great for Sister Go to see that.

   Well I have to get going but I can tell all of you that my prayers were answered this weekend as we listened to the Prophet and our other Leaders. I learned so much and I hope I can never forget some of the very important things that I learned. I love all of you and I hope you have a fantastic week. I know that I will.

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Sixty-Third Week Email

안녕하세요

   Well I hope everybody is having an amazing conference weekend. And if everybody is wondering I will be attending conference this next week. Korea has to wait one week for translation but it's amazing how fast it gets done and how fast we can get it. Well in Korea everybody meets at the stake centers to watch all of conference and it's such an amazing weekend. It seems like last week I was up in Suwon with Sister Kim and Junesoo coming out to General Conference but turns out that was 6 months ago. Time needs to go a little slower right now. Just my opinion.

   Anyways this was a very fun week so far. I still feel like I'm terrible to Elder Hughes but he's just doing amazing. We have been out all the time that we could because we had a busy schedule this last week with the new training program, service opportunities, spending time with member's, and helping our little Korean companion Elder Kim get ready to go. That was some sad news is that Elder Kim is probably on a plane right now on it's way to Utah still. Well it's really good news because I'm really excited for him to go to Hawaii but I'll miss our little Korean member of our family here in Jeonju. We also were able to go out and visit a lot of members this week and work with them a lot. Our new Bishop who has come into the ward has just been so amazing with helping the ward's missionary work to get going. We spent some a lot of time inside our member's house this week teaching our lessons to them and they had such a great time it seemed like. We have been building some relationships with our member's and it makes the biggest difference in the world. We spent time moving a couple hundred 80 pound bags of salt for member's this week and some of them told us that if we don't call them to have an investigator over for dinner in the next couple of weeks that they would be sad haha. And I also came to the realization that I have been in Jeonju since early December. And I really want to just stay in Jeonju forever and I hope I can be here longer. Time is flying by right now and it feels like I can be doing so much for everybody in this area and I love everything about it. I feel like I just need more time for everything these days but by the time I hit my bed on Sunday night I'm just gone haha. I love everything about my mission and the people I'm meeting everyday in Korea. I have also just grown to love the gospel and especially relying on it more than I ever have before in my life. Doing weekly trainings these past couple months have just made me focus more on a lot of the things I wasn't focusing on a lot before. It has been such an amazing time to just learn at all times and I'm so grateful for that knowledge that I have always feel like I have lacked.

   And Elder Hughes my new companion has been just amazing. I feel like I'm learning just as much as he is these days and we have just done nothing but work this past week. He had a very busy first week and we're going to try and do even better this week. I also feel like I have just been horrible to him haha. I thought of me standing on a diving board when I was little and my Dad in the pool telling me to jump and that he would catch me.... but he didn't haha. But hey I can swim now. But don't worry Elder Hughes has just been amazing. He was the first group of missionary's to come out of the MTC with only 9 weeks of training compared to the old 12 week program and he has just amazed me. He has such a strong testimony and he came out here to get to work and it has been a great week already.

Well I love all of you and I hope you have an amazing week because I know I will.

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Sixty-Second Week Email

안녕하세요

   Well what a very busy week in Korea haha. So I guess the big news right now is our area which turned into a five man house. And if all of you are wondering my new companion is.... (drum rolls) .... Elder Hughes. And I hope all of you can take a wild guess where he is from. Gilbert ARIZONA.... So that makes my 4th companion straight who is from Arizona. So I feel like I'm starting to receive some type of answer like there's something for me in Arizona sometime later on in life but I do not have the best feelings concerning Arizona. Mainly because all of my Arizona companions talked about Arizona all of the time haha. Anyways Elder Hughes is my 5th companion who is from the same area of Arizona and that's not counting Elder Brown twice.

   Anyways Elder Hughes is just amazing. He's super tall and every Korean just loves him so far. But we went up to Daejeon on Thursday and picked everybody up and this last group of missionaries was very big and the next one is going to be even bigger. But it was such a great time meeting Elder Hughes and meeting up with basically everybody I came to Korea with. It was such a great day and we got back to Jeonju and had a great night. haha I'm the worst to Elder Hughes though. He still hasn't unpacked pretty much at all. We were talking last night and he finally brought up that he was jet lagged and was sitting in a room for 9 weeks and came straight out and we have just walked around our entire area probably twice now. But he's doing so amazing and when he told me he was just grateful that we have just went out right away and did things. He's been saying hello to everybody he see's and no matter what they say (sometimes not the nicest things) He continues with talking to him and we have already met some amazing people in just 2 days of being out. And this area growing so fast has just ignited the ward and it has been amazing. We had such an amazing time at church and our Bishop got up and was talking in a combined meeting of relief society and Elder's quorum about member missionary work. And our member Brother Kang (He is the father of Brother Kang who was baptized a couple months ago) got up and gave one of the most amazing missionary stories and all I could think of is how he was baptized only 8 months ago, and how now he is just the most amazing example to all of the member's. Whenever we have any meetings with the ward or at district meeting he always seems to pop up for doing something amazing. And my favorite part is just seeing how happy he is all of the time because of what he does with the gospel.

   Well we have a busy week scheduled this week and it's going to be so much fun. I'll be going on a split every week from here on out because our district is huge now haha. It's such an amazing time to be a missionary and I'm so grateful. I hope I have so many more stories to tell you next week but just know that I'm having an amazing time and I'm meeting amazing people. I love all of you!

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Elder Hughes and Elder Jensen

Sixty-First Week Email

안녕하세요

    Well another fun filled week in the Daejeon Mission. It was a week filled with appointments, new people, members, and to end the week off the Sister's investigator was baptized yesterday in the Jungang Ward. I honestly have no idea how to explain my weeks these days other than they are just amazing.  A sad but happy thing that happened this week was that two of the older Sisters in our ward cried at us when we visited haha. It was super sad because they are having such a hard time but they were so happy we visited. First is Sister Jang who is just my favorite. She's so funny and just the Sister in the ward who is so spiritual but the funniest person there. Well she wanted to feed all of us but we weren't able to find a member to go with us and the time she wanted to feed us our Investigators were all busy as well. So we made her a really special message and we went to go say hi. She called me on the way and told me that her heart hurt and when we got there she was telling us to call the zone leader or the President to make an acception to the rule but we told her that we couldn't. She told us how she's just having a hard time and all she wants to do is feed us. Well just like a miracle a Brother from our ward called us and said he was on his way and our friend who lived a few blocks away got off his military service and said he wanted to see us. So just like that Sister Jang's house was filled and we had such an amazing time with our friend and our member's and Sister Jang was so happy again. It's so much fun because there's a way that you can talk in Korean that means that somebody is your friend and yesterday  at church when we were cleaning up after lunch Sister Jang was just going off about us and she told me that she expects to see us there with the same friend this week. It was just so much fun.

   We were also able to go visit Sister Iem who also has been having some rough times these days. And it couldn't have been a better situation. We have tried visiting her before but between trying to find a Member in the ward and our investigators it was rough but we have been able to put messages on her door since I came. Well she is a single mom now raising a young boy (who is acting just like I was when I was his age) and she needed help in hour house changing doors and moving some furniture around. Well exact same case where we thought we couldn't go that night but the same Brother called us back and apologized for not answering again and said he could meet us. We also met with Brother Iem who is in the same situation where he is living with his Mom right now and as we talked that night he was actually able to share a lot of his life with the Sister and help cheer her up and it was just one of those meetings I feel like I won't forget. I felt like I knew what Sister Iem our member and Brother Iem our Investigator were going through and it just felt comfortable to us to talk about the gospel and what we can become through the gospel. Sister Iem is now acting just like Sister Jang and told us that she expects us to be back with Brother Iem this week sometime. And when we left Brother Iem was telling us of how he thought about marriage and felt like it was impossible for a man and a woman to be together for this entire lifetime and we told him how our Heavenly Father has a different plan then that. That our Heavenly Father has a plan for our marriages to last for Eternity and Brother Iem has never thought like that before so it was just such an amazing experience to see somebody who starts to think eternally rather than this short lifetime.

   Well after this week I have even more respect for the amazing women of our church and to see how strong they are. Just like in our mission where the Sister's are always working in amazing ways the Sister's of our Ward are working miracles. I can't imagine where we would be as a church without the relief society and how much help they give to the entire ward. I've always been taught to respect women by my father and out of fear from my Sister Tawni but this week only added to that respect I have for our Heavenly Fathers daughters. I've always had such amazing examples in my life and I really came to appreciate that blessing in my life and even more in the past week.

Well I'm going to have an amazing week. I just found out that I will be heading up to Daejeon on Thursday and pick up my brand new missionary companion and start the training program. And that Elder Brown will stay with Elder Kim and Elder Brown will get a junior companion named Elder Lions. So that makes us a five man house until Elder Kim gets his visa haha. We also added one more sister to the area so that means our district went from 9 to 12 members. It's going to be a great time in Jeonju South Korea. I love all of you and I can't wait to tell you about this amazing week next monday.

Elder Jensen

Sixtieth Week Email

안녕하세요

   Well another fun filled week in the trio this week haha. This is a really special situation I guess because we aren't suppose to do the training program with Elder Kim but he has not been to the MTC and we pretty much have to teach him about everything that missionaries do so it's been a pretty fun time.

   But we had a few things last week that were pretty fun. We all had to make the trip down to Gwangju last Thursday for mission tour where Elder Oweyagi....(That was my best shot at spelling his name) Anyways Elder Oweyagi and his wife came and gave an excellent training on effective study and some other very important things. And Sister Oweyagi worked really hard and prepared her entire talk in English and it was so great. They both have been working on their language so much ever since Elder Oweyagi was called as a member of the 70 and it was such an interesting meeting. During one of the talks Elder Oweyagi spoke in Japanese, and then they had a Korean her had served his mission in Japan translate that to Korean, then finally it made it's way into English for all of us foreigners haha. My favorite was Sister Oweyagi quoted something in the Mongolian language and that made the exact same route into Japanese into Korean and finally into English. Learning a new language has probably been one of the most interesting things of my life so far and I'm loving it so far.

   Well another thing that happened there was that we had a role play activity. And up to this point this had been one of the funniest mission tours I have ever been too. It had a really relaxed feeling to the entire thing and everybody had such a great time. Well the AP's introduced this role play and they told a story about a missionary who was role playing everyday of his mission but his companion was really sick one day so they couldn't role play. Well he put a orange on his desk and started role playing with the orange. So they gave us an assignment to build a relationship for 2 minutes and teach a lesson for 3 minutes. And of course the only Trio in our mission was called on.... So we went straight to building the relationship and it was the worst. Everybody in the room was just laughing really hard and at one point I just kept on passing the Mic between Elder Brown and Elder Kim. Elder Kim was bad mouthing monkeys trying to build a relationship. Elder Brown couldn't stop talking about colors and nutrition (He is a nutrition major) and then we had to turn it into a lesson somehow and they made me do it. So there were two bananas and one was missing so of course we went down the path of the Plan of Salvation and at that point I think President Furniss couldn't help but laugh. So that was my mission tour and that's all I heard about the rest of the day at mission tour and during nightly call ins.

   Anyways I promise that I learned a lot from that mission tour and we always love having those kinds of meetings. I think the other thing I have been thinking about alot this week is just how much I love my ward and my area. We had Ward Council and our new Bishop is really excited to do a lot of missionary work. But yesterday was hilarious because it came down to all of our Stake Presidency and all of the leaders in the Ward just talking to me only when I was in between two Koreans and just giving me so much advice haha. But my new bishop just loves us and it was a great meeting to get our expectations lined up with the ward. So I'm very excited to see how we can work better with Members over the next few months.

Well I love all of you so much and I hope you have an amazing week.

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Fifty-Ninth Week Email

(There was no fifty-eighth week email)

안녕!

   Well this has been a week to remember haha. To start off I'll tell
you about President Furniss's thoughts as he was sitting in a
testimony meeting with the 11 new missionaries who came in. President
told us that he was sitting there thinking that he had recieved two
temporary missionaries and he remembered assigning one of them to an
Elder up in Suwon but when he looked at the other temporary missionary
it dawned on him that he didn't assign him a place to live.... So
Wednesday night at 10:00 after nightly call ins we get a call from
President haha. Elder Brown answered and started talking. I had no
idea who it was until Elder Brown laughs and says I think you should
talk to the district leader about this one. So Elder Brown cops out
and hands me the phone and it was President asking if we could be in
Daejeon my 11 aclock in the morning. He told us that he didn't have a
lot of time to talk but that we needed to take in a temporary
missionary who was waiting on his visa. And then he told us that he
was sorry and that he had to go. So that was our night the day before
transfer day haha.

   But we do have Elder Kim with us now! Elder Kim recieved his call
to the Hawaii honolulu mission but he is waiting on his visa. Elder
Kim is from Poonghyang Ward in Gwangju which... if you can remember is
my greenie area. My Trainer and I worked with his family every week
while Elder Kim was at college in another city. And I absolutely loved
his family. I had only met Elder Kim twice before when he occasionally
made trips back to Gwangju for the weekends to visit family but his
Mom, him, and his younger brother joined the church back in 2008 and
she has been feeding the missionaries consistently and helping them a
lot ever since she was baptized. But yeah that's my other companion
right now.

   But it has been an interesting week. We were told that we aren't
training him because they want to do the 12 week program with him in
Hawaii. Also we can get a phone call any day and all 3 of us will stop
what we are doing and go straight to drop him off in Seoul at the
embassy. So this is going to be an interesting transfer. On top of all
of that it is only a 4 week transfer. Our mission has to line up with
the new 9 week training program at the MTC so this next group of
missionaries will be the first group effected by the new missionary
rules. Also I'm sure all of you have heard by now but there will be a
new Seoul South mission in July. And everybody who is in the Suwon
zone at that time will be going to the Seoul south mission. Our new
President was also announced and it is actually President Shin who has
been the Branch mission President at the MTC for every missionary who
has gone to Korea for the past few years. So I really can't wait to
see him again because we all love him so much.

   So the mission is chaos right now but none of us have time to think
about it. We had a few appointments yesterday and Elder Kim was able
to be thrown in the deep end and told to swim haha. I really forgot
how much they actually teach you at the MTC and we have been trying to
help him with everything. I assumed just because he was fluent in
Korean that he would just be able to do everything but we all have to
learn how to do missionary work. But he is doing amazing and he is so
much fun to work with. When he gave away his first Book of Mormon the
other day he had a grin from ear to ear and it really reminds me of
when I first started in the mission field. And Elder Brown and I have
just been having a great time with Elder Kim.

Well I'm going to have a great week so I hope all of you can have an
amazing week. I love all of you and I'll talk to you next week.

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