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All right. I'm back with a little more time this week, so hello to the world!
Things are going really well out here. I'm about a week and a half into my new transfer (which I don't remember if I talked about) and loving working in 길음 (Gireum)!
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| Gireum House Kitchen |
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| My Study Area |
My companion is a Korean. We get along really well. He's a super nice guy with a big testimony and on top of it all, he speaks Korean like a fiend. Figures. Working with him has pushed me to work harder language-wise and my abilities have already improved a lot. The big challenge of working with a Korean, I've found, is that other Koreans talk to his level, so my understanding has done been defenestrated. We are also from the same MTC generation.
Even though we are both new and inexperienced, we've been having a lot of success. We came into an area with a couple of maybe investigators, and this week we had a good run finding people. We ended up getting nine lessons for the week (including street lessons) which is an all time high for my mission service, so fiesta!
This last week also included my first taste of training. One of the greenies in my apartment went on an exchange with us while his companions did their Zone Leader duties and I got to teach him to jundo. Loved it. Sooooo much fun. It's nice to see how much I've progressed, even though there is still a super long way to go.
We also got to watch Conference this week. It takes a week for them to translate it to Korean, so we ended up watching it just this last weekend. Loved it. Everyone has already heard about how bomb conference is as a missionary, so I won't go into that, but my favorite talk was President Uchtdorf's spiel (Come, Join with Us) about why everyone should join the church and how much stuff we do, followed shortly after by Elder Holland 's talk (Like a Broken Vessel) about depression. It was also nice to see President Monson a little bit more recovered from the loss of his wife. President Uchtdorf has grown in my eyes by his lifealert joke. Pretty sure me and the old friend circle all busted up on that one.
To mother, when Corrie Ten Boom (Concentration-Camp-Lady) was brought up, I could just sense your satisfaction from across the ocean.
Just one quick miracle for my spiritual thought for the week. I guess this is a story that has been told, but it is a little different when you experience it.
We were out jundoing at the end of a long day. I have been trying to be better about responding to potential spiritual promptings, regardless of whether or not they make sense to me. Normally, we jundo at cross walks. It is pretty easy, and less awkward, to start a conversation with somebody when you are waiting for the light to change. Plus, there are always people where we go. Usually after I jundo to someone, I go back to the corner and wait for someone else to show up. I was coming back to my corner, and was going to go strait, but one guy stuck out to me. He was going right, and the light had just changed, so it was out of the optimum aproach time, but I felt like I had to talk to him. So I followed him for a little bit until I caught up to him and I was like, "Alright, Lord. I got this. This is what you want me to do, so give it to me."
I say hello and get the most direct rejection I'd gotten all night. I'd say I was discouraged, but rejection is just a thing now so it doesn't really affect me. I was a little disappointed though.
It wasn't much later in the night that I talked to a guy named -----. Things went super well, he spoke fluent English, he's really smart, and even though I couldn't find a specific need to teach to him, he agreed to meet me again and I set up my first full street appointment. I've gotten other appointments before, but always from calling someone back later, and he just gave it to me.
The moral of the story is this: Sometimes, doing the right thing, even the thing that God tells you to do isn't going to yield immediate results. Sometimes it is just to give you experience. Other times, as I believe was the case for me, we just have to show God that he can trust us. We have to show him that we are willing to do his will before he can make it more fully manifest to us. In the end, that is what life is all about, building that relationship with God. Showing him that not only are we worthy of his trust through acting on what he gives us, but by showing that we trust him enough to do so.
Whitlock out.
