Monday, October 21, 2013

Hello! (October 21, 2013)



Hello everyone, how are you all doing?

Not a ton of time to write today - had a transfer meeting, and then some other meetings which took up a ton of time.

Elder Cho left 영도 today - a lot of the members were very sad Sunday. He really worked hard for the people here. My new companion's name is Elder Platero - he's from California, and has been out for about a year now. He was a trainer for Elder Harris, who was in my MTC district. Elder Cho's going to be companions with my MTC companion, Elder Stapley - basically, a lot of the trainers and trainees are getting shuffled around.

So I'll continue to serve in in 영도, and we'll do our best to not get too lost...

Our first week together doesn't look so great. We currently don't have any kind of investigators at all - one guy we though was interested said that he just wants to learn English, and one lady we were meeting with said that she doesn't want to meet people that's not Elder Cho. She says she doesn't like non-Korean people because we can't understand her. Dad, you wrote about 김대양', but we haven't been able to meet with him a second time. We've called/texted him maybe ten-plus times, but he's never responded or picked up the phone. So, we're starting from scratch I suppose!

Dad wrote in his last letter about teaching confidently as a missionary, and I think a large part of that is studying the lessons very deeply. On one set of exchanges, I was practicing teaching the Plan of Salvation (in English), and I got to the section titled "Ressurection, Judgement, and Immortality." That was really hard to teach - I didn't feel like I understood the doctrine at all; like, I knew the doctrine, but I didn't understand it. Understand comes through study and prayer, and then I can be confident when I teach. I'm not sure what other missionaries study during our personal study time, but my district leader told me to focus very heavily on the lessons, so I've been doing that. It's slow, but he said that if we don't understand doctrine deeply, we can't teach clearly and simply. That was kind of confusing at first, but it's starting to make sense now. Study, prayer, and practice - just keep doing these three things!

The post office called and said I got a package. I'm not sure if that's something you sent, or if it's more of Elder Platero's luggage, but I guess I'll see.

Oh, and for Daniel: I've had Mr. Dust (he's cool), Mr. Garrard (he's way cool), and Bro. Deeble (nice guy, but liked the other teachers better). Also, your handwriting kind of looks like "Did you hate any of these teachers?" instead of "have any of these teachers." :D

That's about all I have time for today. Hope all is well with everyone!

Love,
Elder Luke


Notes:

영도: Yeongdo, Andrew's area in Busan that he's staying in.

김대양: Gim Daeyang (or Kim Teyang), a guy they met on a bus; Andrew talked about him in his letter of September 16.

Package: We sent him a package on October 9; it reached the post office (I assume the post office in the Dongnae area of Busan, where the mission office is located) on October 17, and apparently has been forwarded to his local post office (in Yeongdo). That's less than two weeks, including the time for forwarding, which is more than twice as fast as our letters have been getting there.

No comments:

Post a Comment