안녕하세요~ (Annyeonghaseyo)!
Hello from 광안 (Gwangan)! My first week here done, and so I think I kind of have a grasp on what's going on here (not a super good grasp, but I can find the church, and I've met with most of the investigators now). I actually haven't been able to see much of 광안 (Gwangan) yet; we tend to mostly go from the church to the house and back, so I know those roads well but, I guess we don't really have a reason to go wandering off in far places. It's a good thing - it just means were staying pretty busy. Here's some of the events for the week...
Our two main investigators are two high schoolers -
Brother 정대영 (Jeong Daeyeong) is kind of quiet, but he seems to like the missionaries and church meetings. He's attended church for like 3 weeks now, and he's meet with the missionaries pretty often. It doesn't seem like he's toooo interested in the gospel, but he listens well and at least doesn't want to not learn. He doens't ask alot of questions though - he tends to just throw out a lot of "yes"s at us. We'll have to work with him to help him open up... we usually meet 3 times a week, which is really good.
Brother 김화랑 (Kim Hwalang) was invited to chuch by Brother 정대영 (Jeong Daeyeong), and is a really good kid. He asks a loooot of questions (well, I've only taught him once, but still), and seems pretty interested. It's kind of weird - I've tended to teach older people, and with them, there's kind of a distance to some extent. But with these two, we invite them to Young Men's activities, we play ping pong with them... anyways, it feels a lot more like we're friends or brothers or something. It's kind of weird.
We're trying to focus on these two to help them be baptized, (hopefully) sometime towards the end of the month. They're both really young as invesigators (maybe a couple of weeks since they've met the missionaries), so there's a lot of work to to - it's really hard to get high school students to read the Book of Mormon...
English class is pretty crazy, like I wrote last week. There's I think 30ish people that show up, so we divide into 3 classes and teach. I'm teaching the intermediate level class, which is probably the smallest - usually 4-6 people are in my group. It's kind of weird not knowing anyone else in the other classes though (I don't know anyone's names, jobs, faces, anything!) - especially in 포항 (Pohang), we were able to talk about each English class member and try to make plans to help them out, but I don't think that's possible here. We'll just have to work on figuring out how to work with the peope in the intermediate class I guess.
We do a lot of 전도 (jeondo) (translates to "prostelysing" but I guess "adverstising" is better) for English class here. It's actually a really easy way to get numbers, but it's different from what I'm used to. With Elder Boome, we really focused on contacting the people we could over and over - trying to take care of each individual (I like to imagine we were like shepherds look after each sheep). But with advertising for English class, we get a lot of numbers, and it's hard to know who's who (to extend the mephor, something about large-scale sheep, uh, farming). It's not really a bad thing - just a different way to do missionary work I guess. I'm not a huge fan of it, but it seems like a decent number of investigators come out of English class, so it's worth out time.
We've got a few other investigators, but they're still kind of in iffy states, or they don't seem super interested, or theyr'e just really busy. Real quickly, here's a summary:
One investigator who's met the missionaries for a very, very long time, and doesn't let us teach because he talks waaaaaay too much about anything other than what we want to (he'll probably have to be dropped soon...)
One boyfriend of a less active girl who's investigating the church because his girlfriend wants to marry someone who's a member
One man who's interested in learning about our church in kind of an academic sense
A troubled middle school kid who needs a lot more than what we can help him with (he's had a few run-ins with the police)
I wanted to write a little bit about my first week as a district leader, and then I think I'll wrap it up.
This week was pretty crazy - I don't know if I wrote it last week, but I have yet to recieve any kind of formal training or instruction on what I'm supposed to do, so it's been a bit stressful. Everyone in the district is super nice, so there hasn't been any real problems, but there were a lot of things I did this week just guessing. The first week is over, and so now I kind of have a grasp on what I need to do, which is a relief. I think a lot of chuch callings are like that though - we don't really get a ton of instruction, but the Lord helps us out.
I studied a lot about priesthood leadership this week, and I ended up learning alot about service. It seems like that's a big theme in in church - people who are leaders are simply given more chances to serve and give of themselves. Think about how much Presidnet Monson gives for us! The important thing is that we do our best as we serve, and God will bless us as we work to bless others.
Sorry if the email doesn't make sense. Emailing always makes me really sleepy.
I hope you're all doing well in the States! Have an awesome week!
- Elder Luke
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