Bibimbap: Transfer 11, week 2 - P-day (September 29, 2014)

Hello!

This week wasn't bad, but just a little bit slower than we had liked. We had planned to teach like 6 lessons this week (which is pretty good for our area, especially considering the number of investigators we have), but things kind of turned out that we couldn't meet with people as often as we like. We set a goal to try to contact people better and set up more appointments. We also had to spend a lot of time working on the "광안 와드 선교 모임" (Gwangan Ward missionary meeting). We kind of filled in the rest of the time with finding activities but haven't been able to meet any new investigators yet...

The preparation for the missionary meeting is going slowly but surely. It kind of reminds me of planning that Christmas meeting in 서귀포 (Seogwipo) last year with Elder Brower. We spend so much time planning and preparing that thing; I don't think ward members realize what a burden planning is - I think the week of the Christmas meeting, we shared a message with a member, and that was the only stat of the week. At least for this meeting, it's very closely related to missionary work, so I can't complain too much. It would be a lot easier if we had a Korean missionary in 광안 (Gwangan) though, haha. Oh, and the meeting thankfully got pushed back 3 weeks, so now we have a lot more time to plan. Hurray!

Let's see... Brother 박신곤 (Bak Singon) is doing well. The lessons with him always seem to go really really well - we get done what we plan, and he's progressing well. We changed his baptismal date to the 19th because of General Conference, and if the lessons keep going as they are, we should be able to get done with everything we need for him. He says he's been praying about the Book of Mormon, but he's still not sure about our Church yet. He came to sacrament meeting yesterday though, and I think he thought it was good. He said he moved kind of far away though, and so it'll be hard to meet with him - he used to be like 15 minutes away, but now has to come 1 hour by subways for lessons. We don't want to make him call all that way to our church, but I don't think there's a better place to meet him. He keeps texting us and so we've been keeping in touch pretty well, which is good - he's asked us a couple of important questions through text, so I'm glad we're constantly texting back and forth (things like "what do you think people can expect to learn from the Mormons?" and "sometimes I think it's hard to believe everything your church teaches. Do you ever feel that way?").

We had Brother 정대영 (Jeong Daeyoeng) show up to church yesterday, so that makes 2 investigators at church, or what I believe is the highest for that stat that I've gotten so far. Brother 정대영 (Jeong Daeyoeng) was kind of confused though - we had a conversation that went something like this:

"Woah, is that another investigator?"

"Yup, this is his first time at church!"

"You have other investigators?"

"... well, missionaries teach a lot of investigators, but not that many people come to church you see."

"Are you even teaching them right!?"

"Well, uh, we're trying to... it's just that uuuuhh...."

We will have to try harder to bring more people to church to impress Brother 정대영 (Jeong Daeyoeng).

I mentioned that we had planned for a lot of lessons but we weren't able to get them, and we wanted to teach Brother 정대영 (Jeong Daeyoeng) after church. But we finished our class and stepped out, and we couldn't find him anywhere in the church. So we gave him a call, and it turns out that he had already left for home, and actually had arrived at home. I guess Young Men's ended really early, and since nobody was done with their classes at Church, Brother 정대영 (Jeong Daeyoeng) just left. In hindsight, we probably should have told him that we wanted to have a lesson, so it's kind of little things like that that Elder Lees and I need to improve on.

Brother Steve was kind of a star this week. His real name is Brother 김양춘 (Kim Yangchun), and he comes to our English class. We thought he was an investigator at first (well, a non member), but it turns out that he's a recent convert in a nearby ward. I'm not sure why or how he comes to our English class, but apparently, he really likes Elder Lees and I. So we had lunch with him once, and he took us out for a tour this p-day. We took a toooon of pictures, so I'll send them over!

Other then that, we just did a fair bit of finding. We tried knocking doors for the first time this week - Elder Pickard in my district apparently had some success (finding someone who had heard about our church, and was willing to have the missionaries come around again), so Elder Lees and I gave it a shot. We gave out a lot of pamphlets and stuff, but we weren't able to teach anyone or anything.

We did, however, manage to give out a Book of Mormon though. We were standing in front of a house that had the gate open. Elder Lees and I were trying to figure out whether to ring the buzzer or just go in and knock the door, when a lady walked by. It's really awkward when you're two foreign kids standing suspicisouly in front of someone's house, so we gave her an "안녕하세요! (Annyeonghaseyo!)" She replied hello, and then asked "왜요?" ("why?"). Somehow, we got talking, and she mentioned that her son had served a mission (for a different church of course), and as we continued to talk, we somehow gave her a Book of Mormon. It was kind of cool that something as simple as saying hello lead to us being able to give out a Book of Mormon!

I think I'll wrap it up about here; I'll send you the best pictures of what we took today. Thank you, and have a good week!

Love,

- Elder Luke

The first picture is a picture of us at lunch with Brother Steve, the second is me with Brother Steve at the Busan Museum (which was unfortuanatly closed today...).