안녕하세요~! (Annyeonghaseyo!)
이번주도 구도자들을 많이 만나지 못 해서 시간이 많은 것 같았어요...
(Again, this week too, since there weren't many investigators, it seemed like there was a lot of time...)
Things have been pretty good in 광안 (Gwangan) - we weren't able to meet Brother 박신곤 (Bak Singon) this week (again!?), but we've pretty much wrapped up everything with Brother 정대영 (Jeong Daeyeong) in terms of lessons. We also met a guy though English class that says he is fine with meeting us (he didn't really say he's super interested, but is willing to set up a time with us and meet), so that's really good news! We actually had an appointment for today, but he said his work schedule shifted around and so he can't make it; we'll have to get him next time.
Here's a story about Brother 정대영 (Jeong Daeyeong). We met with him last Saturday for a lesson, and we met at a local park instead of the church, which was kind of neat. It was also kind of distracting since people were like talking walks around us, but the lesson went fine (this isn't important, but Elder Lees and I wanted to spend a p-day at the park, but it turns out that the park is smallish and not as cool as it was advertised, so I'm kind of glad we got to check it out before we spend precious p-day time there. 정대영 형제님 (Brother Jeong Daeyeong) lives near the park, and so he said it's more convenient for him to meet there). So like I wrote in the paragraph above, we've wrapped up all the lessons, so we went over the baptismal interview questions. I think he thought that the questions would be really hard - he asked a couple of times "So is this like a test!?" "How much do I need to study for it?" but by the time we went through them all, he was like "Is this it? This is way easy."
So he knew the answers pretty well - there were a couple of things he needed prompting on.
"What does it mean to you that we have a living prophet on the earth?"
"Uh... this is a hard one...... what's the answer?"
"형제님 (Brother)! There's no right or wrong answer; it's just what you think. So what do you think?"
"Uh... prophets can tell us what God wants us to know?"
"Good!"
But that was pretty much the only thing he had questions about.
That means that Brother 정대영 (Jeong Daeyeong) is all ready for baptism, and so our next step is to try and meet his parent and get their approval for his baptism!
Brother 정대영 (Jeong Daeyeong) told us that he wasn't going to be able to make it to church on Sunday because he was going to another church; a friend that he hadn't seen for some time invited him. It was kind of funny - he kept telling us that he didn't think it would be okay to go because he needed to come to church to take the sacrament. He double-checked with us and asked "other churches don't have the sacrament, right?" He was suprised when we told him that he could go to the other church if he wanted (we can't really force him to come to our church, and so of course we wanted him to come, but we basically just said, "Hey, it'd be good if you came to our church" and left it at that).
Come Sunday, Brother 정대영 (Jeong Daeyeong) doesn't show up at church, so we were a little disappointed, but then he walked in like 15 mintues late to sacrament meeting! We talked with him later and he said simply "I decided not to go to the other church." And then he stayed for the whole 3 hours. Elder Lees and I were happy that Brother 정대영 (Jeong Daeyeong) made the right choice. He's a really, really good kid.
We also had a chance to meet with some of our members this week. To be honest, we haven't been meeting with people as much as we should be - people just tend to be really busy and hard to catch. Recently, if we've tried to meet someone and if they just can't find time time, we'll write like a letter/note and drop it off at their house. A couple of people that we've done that to seem to have appreciated it, so I think it's a pretty good idea. It's really nice meeting with the members - it's hard to feel like you know them well until you visit them in their home and share a message with them. Nothing really to speak about the meetings, but we met our goal for members visited this last week, and it's been a long time since we've been able to do that.
Elder Lees and I were out on the streets talking to people, and one person we said hi to responded with "it's the Mormons!" so we started talking to him. He kind of launched off into a story about how he met our missionaries some 10 years ago. I guess the missionaries taught him a song or something (?) - I'm not really sure. He also talked about how the missionaries came into his office and left some pamphlets and how good of people the missionaries are.
I realized that he was drunk a few minutes into the conversation, and the conversation lasted like 10 minutes.
Afterwards, Elder Lees said to me, "That guy was really friendly.", so I told him that he was probably drunk. He responded with "Drunk people and prepared people are surprisingly similar." Earlier in the week, Elder Lees had given a Book of Mormon to another drunk guy.
Elder Lees and I have continued to try to give out Book of Mormons this week, and since we couldn't meet with investigators that much, we've been doing a lot of that. Here's a few stories:
We met this one nice old man at a subway station. We weren't actually going anywhere - we were on our way to a meeting and we had some time so we were hanging out in the subway trying to talk to people (I've found that if people ask where we're going, the best response is "I'm waiting for a friend." I told (lied to) a guy in 포항 (Pohang) saying I was going to the bus terminal, and then he called me out and told me the ride the bus that was in front of us. I wasn't actually going to the terminal; I was at the bus stop to talk to people. So I probably said something stupid, gave him a pamphlet and left. "Waiting for a friend" is perfect because you're not actually obliged to go anywhere.), and this old man who was like half deaf was standing, so we started talking to him. He was really nice, and so we showed him a Book of Mormon, and he held it for maybe two minutes. He checked out the pictures, the introduction page, and then flipped through the book. His train came, so we told him to have the book, to which he hurriedly shoved if back into our hands saying, "Difficult." Elder Lees showed him a pamphlet as kind of an alternative ("Oh, then please take this little pamphlet with you! It's small and not difficult!") . He flipped through that, gave it back to Elder Lees, and then grabbed the Book of Mormon out of my hands and got onto the train. I'm not sure what was up with that, but hey, Book of Mormon given!
We also had a district Book of Mormon 전도 (jeondo = contacting) activity; we met up in a train station, said a prayer together, and then split up to try to give out as many Book of Mormons as possible. We were at an area near the beach, so while there were a lot of people there, it was kind of a bad atmosphere to talk about religion - a lot of foreigners, groups of people (friends, couples), and loud music. We planned for the activity to be about an hour and twenty minutes, and Elder Lees and I were having a hard time even just talking to people, let alone giving out a Book of Mormon. We made a plan to go to hang out at a nearby bus station where things would be quieter and where there would be a decent number of people. It was 8:15, right when we had to wrap up and go home, and we were blessed to be able to give a Book of Mormon to a nice old man. It seems like it's really often that it's the last person you talk to that is willing to accept the gospel, a pamphlet or whatever it might be.
I think that about does it - we went to 남포동 (Nampodong), which is a big shopping district. We went to the 짬뽕 (jjamppong) place we went to before - here's a few pictures. Have a good week!
Love,
- Elder Luke
Notes:
Thanks to Lynn for the translation of the first sentence!
남포동: Nampodong. You can see it on a map here. The area Andrew is usually working in is the peninsula to the east, and the area behind (west of) the bridge, up to the river. The island just across from Nampo-dong is Yeongdo, which was his first area.
짬뽕: Jjamppong. Google Translate gives this as "chanpon," which is a Japanese soup from Nagasaki, and which was inspired by a Chinese soup, similar to ramen. The English Wikipedia article doesn't say anything about Korean variants, but the Korean Wikipedia article shows two photos of the Japanese-style soup, and one photo of what looks a lot like what Andrew is eating in the photo, which looks like it has been Koreanized with near-lethal quantities of red pepper.
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