Hello!
This week was kind of similar to last week.... I don't know, but work to do just seems to crop up. Elder 박 (Bak) and I talked about it a bit, and we both decided we need to do something to try and do more missionary work (find and teach investigators that is). Haha, but we have a couple of big meetings we need to prepare for this next week, plus exchanges, so we'll see what happens.
You might have to send me some questions for me to answer because I don't really know what to write about...
I guess I was kind of sick this week so that didn't help in our efforts to do more work in 상인 (Sangin).
Oh, we had Zone Training Meeting this week (where our whole zone gets together and has a meeting). It was really stressful to be honest. Normally, I would go to those meetings and listen to the talks, but this time around we were busy and worried about other things so I couldn't enjoy the meeting...
As far as Zone Training Meetings go, kind of the hardest part is to think about our zone and try to discern what it is that they need, and then base the meeting around that. The actual execution is pretty easy since we give assignments to the district leaders (well, we normally prepare a talk or do some part of it), but anyways, it takes a long time for us to think and prepare the different topics. And of course, at the actual meeting itself, we as the zone leaders are in charge of making sure that everything runs smoothly, and so we spent the meeting running around mostly. I think the second zone meeting we do will be better now that I kind of know what we're doing and how things go though.
Other than that, we had do a lot of preparation for SPM (Stake Presidency Meeting), where we report to the stake how the missionary work is progressing in our zone. Basically, we have to call all the missionaries in our zone and ask them about progressing investigators, recent converts, English class and ward mission leaders. So we had to spend a lot of time in the church calling people, and then we put that information in a document to present to the stake. That takes a lot of time as well; the calls take like 15 minutes if people don't have anything new to report, and then like 40 minutes if people have a lot of new investigators and stuff. And we have maybe 14 teams in our zone and then we lost our old SPM documents as our ward computer got updated so this week's been pretty crazy.
Oh, and both of these meetings are monthly, so it's a really time-consuming affair unfortunately.
I don't have much to write, so I'm probably going to have to start writing down some of my thoughts and things I'm learning....
This morning, I was reading an old Liahona magazine, and there was an article in there by Elder Faust I think, about testimony. Now, missionaries have a lot of chances to bear their testimony, and so every fast and testimony meeting, or testimony meeting after a meeting, I think about what kind of story or experience I can share.
The Liahona article contained a list of things a testimony isn't, and in that was a story or experience. It then went on to explain that a testimony is a statement of belief, and while we can use a story to help illustrate what we believe or how we became to believe it, a story or experience alone is not a testimony.
So what I learned is that the most important part of a testimony is the testimony. I think that I focus too much on the story or whatever, and then not spend enough time on what actually matters. I've had times where I didn't have a story so I didn't share my testimony, so there's a lot of room for me to improve.
Preach my Gospel says that one of the best ways to help investigators feel the spirit is to testify frequently, and so that'll be something that I will be trying to improve on!
I think that's about it for this week; until next week!
Love,
- Elder Luke
Bonus info: I asked him about social media in Korea, as a follow-up to his letter last week, and here's what he said:
Facebook is really big in Korea (probably everywhere on earth, really) as is something called Kakaouto (I think? I have no idea). Basically, I heard that it's a free text messing service, but that and Facebook are by the biggest social media giants. I don't think people use twitter at all.
And yeah, smartphones are huuuuge in Korea (America is probably similar...), so I think most people just use those.
President Barrow mentioned that they're planning to roll out iPads in Japan (like in all of Japan), but that they don't have any plans for Korea yet; he says we shouldn't wait to do social media stuff either, so we're just going ahead with it. He said that it's pretty distracting though; a lot of missionaries have to spend a lot of time going through their history and deleting unmissionarylike things and then they look at pictures and old posts and stuff and apparently it's kind of a mess.
We'll see what happens to our mission though!
-Elder Luke
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