초복

The heat of the summer is officially here! At least that's what I've been hearing, I feel like it's not even that bad

Highlights:

One highlight was we had 6 people come to our English class! It was the most we've had so we were pretty excited haha

Another highlight was we were able to meet someone named sabin from Nepal and play ping pong and teach him about God. He has a lot of religious background and has explored a lot of religions. It was actually kind of a miracle how we met him. We were on a bus to a neighboring city that's about an hour away, and he was on the bus, we saw him and stuff but didn't really talk the first time. But later that day, we were on the way back home, which is not super common to just go back and forth like that from cities in that short of time, but he was on the exact same bus! So we talked and got his number and were able to meet this week. He's super cool but also really busy, so hopefully we'll be able to meet him again (I forgot to take a picture together)

Another highlight was we got to eat 쌀국수. Wow this stuff is amazing. And sokcho has one of the best 쌀국수 restaurants I've EVER had (it's the only one I've ever been to)

Spiritual Thought: Earlier i remembered the general conference talk about stillness~~ 

"I pray the Holy Ghost will enlighten each of us as we consider a higher and holier dimension of stillness in our lives—an inner spiritual stillness of the soul that enables us to know and remember that God is our Heavenly Father, we are His children, and Jesus Christ is our Savior. This remarkable blessing is available to all Church members who are striving faithfully to become “covenant people of the Lord.”"

I like this invitation from David A Bednar to find stillness. I think without moments to be still, it can be very difficult to feel the spirit. But when we take a moment to listen to what the spirit is trying to teach us, it can become easier to notice 

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I’ll call you…when it rains

We got transfer news this week and me and my companion are both staying. Which is good cause I've got some people I wasn't ready to say goodbye to just yet, also it’s Thursday so I can't be missing that. 2 new elders are coming back to 속초 though! Pros and cons of that:

Cons: there goes my personal bathroom, clothes room, and other room that we don't use 

Pros: everything else

It's gonna be awesome! And the weather's finally getting warmer here, today was the first actual warm day in a while 

Highlights: we met with a man named 함영달 this week. We found him while calling old random numbers and set up a meeting. He came and picked us up, and we went to a park, and we started talking. Almost immediately, he pulled out two books, one titled "when that day comes" and the other, "the traces He left behind". So, I figured we were about to get into a deep doctrinal discussion. Turns out, he wrote the two books. And he spent the next hour explaining in depth all the connections between Chinese characters and Christianity and things like that.

I tried to explain why the Chinese language has so many connections to God and Jesus Christ, but he wasn't very interested in that. He signed the two books and gave them to me to keep though so that's fun I guess. Also, right before he was leaving he was like "so whenever you wanna meet again you should call me!" And then was like "WAIT. No... I'll call you. I'll call you...when it rains...." and I swear I remember him waving his arm through the air in a Wizarding manner as he said when it rains, maybe for dramatic effect. For a second I felt like it was in a Disney show or something. But anyway, it rained all weekend, and he didn't call so yeah idk 

We have our English class on Thursday nights, but recently we have two more additions: English class on Saturday afternoon and English class on Friday morning. The Saturday afternoon idea just started when someone wanted to meet for English at that time, so after a few weeks we started inviting the people who couldn't come on Thursdays, and it turned out well!

One day, we got a call from someone we know saying her daughter wants to learn English. So, we called her daughter, who invited us to her English club. To our surprise, we found 5 really nice people who all want to learn English who were just trying to learn on their own through this little club. We attended the club and became friends and then ate some food after. They invited us to keep attending, which we accepted, and we're going try and move this club into the church and combine it with our other class. Hopefully that will work, because when we teach the English class at the church, the short spiritual thought at the end is sometimes the only way we get to share about the gospel to people in the church building, which can play a big role in a lot of these people's conversion, since most of the time they wouldn't listen otherwise.

We heard a statistic the other day by our mission president, and I think it was like 70% of the baptisms in our mission are people who originally had interest in learning English and were found through English class. But for a lot of them it takes years of coming to our church and English class before they are ready. So that's why I think putting a lot of effort into just getting people to the church regularly even just to learn English is important. 

Other highlight, we found a new guy who's 75 and crazy at ping pong who came to play with us.

Picture of us after randomly seeing 남순덕 at the market today so we went to eat together.

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Also, Happy Mother’s Day!