October 20, 2014

 We visited some clifs and the ocean. Nice...


We are meeting this one lady who is soooooooo sweet. She is so kind it hurts. :P We are teaching her English, and we hope she progresses with the Gospel. Initially, she said she is not religious, but yesterday she prayed at the end of our lesson! It was sweet! We have a lot of hopes for her, but we'll see.





That one member that gave us the nasty spicy, dried anchovie filled rice balls met with us again (every other week). This week she thankfully did not have enough time to cook for us, so she bought hamburgers! I was quite happy about that. 

On Wednesday, we had a District Meeting, and I was in charge of the teaching practice part, so, with the topic of trying to share the Book of Mormon while talking to people, we paired up and roleplayed doing that for 5 minutes on a bus, 3 minutes on a subway, and 1 minute at a stoplight. Haha, it was pretty intense :P But I learned a lot, it was pretty fun :P If only it was so fun for talking to real people :P Real people are scary :P

We had a wonderful meal appointment with a member, which was largely due to the fact that she is a wonderful cook, and young, so she doesn't try to stuff insane amounts of food in us :P It's usually the older people who do that.

On Thursday and Friday we had exchanges. In the past times I've done that, I went to another area, but this time I stayed in mine, so that was different and exciting :P I luckily did not get lost and we had a pretty good day. We didn't have any appointments, but somehow things to do seemed to pop up out of the woodwork :P A member requested we visit a recently moved-in family, and then we helped the Elders prepare for the Halloween party we are going to do soon. We are going to need to put that together really fast.. :P While on exchanges we also did proselyting as a district, though I don't know why, because we just ended up splitting up and just setting a time to remeet... But anyways. 

This experience inspired me to write about the various ways of rejection in Korea. Haha. 

1. "I'll tell you next time". 
2. "oh, I'm too busy" and usually that means for eternity :P 
3. "I'm Buddhist". which means they don't want to listen to you 
4. "I'll call YOU later" which means never. 

 Its kind of amusing, because variations of these are always what people say :P They usually just beat around the bush because Koreans are typically too nice to say they aren't interested :P 

Friday morning was interesting because the mission president and his wife randomly popped by our apartment! It's a good thing Sis Bussio wasn't there, she probably would have had a panic attack :P But it was super cool. They were there during personal study, so they sat on our floor and studied with us, and towards the end he shared some of his thoughts on what he had been reading (Mark 10, I think). It was really awesome. He noted on how Christ in that chapter was always allowing all people to come unto him, even children, and he was always INVITING them to come and asking them what it is they want, rather than him just going and fixing whatever was wrong. I think He wants us to figure out for ourselves what we truly desire and need, and then for us to ask for it in faith. That process is important, I think.. That way we are actively acting. Anyways.

This morning was.... weird. We went to Nampodong, which is like Banwoldang in Daegu, so it's a big shopping area with literally everything, and if you look in the right places, you can get good stuff for super cheap. It's great. 

Nampodong at Night

But anyways. On the way there, we were on a subway with the elders, and a man comes up to Elder Lees (who is 1 transfer newer than me), and asks if he's Mormon and all that stuff, and then starts telling him that he's wrong, that Mormons don't understand God and Christ and such. He wasn't being very nice. Poor Elder Lees didn't understand really what was going on and that he was being proselyted to AND insulted. I didn't understand much from what that man said, but I did catch a few things that were not nice. Stuff about us going to hell, I think, because we don't understand the Bible. I was thinking "well.. I do recall there being a part in the Bible about loving your fellowman..." Haha. So that was interesting. He was being super loud and we mostly ignored him while he informed the other passengers about the us :P They looked irritated by him :P And so we got off at our stop and were on our way to eat lunch with the elders, when a really old drunk man came up to Sis Bussio and I and he tried to hold my hand. It was weird. .... Thankfully the rest of our day was devoid of drunk or crazy men. :P 

So anyways. Things are going pretty well here. I can't believe we are on the 5th week of the transfer now, time is going by so fast! But I'm learning a lot, and Sis Bussio is pretty great. We are trying our best to take care of our area and our investigators, and things seems pretty okay right now. We have a serious lack on investigators in Haeundae, but we are hoping to find new people soon.