"Hello President! The zone activity went wonderfully!! We were able to divide the less actives by address, and split them between companionships. We were able to visit/confirm more than half of the addresses on file, and saw many many miracles doing so! Most of the [less-active]members were very surprised, and very touched that we had made the effort to come out so far just to say hi, and let us into their homes. We haven't had the chance to hear from the other teams about specific miracles they had, but [another elder] and I had a pretty cool experience. We had a list of 5 houses to visit, but 4 of the 5 were invalid, so we set out to visit the one good address. We found where the bus would come, but there was no tv screen telling when the bus would come, so we just waited. We waited for an hour or so, but still no bus. So we looked up alternate routes and decided to try another way. We made our way to another bus stop, and waited for another 45 minutes for that bus to come. While we were waiting, a very drunk man came and started talking to us, which made us turn around, and as we did so, I heard the sound of a bus coming. I turned around just in time to see the bus we'd been waiting for for 2 hours pass us by. Almost immediately afterwards, the old man left too. I was about ready to give up, but we decided to take a look at the map again. We knew that there wouldn't be any buses coming our way for a while, so we'd have to take a taxi, but couldn't afford to take it both ways, so we checked when the bus would come at the station coming home. We had 30 minutes until the bus came to take us home, and kakaomap told us it took 15 minutes by car to get to the address. We decided to go for it, but the taxi driver got lost half way, and we had to pull out his gps to get us the rest of the way. We ended up in the middle of no where with nothing but ricefields around us. We looked around for the promised bus stop, saw none in sight, but knew we couldn't afford to take the taxi back, so we thanked him and hopped out. We followed our kakaomap gps for a while through the fields until we came to a random little house. We found the house, but as were were calling and knocking on the door, nobody came out. Finally a woman answered the door, and said "oh my! The missionaries! How did you get here???" She explained how she normally gets home much later, but was able to come home early that day, and because she never has visitors, it didn't register that someone would be knocking (she was also watching tv with her husband and couldnt hear us), but she felt a weird feeling that she needed to go check the door, so out she came. Turns out she's not a member, but her 2 kids are. We got her number, and her children's numbers, and she told us to come back later! She then felt bad that we'd come so far, so she took us home! If we hadn't of waited so long for the busses, we would've missed her, and probably marked the address as incorrect. After making to the house, we didn't know how we were going to make it home, but God provided a way~ we now have contact info for the members, and a wonderful new potential investigator! I know we weren't the only ones with great miracles that night!"
We receive lots of these types of notes from our faithful missionaries!
We had another week of great interviews with the rest of the mission save six we'll see tomorrow. We get such a lift from their wonderful attitudes and testimonies.
We had more baptisms, again, more than we can attend. So many wonderful stories behind each one. The one we were able to attend had two men who met missionaries 20 or 25 years ago respectively and recently felt their hearts had prepared to hear and accept the young missionaries' message.
We are ever fortunate to be a part of this glorious work of seeing joy dawn in the lives of these individuals and families. We don't have to press, just open our mouths and these individuals recognize that there is a memory, that there is great truth in these words we share. Our missionaries are young and have little experience, but they have deep felt love and testimony for what they teach!
After one day of interviews, the missionaries did some sticker boarding, an activity where they put up questions for people to consider and put a sticker on the board under the question responding to which answer is most important to them. The question today was, "Of these four, what is the most important to you?" The answers were: Family, Success, Religion/Belief, or Food. The winner by far was family! We had the opportunity then to ask them questions about their response and plan for additional discussion.
Of course, while we were standing in this big public place with lots of pedestrian traffic, we saw fun sights:
Oh, so cute!
We always have to have a pose with the lovely flowers. We love sprint!
Finally, we planned to hike a mountain called Gwanaksan on a day off. We talked to two sisters and they said they would like to join us. In the end, almost the entire zone of sixteen joined us. Four couldn't join us in the end due to health and other reasons. What a great day. We thought it would be a quite stroll, but our guide, a friend to the missionaries took us all on a path for mountain goats only. We were sore for days after, but we had a great time. These young people literally are mountain goats! They were waiting on us all day...
While riding the subway back from the mountain we noticed the best example of the diligent Korean student. He was focusing on his homework on the subway. He was fortunate to have a friend with him to remind him of his stop or he'd have gone to the end of the line. He was truly focused.
Terri and I are doing nearly everything together. We are fortunate that we have a car to travel together. This older couple were sticking together even with out the car...
Well, it's been another amazing week. We hope you are hearing good things from your missionaries. We can't say enough positive things about them. Thank you again for your support and prayers on their behalf and for us. We feel it every day.
