Hello everyone, I hope you all had a great week! It sounds like California is finally getting some rain. I was worrying about that a little bit this week, so that's definitely a relief to hear.
Things are going great over here in the eastern hemisphere, not really anything to complain about. Right now is the winter vacation for the Korean students, but the kids like being in school better because during their winter break, they just have to study all day. Virtually every Korean student goes to a tutoring type of learning center on top of going to school, because schools here are super competitive so everyone is trying to get ahead. There are advertisements for the tutoring centers that say things like "If you want to be the top 1%, you can't take take a break during winter vacation." The students here work so much harder than in America, it's definitely admirable.
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| Mokdong Church Building |
I don't know if I mentioned this before, but in America, most of the church chapels have a basketball hoop for recreation. But in Korea, they have table tennis tables instead. So on P-days or with people we are teaching, we get to hone our ping pong skills. And one milestone for me was beating our bishop in a game of ping pong!... After he beat me 6 times.
In other news this week, They called a new seminary teacher this week for our ward, so we will not have to teach seminary anymore. But she doesn't start until February, so we will at least finish up the rest of January. But since transfers are next week, either me or my companion could end up leaving Mokdong, which does worry my companion especially because he has been here for over 9 months, and wants to finish his mission here. But now that he isn't the seminary teacher, he is really worried he might be moved. But nothing is decided yet, I will let you all know next week how it turns out..
Some really great news is that we have our first investigator with a baptismal date since I got here! We met a really great 21 year old, and he is preparing to be baptized at the beginning of February, he came to church for the first time yesterday and it is amazing to see him take the steps to follow the Savior. Please keep him in your prayers! His name is 정찬유 (Jeong chan yu).
Missionary life is full of miracles, and it is also full of last minute musical numbers. It's pretty common for people to just give us a song and say "Okay, you're going to perform this in two hours with the sister missionaries!" So we often perform some iffy renditions of songs on Sundays, but we just sing half in Korean and half in English and then it suddenly becomes a cool bilingual performance. Being able to speak English is actually super useful here. We get to help lots of people by teaching English class, and most of the people we end up teaching are first found through an English interest. So I came 5000 miles to Asia and English is one of my biggest assets, go figure.
Being a missionary is seriously the best, and the closeness that I have felt to the Lord serving as his full-time servant is both unexpected and incredible. Even when I feel that I'm never going to crack this Korean language or that nobody wants to talk to us, I am never left without the comfort of the Holy Ghost and the assurance that the best that I can give will always be enough.
I hope you all have a great week!
-Elder Bigelow
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