2nd Christmas in Korea

Hello everyone and Merry Christmas! I'm about to Skype with my family, so I'll keep things short for today!

I hope you all had a great Christmas and found some great opportunities to serve others! I had a great 2nd Christmas in Korea, being a missionary on Christmas is the best. Since Christmas was on a Sunday, we had a combined church meeting with the ward that shares the building with us, making a congregation of about 300 people. I was able to participate in the choir, and I loved celebrating the reason for the season with all of the church members. Then after that, my companion and I went with some other missionaries and visited church members and sang Christmas songs with them for the afternoon. The only problem was, every house we visited insisted on giving us food before we left, so our bags got heavier and our arms got more full as we continued from house to house. Then at night, we were invited to a church member's house for dinner. And it turned out that they invited both of the American families in our ward, so we had an almost American Christmas party to finish off the night. I've enjoyed lots of love from the Suji ward members, we even got some new socks to replace ours that inevitably get holes in them.

Other things this week:

We also had a combined Christmas party on the night of Christmas Eve, complete with a play done by the missionaries- We wrote a play about missionaries that went to find the baby Jesus on the first Christmas. It's in Korean, but I tried to include a link so you can view it if you would like~

We were also able to start meeting somebody new this week, his name is 최석원 (Choi-seok-won). He actually used to be a pastor in a Christian congregation. But he felt like churches were all about money and gaining influence, and the churches weren't able to help him with the problems he was having in his life. So he came to us with a desire to both learn English and to have some of his spiritual questions answered, he's a super nice guy.

I hope you all have a great week, and I'll check back in next year!

Love,

Elder Bigelow

Time as a missionary is precious

Hello everyone!

Last week I was sick and I mentioned that it was all over. But it turned out that I was just the halftime, because I contracted tonsilitis the next day.. One of my tonsils swelled to the middle of my mouth and the other tonsil soon joined it, and didn't leave a whole lot of room for me to breathe, and my voice sounded pretty funny. So that took me out of the game for several days, and I eventually was told I should go to the hospital(Korean hospitals are pretty different from American ones, there are not really separate "doctor's offices"). So I went to one of the biggest hospitals in Korea in Gangnam, and got some medicine which has worked like a dream and I'm feeling a whole lot better now, my voice is even back to normal.

It's kind of a bummer  to only have 2 years to serve a mission and then have to spend several days sick in bed, but I think it's a good reminder for me that the time as a missionary is precious and we can't let any seconds go to waste.

But on the lighter side of things: We taught our children's English class for the second time this past weekend, and the first time we did it, I introduced a rotation of show-and-tell. So I taught them what it was by bringing something that I liked, then saying a few simple sentences in English about that item. Then I told them that they would all take turns doing show and tell (followed by a look of terror on their faces), then I assigned on of the boys to bring an item the next week. So last weekend, I was very worried that he wouldn't remember and we would have no show-and-tell. Then as he walked in with his favorite soccer ball, I breathed a sigh of relief. But when the next child walked in with a stuffed animal, followed by a girl holding a souvenir, followed by a boy with a top, followed by a boy with a fully functional drone, it became very clear to me that the whole "take turns bringing items to share" part had gotten lost in translation... So, every single student brought their show-and-tell, and we had an entire class of English show-and-tell! They're the best~~

I hope you all have a great Christmas! I'm excited for the time that I get to spend with the Korean people here celebrating the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ and for the time I get to spend inviting them all to come and partake of his infinite love and mercy. I hope that you can all take a minute and consider what Christmas means for you and for all of us. Love you all!

-Elder Bigelow

You'll never get to be a spectator

Hello Everyone!

This week was the end of transfers, where we find out if we will stay in the area or be moved. Training a new missionary takes 12 weeks, so I will stay with Elder Curtis here in Suji for 6 more weeks! Elder Curtis is great and so are the members here, I'm super excited to be able to spend some more time here.

I was a little bit sick with a cold for a lot of the week so there was some time that had to be spent inside, but now I'm doing fine and I love being able to go outside as a missionary.

One thing we did get to do outside though was Christmas caroling! We are sharing a message about Jesus Christ and this Christmas we are focusing on the theme of "Light the World" (found at mormon.org) so we gathered about 25 missionaries, and most of us sang while a couple people stood out front and told people that stopped to listen about how we can try to be like Jesus Christ this Christmas season.

We also had Zone Training this week, a time where we get to learn from our mission leaders how to be better missionaries. I had been in charge of that meeting for the last 6 months, so I  made the comment about how I finally get to be a "spectator" again. But they had me to the translation for the meeting, so it turned out that I actually didn't get a break this time... But one of the Korean missionaries came up to me after and said "you'll never get to be a spectator".. She also thanked me for the translation and said "Because of your help, I was able to receive guidance and inspiration from the training." I think for me, that is what makes learning Korean all worth it. I've been so grateful to learn a new language and use it to be able to help people come unto Christ, it's just amazing.

To finish, I just wanted to share a scripture that I came across this week and I really liked:

John 16:10: "He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much"

I know that as we continue faithfully doing the things that may seem mundane or simple (praying every day, reading our scriptures, going to church), that we are preparing and will be more prepared to be faithful in those things that may be  harder, but will bring the greatest of blessings.

Have a great week everyone!

-Elder Bigelow

Advent Calendar

Hello everyone! I hope you are all enjoying your December! Our church is putting a lot of effort towards helping everyone around the world remember Jesus Christ (and the example he showed) this December (found at mormon.org). And in Asia, they even created an advent calendar, that contains ideas for ways we can serve others. Each day, you scratch off the number, and the calendar talks about one way that Jesus served others, followed by a specific suggestion for how we can serve today. And as we scratched off the very first number on the first of December, the calendar told about how Jesus fed those that were hungry. And of course, the challenge was to "deliver food to the missionaries." I'll just say that there are 200 people in Suji who all saw that on December 1st and I'll leave it at that...

Also this week, my companion and I started teaching a children's English class. There are a lot of members of our ward in this area that have kids that all go to the same school, so they came and brought several of their friends to a free English class taught by us. Keeping 15 children under control is a little bit complicated when you are speaking a language that they do not understand, but we focused on learning English through lots of fun games. We played a game where each letter of the Alphabet was written on a piece of paper, then I would announce a word, then the kids would have to pick up the papers and get in a line to spell the word. They had a blast, but I noticed something quickly that one of the adult Korean men called the "Korean Disease". That is, the need to be organized and have a system. I gave them all of the alphabet cards, and they laid them out in perfect alphabetical order, and did the same when it was time to clean up. Those kids were the cutest though, it was so much fun.

This week, our investigator 이정수 (Lee Jeong Su) passed his interview and got accepted to a very prestigious high school, so he has a little bit more free time now. And he had a lot of questions about baptism, so we invited him to watch a baptism with us that happened yesterday

 in our building. He has a Buddhist religious background so a lot of it was very new to him, but after he remarked that it seemed like a very special experience. So we're excited to keep working with him, he's super cool~

That's it for this week, I had some cool pictures but it's not quite working so I'll leave it at Have a great week everyone! Go check out mormon.org!

Love, Elder Bigelow