Talking to people you don't know

Hello everyone! 

This week has been really great, the weather has been great and I've gotten to meet a lot more of the people we've been teaching recently. In fact, we met with a man named 서정훈,(Seo jeong Hun) who loved in America for 15 years. He lived mostly in California, and actually lived in Modesto, California for 6 months during the time I lived in Modesto! So who knows, maybe we were neighbors back when I was 7...  We are helping him to try and quit smoking so he can be baptized, it's very difficult to quit but he recognizes that having an addiction can limit the choices that we can make, and he really wants to stop. He has recognized that when he prays for help, it's easier not to smoke, so he is starting to see that change is possible with help from the Savior, and it's been amazing to see.

Other things this week:

-Do you remember our class with the North Korean and Chinese students? This week, we were accompanied by President and Sister Turner (the Mission President), as well as Brother and Sister Robinson, the couple in charge of Public Relations for the entire country of Korea. They were very happy with the interaction that they saw, and they even mentioned wanting to bring 25 or so missionaries to the school to do a big activity day. Here's some pictures that we got~(notice that you don't wear your shoes inside the classroom)

It's a super fun class, I'm excited to keep working with them~

-After the class, we ate lunch in the cafeteria with all those that had attended the class, I sat across from Sister Turner (we call her the mission "Mom"). She turned to me, scooped the tofu out of her soup and dropped it into my soup. Then she said "you're my son, so you have to eat the food that I don't want :)" It's a good thing I developed a taste for tofu on my mission...

-We have been teaching a mom and her daughter both English and about our church for the past few weeks, they are both really great. And the mom found a music video that was made by a missionary somewhere else. It was a parody of the song "Hello from the Outside" by Adele, and she would highly recommend it to everybody :) But someone in Korea had uploaded it to a blog with a description about what the job of missionaries is, and how we want to share our message of happiness even though there may be things that are difficult or out of our comfort zone, and even though there are a lot of times where we face rejection. When the mom read that, she said it really hit here and she said to me "that's not really your personality, huh? Talking to people that you don't know is pretty hard, isn't it?"

So I told her "Definitely, it's hard for everybody and it's definitely not natural for me either. And I knew that before I came on my mission, and I worried about it a lot. But I knew that being a missionary and sharing the happiness that I've felt with others is worth overcoming any doubt or fear that we may have."

Missionary work is the greatest. The end. Have a great week everyone!

Love,

Elder Bigelow