Last 6 weeks in Gimpo

Hello everyone!

As of August 26th, I started my mission 2 years ago, and I am happy to announce that I will spend my last 6 weeks in Gimpo. We received transfer calls, I will continue to serve with Elder Barnes, and only one missionary will be leaving Gimpo ward, Sister Woo

She is the first Sister missionary from Hong Kong to serve in Korea (99% of people think she is Korean when they first see her), and we took a final picture with our most diligent intermediate English class students, both of whom we are also learning a little bit about our church.

Other things this week:

-Double baptism!: The other Elders in our ward have been teaching two boys and this week they were both baptized! It has been almost a year since the last baptism in the ward, so having 3 this month was really great.

-Zone 전도: We had a zone proselyting activity in our area this week, so around 20 missionaries all came to Gimpo, switched companions, then split up and shared the joy of the gospel! And of course, we ended with a zone dinner at my favorite restaurant~

-Drills: Some of you may have heard about increased caution with regards to the activity of North Korea. Nothing is going on, but our church makes the safety of its missionaries a high priority, so our mission president got special permission to do a "drill" of sorts. If things do seem to escalate, the missionaries will meet at our headquarters in Seoul, so we woke up to a text on Friday morning that said "This is a drill, grab your 72-hour kits and be at the mission headquarters by 10 am" Since we are one of the farthest away from the headquarters, we had to leave as fast as we could, but we made it~ There we just got more training on what the actions we are to take in different situations are, then we finished by watching a slideshow... It turned out to be pretty fun!

That's it for me this week, we are getting lots of rain here but I know there is some bad flooding in parts of the US, stay safe everyone!

Love,

Elder Bigelow

Bonus round extra 6 weeks

Hello everyone! This is week 104, which would be the last week of my mission had I not gone home for surgery last year, But I can say that I am truly grateful for my "bonus round" extra 6 weeks.

Yesterday I said goodbye to my companion from the MTC, Elder Santana. He will leave next week, leaving me as the oldest (in time since starting the mission) missionary in our mission.

Other things for this week:

-Thumbs: If you look at my right thumb in the picture, you can see the sad little thumb brace I am wearing. I hurt my thumb a month or so ago but it couldn't seem to heal enough before getting hurt again, so I'm trying to protect it for a little bit~

-Broadcast: We had the special opportunity  in all of Korea to watch a broadcast just for Korea. Several General Authorities, including the General Primary President and Elder David A. Bednar did a broadcast from Salt Lake for all the members in Korea, it made us all feel special~ They taught us about the importance of putting God first in our lives, and also principles that can help us raise families in righteousness, super good!

-Bucheon: For that broadcast, we had to go to a church building about an hour away from our home. The broadcast ended at 12, but we had to attend another meeting there at 5 pm and we figured that it wouldn't be worth going home at all, so we spent the whole day there, and did a big stickerboarding activity with several other missionaries. The meeting we went to at 5 was a training meeting for teaching children's English classes. We teach for free as a service, but we want to make sure that the people we teach are actually benefited from our service and that they can maintain a positive view of our church as well, so we learned ways to be better teachers.

-Interviews: Usually when we have our interviews with our mission President, we just do it and leave, but this time we met as a district (10 missionaries) for a few hours, and those who were not being interviewed talked with Sister Turner. We did some fun group activities, and she taught us about how we can become one with our companion. We are focusing on becoming one as a mission and being able to follow the Lord's will, but it is something that has to start in the companionship before it can spread to the mission. Loving others is good~

-Sandwiches: The person that was planning to get baptized this week did not end up doing so, but we are still teaching a lot and having great experiences. One happened several days ago as we met with Brother Yoo. He has been meeting with us for a while, and loves the Book of Mormon. He said "If everyone just lived according to the words of the scriptures, tis world would have no problems!". On the other hand though, he struggles a little bit with prayer. We asked him if we had been praying, he told us no, and I was a little disheartened at first. But then he said "can we talk about prayer today? I want to be able to pray well, but I just never really know what to say. Can you give me some advice about prayer?" So, we taught him about the principle of the "prayer sandwich", because it does not matter what goes on the inside of a sandwich as long as there is a piece of bread on each end. In a similar manner, as long as we address God to begin and end in the name of Jesus Christ, what goes in between is up to the individual. He loved the metaphor and left determined to make his own prayer sandwich~

That is it for this week, have a good one!

Love,

Elder Bigelow

The first person I have baptized

I Hello everyone! 

The weather has started to cool off slowly here, good news for the missionaries!

This week, against all odds, our ward had a baptism! The sisters have been meeting her for several months, she has a mental handicap and has wanted to get baptized for a while, and she showed that she understood the importance of baptism and so she was able to get baptized! I had the privilege I of baptizing her. She was the first person I have baptized, and interestingly enough, it happened exactly 12 years from the day I was baptized at 8 years old~

We are looking forward to several more baptisms in our ward soon, some may have to be postponed, but we will keep praying that they happen!

Other things for this week:

-SYL: This week I challenged the 10 missionaries in our district to SYL (speak your (mission) language) as much as possible for the entire 7 days. Some of them may or may not have hated me by the end, but regardless we witnessed a lot of growth that came from it~

-Missionary Disease: This week as I was studying my Korean grammar book, it gave an example sentence that was something along the line of, "she is so meticulous that she plans every single day in intervals of 30 minutes, is that not considered a disease?" I read it and thought "wait that's what I and all other missionaries do..." I guess if it's a disease, it's a pretty good one.

-Korean mistake of the week: This one makes it pretty high on the charts I think. We were meeting with someone and talking about the 10 commandments, because we believe that the 10 commandments still apply to us today. We took turns reading the commandments, and when it came to "Obey thy father and mother", it was my companion's turn. As he read, he made a very minor mistake in pronunciation. Instead of saying the word "gong gyeong", which means "to honor", he accidentally said "gong gyeok". Normally small mistakes like this wouldn't make too much of a difference, but the word that he did say means "to attack or assault", so he told the person we were teaching that we are supposed to attack our parents... We fixed the mistake, but made sure to laugh a lot first~

I think that is it for this week, have a good one everyone! I'll try to put some pictures at the bottom..

-Elder Bigelow

-When you go to the airport but you're happy because you don't have to fly home yet:

My birthday

Hello everyone!

Thanks for all of the birthday wishes, my birthday coincided with zone conference, so luckily I was able to spend most of the day in an air-conditioned room, and it also came with the perks of having a delicious meal made by Sister Turner, and the chance to wear a birthday hat~ Pictures are attached at the bottom.. It was a really great training, we discussed making Jesus Christ the center of all we teach, and becoming more unified in doing the work of the Lord :)

In addition, last P-day we made a trip out to one of the islands in our mission (the one with the airport on it), and had a Mud Flats adventure. It's kind of like the beach except instead of sand it's mostly mud, so you go out during low tide and try and find lots of creatures(little crabs, clams), and the idea is that you take them home and cook and eat them. Part of it was that we didn't know how to cook any of these sea creatures, part of it was that we were inexperienced and didn't find them very well, and the biggest part of it was that we had too much fun looking for little creatures, but at the end we didn't really have anything to show for our efforts. I think the staff and everyone else felt really bad for all the foreigners that weren't able to catch any delicious clams, because a man passing by just handed the sister missionaries a giant bag full of clams and told them how to cook it.

Other than that, all is going well here, it's pretty hot and a couple nights ago when we went to sleep, it was 33 degrees celsius in our house (about 90 degrees) with a whole lot of humidity, at that point it's less sleeping and more of just waiting until morning, but we are still happy :) We were trying to work towards 4 baptisms in our ward on the same day, it didn't quite work out but we should have 3 baptisms scheduled throughout August, we are looking forward to it! We are working with some really great people that have come to see the joy that following the teachings of the Savior Jesus Christ can bring.

That's all for me this week, have a great week everyone!

-Elder Bigelow