A Californian shoveling snow

We got snow this week! This week was super cold and we even had a small snowstorm one of the days (I'm not sure how to measure how many inches it was, I'm from California). But, one of our church members expressed concern that the snow would turn into ice like last year and it would be difficult to enter the parking lot, so the other 3 elders and I went into the freezing night and shoveled our big parking lot. Fancy that, a Californian shoveling snow with 3 Utah natives~

Elder Curtis is doing well, training is almost over and I've enjoyed being able to serve with him. It's truly magical to watch a new missionary because while they feel like they haven't learned any Korean in the 3 months they've been here, you also get to watch their fluency in English slowly but steadily decrease. Elder Curtis laughs at me often for my English mistakes, but I was the one laughing when he tried to say "They will chew me up and spit me out" but instead said "they will eat me up and chew me out."

And teaching Korean is really fun, and so is watching new missionaries give it all they've got, with some fun mistakes in the process. For example: We wanted to visit one of the families

in our ward, and so when we call them I always have Elder Curtis do it so he can get lots of practice making phone calls. So he was introducing himself, but due to a small slip in grammar, instead of saying "Hi, this is Elder Curtis", he said "Woah! This is Elder Curtis!"... Laughing at your mistakes is an important aspect of learning a language too, so I'm glad he is able to do that well. 

PS this is us with our Santa lollipops(thanks mom)

One other interesting thing that is going on right now is that there is a problem with the water in the apartment of the missionaries in the area next to ours, so they are staying with us for a few days, making our apartment a 6-man house. Luckily our house is big and we don't need any bed space because we all sleep on the floor, but we're hoping food won't end up being a problem...

This week we were able to meet with somebody new, her name is 이현숙( Lee Hyeon Sook). She is about 50 years old, and called me a few weeks ago. She had seen our Free English banner on our church for a long time and wondered about our church for a long time, but it took her a whole year to build up the courage to call us. So she came to English class, and also to our post-English class Ping pong activity(I'm getting trained by an elderly ping pong master and it's great), and began to talk with some of the church members. They invited her to church, and she came to church the following day, and expressed interest in reading the book of mormon along with talking about it. So we met her this week with a few of our church members, and the discussion went really well. She has lots of questions, and is really sincere about her search to find a church that is right in a world where there are thousands of churches and even more things vying for our attention. What a great blessing it was for us as missionaries to be able to say, "Your search is finished, you've found it"

Love you all, have a great week!

-Elder Bigelow

PS this is a picture with me and Elder Forthman(the other greenie that lives with us) on exchanges

PPS there's an American family in our ward and their adorable son really likes spiderman so this Sunday I showed him my Spiderman themed Book of Mormon case and he now believes I'm the real Spiderman and now he looks at me with awe but also a hint of fear.

Favorite Sunday of my mission

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great week! We are doing well over here, the weather was very favorable this week, but we are promised some pretty cold temperatures over the next few days.

This week has been very good, and yesterday (Sunday) was one of my favorite Sundays of my mission. 

We started of by giving a priesthood blessing of comfort and counsel to one of the sisters in our ward. She is American and wanted a blessing in English, so  my companion Elder Curtis did it and did a wonderful job.

After that, we had Fast and Testimony meeting, which is the church meeting we have once a month where members of the congregation can come up and share their testimony, or what they know to be true.

(Side story: We did a play about finding Jesus for our ward Christmas party and for the New Friends Party the next week, the people who saw it all liked it and we have continued to see the effects of it recently. The day after we did the play the second time, one of the members of our ward invited us over for dinner. When we got there, she said "I've been meaning to invite you missionaries over for a long time, but I've been so busy with the move. But I saw your play last night and thought "Wow, those missionaries worked so hard and did a good job on that play, I better feed them some dinner" Pretty cool huh?)

Anyways, the stake president is a member of our ward and he happened to be there today, so he got up and bore his testimony, and he talked about our play in his testimony! There is a part in the play where the mission president calls and tells the missionary that he will be transferred (assigned to serve in a different area), and the missionary asks, "okay, when are transfers?" to which the Mission president responds "now", and the new missionary is thrust on to the stage. So as the stake president spoke, he said that when he saw that part of the play, it really made him think- He thought "if the Lord calls me to move or act now, will I be ready to heed his call?" and proceeded to share a great testimony about that subject. And all of the missionaries were beaming because our play even made it into testimony meeting :)

After church ended, we met with 임정희 (Im Jeong Hee), a woman who was baptized right before I moved to Suji. So we have been teaching her the recent convert lessons since then, (she got a pretty bad burn on her leg so hasn't been able to come to church for the past few weeks, but ) we taught the last of the lessons yesterday. She really has a powerful testimony of the truth of this church and has been able to see a lot of blessings that have come from being a member of this church. Towards the end of the lesson, one member of the stake presidency came in and helped teach the remainder of the lesson, and I asked him at the end if he would pray to end the lesson. He asked 임정희s if there was anything specific that she wanted him to pray for. She began to cry and asked if he would pray that she would be able to go through this difficult world together instead of alone. Her husband still has not decided to join the church, and although she has found lots of joy through the gospel, it is still hard when a family member or spouse  does not choose to join. There are lots of situations like this in Korea especially, so I really want to be able to help the best I can.

After that we met 이정수 (Lee Jeong Su), we haven't been able to meet him in a month or so because he has been on a trip, but we met him yesterday with another one of the Young Men in the ward(who is waiting for a mission call). 이정수b shared with us that he had come to know in the past month that God existed. He was trying to get into a very prestigious high school, and he passed the written test but then had to do an interview. They called his name and he walked up to the door of the interview room. He took a deep breath, and then hesitated  for a second. At that moment, the first snow of the year began to fall outside of the window. And at that moment, he said he could feel that God was watching over him and helping him through it all. So we were able to have a good discussion about the role and the promptings of the Holy Ghost.

Anyways, missionary work is the best and I hope you all have a great week!

New Friends Party

Happy 2017 everyone!  새해 복 많이 받으세요!^^ I'm now 21 by the Korean age system, which is pretty cool I guess~
​

To bring in the new year, we had something called the "New Friends Party" on the night of the 31st. This party was for people that had been baptized within the last year, to help them get to know the church members and missionaries better. So missionaries and church members from several cities gathered and had a great meeting with songs, speakers, performances (we did our Christmas play again...) and a dinner of burritos and sushi to finish off the night. I don't know how the quality will be, but here's a picture^^

Other fun things this week:

-For our children's English class this week, we decided to do a life-size game of chutes and ladders to help learn adjectives. So there was a giant gameboard that we made with your chutes and ladders, and then each square had an adjective that the child had to use in a sentence. We seemed to overlook the fact that kids are little balls of energy when we came up with this idea so there was adjectives and ladders and kids flying all over the place, but they had fun and we can only hope that they remember their adjectives~

-I have something that I have named the "ramen curse" that has plagued me my entire mission. So in Korea, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of types of ramen that are very delicious and very cheap. But despite that, we are always told by our mission president's wife to limit your consumption of ramen, mainly due to the fact that there is very little nutritional value. So I don't eat it often, but there are days when we don't have much other food or we don't have much time, so we will have a quick lunch of ramen and maybe some rice. But my "ramen curse" is that every single time I choose to eat ramen, somebody decides to take me and my companion out for lunch immediately after.. Every time.

-We had an appointment to go visit one of our church members and eat lunch with him this week. So we met him outside his apartment and headed inside, and both me and my companion were quite perplexed when we walked inside and there was a woman that was not his wife making food in the kitchen. This woman is also a member of our ward, which confused us even more. So both my companion and I sat there wondering if we were just not remembering correctly, but I was 99% sure that they were both married to different people(and they had different last names so I knew they couldn't be siblings). So my companion and I were both very confused and a little worried, but we just acted normal and figured that we would figure out what was going on eventually. So our church member (I don't know if he could sense the confusion in our eyes or has had to explain the situation several times before) turns to us and says "go ahead and take a seat, I want to show you a picture." He then brought out his family picture and proceeded to explain that that the other woman from our ward had married the brother of his wife, so they were sibling-in-laws and both families lived together. So, we breathed a sigh of relief and had a great lunch together~

I hope you all enjoyed your 2016 and are looking forward to a bright 2017. This is my last year as a full-time missionary, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to represent Jesus Christ in Korea, even if it doesn't last forever. 

Happy New Year everyone!

-Elder Bigelow

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