August 18 Email

Hello everyone!

so this week we had transfer calls and my companion, Elder Jenson is leaving the area and I'm staying in 봉천! My new companion is Elder Westbrook who went into the MTC the same time as me!! We are both super young to be put together. He is from Alpine, Utah and was in the the same graduating class as my MTC companion, Elder Reynolds. I've already met like 7 missionaries that all went to Lone Peak and two of them have been my companions. So we have both been in Korea just over 4 months and the senior companion sister missionary in are Ward left and now it's just Sister Fudge (been here two months) and Sister Basset (been here 3 months). After we told our bishopric about transfers, he said that they must be turning 봉천 ward into the missionary language training ward, ha. Truth is a lot of areas are similar to ours in the mission right now. With the increase in missionaries being sent lots of young missionaries are being asked to step up and train and be leaders and so forth. I am super nervous now that odds are if I'm not understanding it my companion isn't either, but as hard as it may be while it's happening, it will be so good for me going forward with the rest of my mission. And from what I hear, Elder Westbrook has gotten really good at Korean and I already know from the MTC that he is really outgoing and hardworking, so I'm excited to work with him.

Last night our ward had our annual "ward music night" and if I learned anything, it's that Koreans are super good at pretty much everything pertaining to music. We have a guy that got baptized last December who is a professional Opera singer sing and it blew me away. Korean has never sound so beautiful, ah. A cool experience I'll share that happened last night with one of our less active members, Brother Han. We asked people at church if they knew him and no one really did so we went to visit him and introduced ourselves. He was sort of surprised to see us and let us talk to him for a minute, but sort of seemed uncomfortable. Then we came back a few weeks later to give him an invitation to this music night and he pretty much opened the door accepted the invite and closed the door. We thought since no one in the ward knew him and he didn't love us coming to visit that he probably wouldn't come, but he totally came and brought his wife! It was the perfect situation for him to get acquainted with the members outside of church just coming to church. I don't know if it will lead him to becoming fully active again but it was so good to experience that little miracle when we thought our efforts might have been for nothing.

I think these next few months should bring a lot of progress with language because at this point there is sort of no choice, ha. I love you all!!

from 봉천 with Love. Elder Nixon