July 28 Email

July in Seoul So last week on P-day for my birthday, I thought I would buy a new suit since they were on sale for super cheap at a store in my area. I tried on the suit and decided I for sure wanted it but also saw that all their winter coats were on sale (since its 100 degrees right now). I tried a coat on and thought it looked pretty good but told myself that I had to choose it or the suit....then I thought it might be kind of fun to try and bargain with the salesmen in Korean with the tiny amount of bargain vocab I knew. I basically knew how to say I will buy it if you cut the price and that's it. He went down a little and I told him no way. He'd have to go down way more. Then finally my companion (who knows a little more Korean than I do) said he will for sure buy it if you give us this price and he thought about it for a solid 5 minutes and then said we could do it! He ended selling me the coat and the suit for half of what the coat usually costs! I really wasn't planning on buying the coat, but I really wanted the experience so i did it anyway and thought the experience alone was worth it hah. Not that I'm counting at all, but this week was the 6 month mark. I remember when I first got to Korea, people told me that once you get to 6 months you feel pretty comfortable with things and I remember believing there was no way that could happen that soon for me. I don't know if I can say I'm comfortable with my language ability and my grasp on how to do good missionary work, but I definitely can say that I've progressed more than I thought I would from that time up until now. I've grown to not worry too much about it and to just willingly accept any progress God allows me to have with this. If i've learned anything, it is that there is absolutely no way I've learned this language on my own. I know it has come through serving him that he has helped me progress in ways I can't explain. This week we taught an investigator the word of wisdom and law of chastity and he sort of just laughed when we explained it to him. sort of like "it would be so hard to live that way that I think its funny that you think I could really do that!" I decided that he doesn't really need to focus on these things right now, but rather answer the question for himself "Is the Book of Mormon true?" I admitted to him that sometimes I really don't understand why we can't drink green tea and that I can understand how growing up outside of this church it would be really hard to accept that, but right after that I told him that I know the Book of Mormon is true and because I know that it is true I also know that God wants us to live these commandments. It helps me see that lots of people (myself included) can get caught up sometimes in the little details about the gospel and allow those to make us forget the bigger and more important questions. So August is sort of the holiday vacation month for Korea. Three of our progressing investigators are going out of town, two of them for the entire month! One of them showed up to our lesson one day and told us he decided to quit his english academy that he was attending full time and go see Europe for a month. We were like alright see you in a month! It's a little bit of a bummer that we won't be able to meet with them for a long time, but it will give us more time to teach other investigators and find more people to teach. Koreans say that it rains all July (very true) and then the first two weeks of August are really hot, not super excited for that but at least it's only 2 weeks, hopefully. We get to go to the Temple this Thursday! I thought since the Temple was in the north mission that we probably wouldn't get to go but the area president allowed us to still go once a transfer. Thats all I have for this week! From 봉천 with Love. Elder Nixon