October 27 Email

ALMOST TRANSFERS AGAIN!

I can't believe this Saturday is already transfers again! This one really flew by. Chances are I only have two more weeks in Bong Choen, which is a bit of a bummer cause I love it here, but there is a chance I might stay. I'll know by next email so I'll be sure to fill you in.

It was another super busy week. It is good though because it seems that every time I'm not busy is the time that's hard to get though, so it's good to be busy. This week I got to go to the temple, exchange with my zone leader and spend a day in his area and see some awesome miracles.

Temple day was awesome as usual.  Elder Westbrook and I wanted to do the temple session in Korean, but they only let American missionaries do it if they don't have any room left if the english session, maybe next transfer. I can't say enough how lucky I feel to get to go every transfer. That day was also our P-day, so we spent a good part of the day with our whole zone doing fun stuff. We went to Costco after the temple to get a cheap lunch and right before we were all about to order the Stake president saw us and bought us 5 giant Costco pizzas! Gotta love running into members that are out and about. After that, we went to the public bath house. Usually the Koreans are pretty surprised to see 2 or 4 of us in there, but when our whole zone went at the same time they didn't know what was happening. I felt sorta bad, but it was still good. Then we went shopping in a huge underground market for winter clothes. It was an awesome day to spend with the whole zone.

So my zone leaders area also happens to be the area of the biggest english branch in Korea. (300-400 members). We went to the church to meet one of my zone leaders investigators, but he decided to not show up so as we were walking up stairs to the gym I could smell something I hadn't in 9 months: Chili! We walked into the gym and l felt like I literally just walked back into America, 7 crock pots full of Chili, corn bread, hot dogs brownies, HOMEMADE ROOTBEER!!!!! and 300 Americans dressed in halloween costumes. It was so weird, that it was almost hard to enjoy, but nevertheless I did enjoy it!

One night this week, we were walking home and stopped right in front of the gate to our building. We looked at the clock and it was 8:54(we're supposed to be in by 9:00). We decided that we needed to stay out, so we started looking for people to talk to around our building, but no one was around. We started saying "free baptism!! Get your free baptism!" Even after that, still no one was around. We decided to just walk in so as we turned to push the gate to get in 10 high school students came around the corner all having a little late night meal with burgers and ramen. Sometimes its really hard to just go up to a big group of people, but not with Elder Westbrook! He loves that kind of stuff so he went up and said "should we share the food?" Now that sounds really rude and even more weird in American culture, but they are all about sharing food here so they loved it and gave us a bite of of their burger. We told them how we were serving in this area and looking for kids who want to learn English. They took our flyer and hopefully walked away with a good impression of those white mormon missionaries they see around town.

I've talked before about going around our town trying to find inactive members and this week we had a cool experience doing so. We showed up to an apartment and found out he didn't live there anymore, but this time we tried asking the landlord if he still had his contact information.and he gave us his correct number. We called him and said that we wanted to introduce ourselves. He told us that he didn't really want to come back to church, but that he would meet us for lunch. We went out to lunch and got to know him a little better and at the end we told him that we know you don't really want to come back to church but would you want to come to our Halloween party and he said that it sounded like fun and that he would come! I don't know if he'll ever make it all the way back, but it was so cool to see the progress we did make!

All for this week!

from 한극with love.

Elder Nixon