October 6 Email

Hey hey hey!

This week flew by. Every time Elder Westbrook and I are walking to the library to email family, I always tell him, I can't believe we are already doing this again. It was a pretty good week for the area. The weather has finally cooled down a lot and it feels like the perfect temp outside. I'm going to enjoy it while I can because what I'm hearing from older missionaries is that the winters get pretty cold here. I just found out today that in November we are having a joint conference with the Seoul North mission!! I was so pumped to hear this because I have so many friends serving in the other mission! I thought that I wouldn't get to see them till post mission so it was an awesome surprise and will be great to see how they're doing. I wanna share two cool things that happened this week:

With the new transfers being last week, my companion, Elder Westbrook, became the district leader. This means that we will do lots of exchanging with other missionaries in our zone. The zone leaders wanted to do an exchange with him right when the transfer started so this week I got to spend a day working with Elder Lee. He's a new Korean missionary who started his mission 7 weeks ago. He's from a pretty rural town in the southern part of Korea and had only been to Seoul a few times before his mission. Before the transfer, I already knew that he didn't speak very much English. I was just a little worried we would be able to communicate very well since we would be together for a whole day. I thought there would be lots of times where he said something in Korean or I said something in English and we just wouldn't understand each other. Turns out we spoke only Korean pretty much the entire time and we didn't have any problem. It was so cool to see that I was actually capable of it! It got me to thinking of when I was back with my trainer and how he could only use english to communicate with me and that I could pretty much never understand what he would tell me in Korean. In particular, I thought about our second to last day together we were walking and we asked me 몆시에요? (what time is it?) and I just looked at him and said huh? I had been in Korea for 12 weeks and I still couldn't even understand that! I think back to this week spending an entire day only speaking Korean and communicating everything that I needed to showed me how much God has allowed me to grow in the language. It also got me excited that if I ever get to serve with a Korean again that it will be much different than when I was trained.

The other awesome thing that happened this week was a total miracle. We had a day open where we couldn't find absolutely any of our investigators or less active members or anyone to meet us to teach them. We had one of those days where we had plenty of time for just finding people who wanted to know about our church. We decided instead of mainly talking to people on the street that today we would try knocking more doors and trying to find a family to teach. We went to go visit a less active at their home but they weren't home. We got into an elevator at their apartment complex and Elder Westbrook just pushed a random floor. I looked at him and he said "I don't know why I just did that.." We get off on that floor, knock on the first door and low and behold we find this awesome family. We spoke Korean at the beginning, but we found out they met at Grad school at Penn State, so they were fluent in English. it was so weird how we knocked on their door and they were almost excited to see us. They were super nice to us. We asked if we could meet again later and they said that would be okay. The wife said that her husband misses the burgers in the states so we decided we are gonna go back and bring him some McDonalds McDoubles. I really hope we get to teach them! I've wanted to teach a family my whole mission but still haven't got the chance. Things are are good as usual! We have struggles every week and certain things are really hard right now, but overall it's great as usual.

From 한극 with love. Elder Nixon