November 24

Lehi's Descendant

Hey everybody!

I think its only fitting given that since Dad went to Notre Dame this week that I let you know that this morning I got up at 6:30 and jogged in place for 30 minutes straight with the Rudy soundtrack in the background, just getting pumped that I get to be a missionary today. No better way to get the day started.

This week was really fun! The best part of the week was probably yesterday at church. We had a ward lunch after sacrament meeting. Elder Veerothai and I sat with the old and wise High Priests of the ward to try and learn some wisdom of the gospel and just about life. This is what ended up happening: Something that is common among Korean conversation (especially among the older generation) is talk of ancestors. But pretty much everybody here has ancestors from Korea so they love to get a little variety in it and always ask the missionaries about their ancestors. I told them that my ancestors were from Scotland and they thought that was crazy awesome because apparently that is where President Monson's ancestors are from. We talked about how cool it is that I share ancestors with a living prophet, but then I took it to a whole other level when I said that I had a great great grandmother who was Indian. Right after I said that, they immediately asked "so your ancestors are the lamanites???" I responded with an "umm I guess so!" and then they just looked at me with this amazed look and said " I was a decendant of Lehi!" I never really thought about it that way but they were pretty blown away by it. Then Elder Veerothai told them that he has a great great Grandpa who is Korean who married someone from Thailand and moved there and they were even more blown away. They immediately drilled him for every bit of information that he knew about him. I've literally never seen people so excited about someone else's ancestors, hah. It was so fun to talk with them and get a little closer with them cause sometimes they can be a little intimidating with their elaborate explanations of all the deep doctrine that they give in church. Yesterday was also the Primary program, which was so fun. I thought of Kelsey the whole time and and how she must be loving/dying over her calling, haha. As if Korean kids weren't already cute enough just being at church, but when they sing the primary songs and give their little talks and testimonies its soo cute! I hate to say this but it's also probably the first sacrament meeting where I've understood most of what they're saying and it was so good! Their first song was I am a child of God and the kids just screamed it as loud as they could and it was so funny and cute the whole ward was pretty much in tears with laughter.

So we are meeting with this kid right now that Elder Westbrook and I found on the street named Ron. He really likes learning English and also likes to help us with our Korean. I told him that one of my weakest points in Korean was my pronunciation and that I wanted to work on it. He agreed that it wasn't that good and then I made the mistake of asking him to imitate what me speaking Korean sound like to him and it was sooo bad to the point where we just sat there and laughed. Things with that went from bad from worse towards the end of the week when I caught a cold and lost my voice. As if my American accent didn't make my Korean sound weird enough, going up to people on the street and trying to talk was quite the experience. It's already weird to them that I know any Korean because almost all foreigners here don't know any. When they see me trying to say things in Korean and it comes out pretty impossible to understand, they really didn't know what to think.

This week we had a really good zone conference. Since I've first come to this zone, it's nearly doubled in missionaries so it was a pretty big event with lots of missionaries. We had the chance to get really good training from President Morisse about how we can use the Book of Mormon to answer investigators questions. The sample question he threw out was what if your investigator asks you why did God bless you by being born in the church and having it your whole life and he's only presenting it to me just now? I had a really hard time thinking of how I could answer that at all let alone through the Book of Mormon but then one of our AP's turned to me during our role play and said can you think of anyone in the Book of Mormon you might be able to relate his story with his? I immediately thought of Alma the older and how he grew up among wickedness and became a priest of the wicked king Noah and how his chance didn't come till Abinadi came and preached forgiveness. It was such an awesome experience about how we can relate Ancient scripture to modern day peoples lives.

Well that is all for this week. Today for P-day we are off to Gangnam to pig out at a chicken buffet and go shopping. Should be lots of fun!

From Bong Choen, with love. Elder Nixon