So, I think it was last week that I wrote about going to the little country side area and being surprised with the huge festival they had. Well this week the festivals made it up to Suwon and it was huuge! The stake leaders knew how big this festival is and they really wanted to take advantage of so many people being in Suwon for the festival. So we planned together a huge missionary activity that went for 3 days at the same time. The members also rented a booth in the festival and taught about familysearch.org and how apparently now Obama does it..(that was their big pitch). Anyway, for the missionary activity side of it, we were in front of the church (which happens to be right where the festival was going on) with a booth and street boards. What ended up working the best and what we ended up doing the most was what has come to be known as stickerboarding. I think I may have wrote about doing this in Geum Cheon, but its now being done pretty much all throughout the mission. The question we had written was "What is most important?" then columns for family, money, time, health and friends. So the idea of it was for them to stick a sticker on which one they thought was most important and then we had them fill out a survey according to what they chose. Luckily, the most popular choice was family followed by health (I think I've mentioned before how much the Korean elderly care about being healthy). I think by the end of the week there were thousands of stickers on our signs. We had a lot of fun with it. There would be cute little Korean kids standing there next to their mom thinking about where to stick their sticker then I would say "Hey you're in front of your mom you better choose family!!!" Some told me,"Hey I might as well be honest" and then stick it on money. I would say "Well I hope you become really rich!" It was all fun and effective until the sister missionaries in my area pulled a quick one on me; they got a huge group of middle school girls that passed by to stop and they told them that my name was Elder Nixon. so once they passed me and got further down the road they all screamed "NIXON!!!ELDER NIXON!!NIXON!!" It has been a long time since I've been that embarrassed! Anyway, the activity was an overall success. It was really fun because we got all the missionaries in the zone to come and help and all got to work together with it.
Among all the busyness of the missionary exhibition and family history seminar, we needed to help with watching conference and transfers. Among all that, we actually managed to squeeze in a lesson with Brother Jeong. He is really excited to get baptized. Since he has been taking the lessons for about a year, we decided together to review everything leading up to his baptism, including all the lessons. We taught this week about the restoration and Joseph Smith. It was so great to see the truth of it light up in his face as we taught and testified about it. We spent a lot of time talking about Moroni's promise in the last chapter. We asked him if he had received an answer and he said that he has really asked but now he really wants to know for himself. It was really cool to see how we didn't really have a plan to focus at all on receiving an answer about the Book of Mormon but how the spirit guided us to what he needed to hear. He committed to meaningfully pray to know that it was true. It was so great amid the chaos of all this week to sit down and teach the very core of our message and to enjoy the peace of the spirit as we taught it.
Lastly, General Conference!! We had to watch it in all kinds of weird order because the stake planned all the activities we did till Saturday night. We had to watch most of it Sunday and this morning. It was a conference marathon! I was thinking about how I feel like I've been able to enjoy conference more on my mission than any other time in my life. I thought about what made it different than the other times I watched before my mission. I concluded that a lot of it had to do with the way I prepared beforehand and the way I went into it. I looked at it like this: I thought about myself as an investigator meeting with missionaries and compared conference to our lessons. If I just went into the lessons not thinking or wondering about the message with real intent to know more, I wouldn't be able to get very much out of it. But, if I went into the lesson with the mentality that I really want to be learn and change, then the message would be so clear to me along with what I need to do. I hope I really do prepare for conference for the rest of my life so that I can know what I need to do that I'm not doing or what I need to change. Two small things I'll share that I liked was Elder Christophersen talking about how we really need to give God something to work with if we are to improve or receive blessings. I also loved Elder Ballard who shared that some things like prayer and fasting are not easily measured in an outward way but that they are of great importance.
Thanks for everything~~ peace-n-blessins From 수원 with love. Elder Nixon
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