May 8th, 2011

Well Korea has been super awesome this week!!! We've had a couple appointments with investigators and one of our investigators 최승규 (choi sung gu) has come to church!!! He came yesterday and then we went and talked to him for about an hour with our ward mission leader. I'm not sure all they talked about but i know they talked about baptism a bit. I think that if we continue to meet with him and help him to progress, he will have a desire to be baptized. He mentioned yesterday that he wants a change in his life, and that he's been really stressed lately. I know that the gospel will help him put his life back in order and help him deal with that stress. Well we've had a lot of appointments planned this last week but unfortunately many of them cancelled :( The people in korea are always soo busy and it's hard to set up an apointment that will work for both of us! We even had an appointment to play basketball with a man but he never showed up!!! Usually when our investigators cancel on us we go out and just talk to the people on the streets. The other day when we were out, a drunk man came up to us and just started talking about the church with us. It was really neat and fun to talk to him, he even gave me a pencil haha!! we then gave him a card and he told us that he would call us but he never did :( Then two days ago we were coming out of a store and a college aged kid came up to us and started talking to us. He knew who we were and had talked to missionaries before. He told us to show him where our church was and so we took him to our church and we sat down with him and taught him a little bit about the book of Mormon and about our church. I think he mainly just wants to learn English (he had a huge textbook that he wanted us to help him translate to korean!) but when we talked to him about the book of mormon he really seemed interested in it. I think we are going to meet with him again and hopefully we can bring him to the knowledge about the gospel! It seems like a lot of people here just want help with learning english or they want foreigner friends (I've noticed that there aren't very many white people here compared to koreans ;) It's pretty humorous when we're walking down a street and see a group of high school aged girls just staring at us. When we say hi to them they always freak out and just giggle a bunch haha! It's great! Sometimes if they're gutsy enough, theyll tell us that we are "handsome". Well I think that's about all that has happened this week, it's been a pretty good week! altough it can be frustrating when all of our appointments cancel and we pretty much have to start from scratch. It's definitely worth it though when we get into someone's house and teach them a good lesson and eat some good food!!  Well I'm loving the work here in korea and i absolutely love the gospel! It's made me realize how special each of us are, that our Heavenly Father sent us to this earth so that we can become just like he is, and that if we excercise our agency righteously, we will be able to live with him and our families once again!! Well I hope you are all doing well, It was great to talk to you today!!

 

Love ya

Elder Oaks

 

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May 16th, 2011

My dearest family

Well this week has been soo long, Im pretty sure every appointment we made cancelled on us!! It's really frustrating but life goes on. Wait, we did get to teach one lesson this week to one of our investigators. Every saturday we just show up at her house and teach her about the gospel. Each week we commit her to read from the book of mormon daily and pray about it but she never keeps the commitment, so this week we decided to read 1 Nephi with her, hoping that as we read and discussed together she would understand how important the scriptures are. We have been sending her a text each night reminding her to read and pray. Hopefully she has been doing it, I guess we'll find out this week!

 

So the other day I was walking on the street with my companion and a drunk man calls us over to him (this happens pretty regularly) and he started talking to us in english (the only words he really knew were "man" "every curse word in the english language" and ke kept calling me "handsome") Finally when we were about to walk away he gave me a hug and ke kissed me on the neck!!!! That was probably the grossest thing that has ever happened to me!! I don't ever want to experience that again!

 

Oh so good news! Our investigator 최승규 came to church this week and he stayed all 3 hours of church and then for lunch afterwards (the ward has a big lunch each week after church). It was the first time he's actually stayed for the whole thing! It's been funny, a couple of our ward members have talked with him about baptism and yesterday one of the ward members committed him to being baptized next month! We haven't even set a date or anything with him yet! Infact, we haven't really even talked too much about baptism with him, we just haven't had a chance to do that yet. The ward members are one step ahead of us!

 

Well that's pretty much all I have to say this week, It's been a long, slow, hard week but this next week hopefully we'll be able to meet with all the investigators who we wanted to last week! Well I love you all!

 

Elder Oaks

May 16th, 2011

May 2, 2011

Hey so guess what!! I'm in Korea and it's soo crazy!!!

 

Everything is so big here!!! well except for the people, but they're not even that small usually! Anyways, I got to korea on tuesday night (at like 6 in the morning USA time) and a couple of missionaries came and greeted us. We took a subway back to the mission home. Before we got on the subway the missionaries gave each of us a book of mormon and we had to make a goal as to how many people we were going to contact!! It was probably the scariest moment of my life!!! The missionary I was assigned to go with made me start talking to people and go as far as I could, then he would translate the responses of the people and I had to try to talk to them as much as I could, it was really really really hard but it was such good practice!!! I even handed out a book of mormon and I got a couple of phone numbers!!! Well we went to the mission president's house, ate dinner and stayed the night. The next morning we ate breakfast, had interveiws and then went to missionary training where we were assigned our trainers. My companion is named Elder Parkllan. He's really nice but he's super shy and so he doesn't really like to talk to people that much.... This makes it pretty difficult for me because I want to talk to everyone but I just have no clue what they are saying!!!! It feels like  many times we walk to a member's home for like a half hour and we don't talk to anyone that passes us!! I'm gonna have to learn a bunch of korean so i can talk to people!!! I asked him to speak korean to me but he seems to have forgotten, i'll remind him today!!

 

Well we have a couple of investigators and I pretty much can't remember any of their names because they're all korean names!!! haha i'm sure i'll get them down though!! A couple of them speak pretty good english and our lessons are a mixture of english/korean (meaning that we try to teach in english but if they don't understand we teach it in korean) One of the investigators want's to learn english and so we teach him english for a half hour and then we switch and teach gospel for the other half hour, it's so much fun teaching lessons!!! Another one of our investigators is actually from the philippines and she's doesn't speak korean so we teach her in english. Her name is Mae and her husband is a member but she's not. I think they just recently got married. She comes to church pretty much every week with her husband and his parents. I have faith that she will eventually be baptized, but I dont know when that will be. Hopefully soon!!! She seems like she understands and believes everything we say, I just need to make sure that we are commiting her to keep commitments, otherwise she won't progress.

 

In korea all the men work all day long and the kids have school and academy after school (basically more school) and so it's hard for us to get appointments during the weekdays. Usually our saturday and sundays are filled up with appointments but we don't usually have anthing to do during the day except proscelyte ( I'm not sure if that's how you spell it). Proscelyting is pretty hard here because everyone is walking somewhere and they don't ever have time to talk to you (or at least they say that they dont). Sometimes we'll try and talk to someone and they'll tell us that they are busy even though they are just standing there doing nothing... haha it can be pretty frustrating!! When we go door to door the people don't actually come and answer the door, they just yell from behind it (who is it?) and when they hear the word 선교사 (missionary) they just tell us that they already have a religion or just to go away!! It's hard but it can also be very rewarding. Yesterday, we were walking around talking to people and I saw a man who was walking and we decided to talk to him. He actually talked to us and we sat down at a table and taught him a little bit about our church!!! It was so much fun because our hard work had actually paid off!!! he told us that he wanted to meet again and so we're going to meet him on saturday to teach him the first lesson!!! I'm so exited!!!

 

So today is P-Day and we are going shopping!!! I just want to buy some sweet ties to send to people and just kinda look around at what types of things they sell in korea!! I'm super excited!!!

Well i've gotta get going! I love you all so much and I'm so glad that I can be in korea!! It's hard already and It probably won't get any easier but It's definitely worth it! I love this gospel and I want to share it with everyone around me! I want all of the angry koreans to be happy like I am!!! I always try to go around smiling at everyone because I want to show them how this gospel can bless their lives!!! Well I gotta go but I hope you are all doing well and having a good time!!

 

Love ya!

Elder Oaks

 

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