Sunday, August 19, 2012

Letter from Korea~August 20, 2012

Hey everyone! So this last week was seriously such a good week. It started out kind of slow but after that we met tons of sweet people and had lots of miracles.

Monday we wrote letters and just kind of relaxed at home for a little bit, then we did Family Home Evening with the Dongdaemun elders and some of their members. We also spent some time calling former investigators and calling potential investigators we have met on the street recently.

Tuesday we finished making more member message cards and then went out and visited some of the members. They loved the cards because we laminated them and gave them magnets that matched the paper we used so they could hang them up on their fridge. We spent some time street proselyting and then went back to Dongdaemun and taught English class.

Wednesday we had district meeting and then it was pouring rain so we did some of the record work that we needed to do; we went out and knocked doors for the rest of the night. We met tons of sweet people knocking doors and got in to one of them but she wasn't interested in the message too much.

Thursday we had a zone finding activity in one of the other areas for a while and had a really good time talking to people together. Then we went out and visited members and English flyered a little bit and proselyted.

Friday we had weekly planning meeting and then we went to one of the universities in our area and talked to a lot of the students there; unfortunately, since it's still vacation time there weren't too many kids at the school. We had a dinner appointment with one of our members; he's in the branch presidency (he was companions with Cole McWhorter in the Daejeon mission). I took the member books and less-active member books to his house and we went through them and he helped me update them and we even called some of the less-active members together. It was super effective because now we know a lot more about the members and less-active members in our area. I'm planning on doing it again in the next week or so.

Saturday we did more record stuff for an hour and then taught English class which was really fun. We have had a lot of people coming out lately. We taught a message on faith and invited people to learn more about our church. It went really well. After that we had dinner and then we had a huge list of people we needed to call so we just started calling like crazy and we set up a bunch of appointments for this week and talked to a lot of former investigators who we can follow up with again and then meet in the next few weeks.

Sunday was awesome! 지승란s said she was coming to church so we were waiting for her and expecting her to come but then she didn't. But she called and rescheduled for five oclock at night. A less-active member who we had called on Friday came to church and now we are going to meet with him once a week and reteach him the lessons because he never got the recent-convert lessons. He was really close with the missionaries before but then they stopped answering his calls for some reason and he went less-active. His name is 단경위. He's Chinese but he's really good at speaking Korean. It's kinda weird because we speak Korean to each other but it's neither of our first languages. He is way cool and is committed to coming to church every week and meeting us once a week outside of church. 

Elder Hone and I had companionship study and then our ward mission leader came to the church and we had our meeting with him. Then 지승란s came and we taught her about our purpose in life and the Plan of Salvation and next time we are going to teach her the Restoration. It went really well and she is so awesome. I really feel she is prepared for the gospel. 

We went out to knock doors for the rest of the night. We had been fasting all day and we knew that if we kept going that we would see a miracle. So we didn't go home for dinner. While we were knocking doors we were on the last one of the apartment and we knocked and a 21 year old kid (korean age, so 20 years old) answered the door and said, "Why don't you guys just speak English?" haha so we stopped speaking Korean and started speaking English. He had lived in Canada for a long time so he's fluent at English. He's a college student here. He told us that he had started going to church a month ago because his life was really hard and he was looking for something or someone that could help him. Then he told us that his father had passed away when he was seven and that he felt like his life had gotten harder and harder since then. So we shared a little bit about the plan of salvation and our purpose in this life and why we have trials. Then we each shared experiences and scriptures and our testimonies. It was such a powerful experience for us. His name is 이동민 and we are going to meet with him again this week to explain more about the plan of salvation and the restoration. It felt so good to know that we were where the Lord wanted us to be and that we could help this kid. He's so prepared. Elder Hone was ecstatic because we had been rejected soooooo many times before and over the last two weeks. It was so amazing!!!


We visited a member in the same apartment complex and they found out we hadn't eaten all day so they immediately started cutting up fruit and cooking up a meal even though it was 8:30 at night. Such amazing people.

The gospel is true! And I'm so thankful to be a missionary right now. Thanks for all of your love and support and prayers!!

-Elder Rife

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