Baptism!

Hey everyone,

 

Thanks for the emails as always. I especially liked the one from Jesse. It gave me a good laugh. Especially the part about the peasants and the chicken taking his mouth on a trip to the Terrestrial Kingdom. Jesse should email me more often. What the Bourne Legacy? I heard that Matt Damon (sp?) wasn't in this one. I don't even know how I heard that, but I did somehow. Was it good? You might have to throw it on that list for me. So how is Clark? Did you tell him hi for me? That stinks you missed the homecoming. But the after party is where it's at anyways. At least that's where the food is at. And that's what's important.

 

Well this week was good. I wrote in my journal last night and realized I missed the entire week of writing. I hate it when that happens. But it usually means we were busy and that's what we want. I went on exchanges with one of the district leaders in our zone. Nothing too exciting there. But it's kind of funny becuase when this missionary first started his mission, I was his district leader, and then we got transfered to the same district again and now he's my district leader. So we just talked about district leader stuff and things like that. It was kind of hard though because he's Korean so I got a good dose of listening and speaking practice. Which reminds me, I have been studying Chinese characters the past few weeks because like 70 percent of Korean is based off of Chinese. It's the best! I learned something cool. The Chinese character for America also means beautiful. Hmm...what a coincidence. So I just wanted to share that with you. You guys might appreciate it more than my Australian companion. Haha.

 

We had a cool experience on the street this week. We started contacting a guy which led into kind of a long discussion and so he invited us into his work and we got to sit down and introduce the Book of Mormon to him. He seems like he has a lot of interest. He could be pretty golden. We were supposed to meet him again last Saturday, but something came up and he had to reschedule. So hopefully that works out well.

 

The biggest highlight this week was our baptism yesterday! It was really good. Our investigator is so solid! We met with her on Saturday night and just went over her reading in the Book of Mormon. She read up to 1 Nephi 11 and while we were talking about it, she had some really good questions. One of her questions was in chapter 8 about the tree of life and why some people made it all the way to the tree and ate the fruit but then turned away. It caught us a little off guard. I didn't even think about that until like my senior year so I wasn't expecting a question like that. She also asked why Nephi was commanded to kill Laban. It was kind of hard to explain, but with some help from our member we made it through. She's pretty smart. The baptism went really well. We had good support from our branch. I'll send a picture. One of the members bore her testimony at the baptismal service and she talked about how she was baptized at the same age and around the same time as our investigator. It was cool to see how good of a member she had become since she was baptized and it made me think our investigator can become like her. I certainly hope so.

 

Those were probably the main things this week. At least the main things I can remember. Hopefully this will compensate a bit for my lack of journal writing. We have our temple trip tomorrow. The missionaries usually go to a morning session, but because we're way out in the boonies, we're going in to Seoul tommorrow and having our P-day there and then go to an evening session. And then we get to stay the night there again. I like having the temple be our little summer cottage. If you're going to have any "summer cottage" it might as well be the temple. Then we have zone conference the next day. This will be the first one with our new president so I'm pretty excited. I'll try to give you a report of that next week. Have fun at school! Kadin's going to need all the blessings Heaven can afford in order to not get beat up at school. Haha. Talk to you later!

 

Love, Elder Dorius

Gold Flakes

Hey everyone,

 

Wow I can't believe all those people still remember me. That made me feel pretty special. And then I read about all of you guys forgetting to write me and being super distracted while you were writing me. Thanks a lot. I also can't believe that Elder Anderson is coming home this week. That's so crazy. Thanks for his emails occasionally. Those are fun to read. Especially because they're so "Clarky." Hopefully you can catch the homecoming and fill me in. You'll have to tell him hi for me too. Are Kadin and Kylie already in middle school? What the heck? Whenever I see middle school students on the street I think, "Kadin and Kylie aren't that big, are they?" I guess there's probably been a few changes since I've been gone.

 

This week has been pretty good. I think I've said that about every week. We had zone leader council on Tuesday, so we rode in to Seoul Monday night and stayed at our President's house. It was way cool. It felt like a hotel, but I'm sure if you guys were there you'd probaly think it was like the barracks. Since we had the place to ourselves, we got to spend some good time with our President and his wife and just talk. It was really fun. That's one thing I've really appreciated with our American president. With President Lee, it was kind of hard to have that personal relationship because of the languag barrier. So it was nice to just talk and get to know them better. Then all of Tuesday was spent at our meeting and talking to President more about our zone and stuff and then riding back home. Wednesday we met with one our family investigators. We kind of had a shaky lesson, but in the end they committed to a soft baptismal commitment. We're still going to have to work some things out but we at least have that focus now. So that was really good. Our other investigator with the baptismal date is still solid. She was out of town Saturday night and got back really early Sunday morning, but she still came to sacrament meeting and then we finished up all the lessons after church and got things ready for her baptism next week. We just have the interview this week and we need to make sure her parents are ok with it, but that hopefully won't be a problem. So we're pretty excited about that.

 

Now usually in my emails, I try to leave out all the boring, and not so fun parts of missionary work. But I think this time I might go into a little more detail because I learned a fairly good lesson from it. So the past few days have not been super fun. Even though we were seeing some success on the street and working hard, I just wasn't really enjoying the work. It was hard. And honestly I don't even know why. Probaly Satan. Don't listen to Satan. But we were listening to some conference talks and one came on from Elder Ballard's talk last April I think it was. He shared a story about a guy who moved to California during the 1849 gold rush to find big gold nuggets, but while he was there, he wasn't finding his greatly desired gold nuggets. Then another guy helped him out by finding some small gold flakes, but that wasn't good enough for the other guy. He was set on finding nuggets. He noticed his helper's bag was full of gold and told him how he was looking for nuggets like the ones in his bag. Well lo and behold, the bag was full of thousands of tiny gold flakes. That's when I realized that I needed to keep finding and treasuring gold flakes. We were getting quite a few, and some of them were pretty good sized, but I think I was just not appreciating it and just wanted nuggets. The funny thing is that this was one of the principles I learned the most on my mission, but I must have forgotten. That kind of happens a lot though. Just read the Book of Mormon. So that's kind of my word of wisdom this week. Celebrate the small victories.

 

Well that's pretty much been my week. With the start of the new month and new transfer, our zone has been trying to focus more on the Book of Mormon. My companion and I have been studying it a lot so far and trying to use it more in our missionary work. It's been fun. And it's been a good thing to focus on. You definately can't go wrong with that. Have a good last week of summer. Kadin, don't break anything before school starts. Haha. Talk to you later.

 

Love, Elder Dorius

Just a few changes

Hey everyone,

 

Well it sounds like you guys had a good trip. I'm glad you made it back safely. I definately want to go back there sometime. That would be way fun. It might be awhile before that happens though. Oh my gosh. The Olympics are everywhere. Seriously every tv has it playing. When we went into Seoul last week for transfers, it was on our bus and there was tons of traffic so our usual 3 hour bus ride ended up taking 45 extra minutes. It was super long so we sneaked a few peeks at the Olympics. Korea is actually doing pretty good. They're in 3rd place overall in medals, behind China and America. But you probably know all this. People are pretty proud of their country here.

 

Transfers were good. My new companion is from Australia/New Zealand. Round two for me and companions from down under. He's been in Korea for about a year and a couple months now. His name is Elder Coward. So far it's been good. Our whole zone got changed quite a bit. Our two district leaders are both Korean and this is both of their first times being district leader, and this is my companion's first time being a zone leader and he wasn't even a district leader. So I'm the only leader in our zone right now that has some past experience in another leadership position. No pressure. Ha. It's pretty fun though and there hasn't been any major issues to deal with yet. Elder Stanley is still doing well. He's also a zone leader. He's pretty far away from me though so our chances of serving together are pretty much gone. Our chances of even serving near each other are pretty much gone. But we see each other at least once a month at our zone leader meeting.

 

Our investigators are doing well. Our girl with the baptismal date, Hyeimin, is doing really well. She's been keeping all of her reading assignments in the Book of Mormon so we just committed her to start from the beginning and read some everyday. She also came to church again yesterday, so she's still on track to be baptized on the 19th this month. We're pretty excited. We've gotten tons of calls from people who want to learn English. Mostly older ladies. Unfortunately pretty much all of them don't have any gospel interest, so it's not worth too much. We picked up two girls whose mom wanted them to learn English who had really good potential. We met them for the second time and had a really good lesson and gave them Book of Mormons and then we got a text from the mom telling us to not visit again. It was a pretty solid drop. So that was lame. We've been meeting with a less active kid recently and we gave him the For Strength of Youth pamphlet and had him choose one thing to discuss when we came back. He chose dating. Typical teenage boy. But it was pretty fun.

 

That's pretty much been our week. I've felt a little scatterbrained with the start of the transfer and taking over my area/zone, but it's been good. The days go by fast and the weeks go by faster. It's still stinking hot. But tonight we're sleeping over at our President's house and they said they have air conditioning there. Boo ya! We're super stoked about that. Well have a good week. We'll talk to you later.

 

Love, Elder Dorius