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