Sunday, January 5, 2014

새해 복 많이 받으세요! Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! "Happy New Year" in Korean literally translates to "Receive a lot of new year blessings!" I thought that was interesting.

Hello! It has been a super fantastic week here in good old Wonju. Surprisingly, it's gotten warmer this week. But everyone here says that the real cold hits in the middle of January. Should be fun. I had my first district meeting this week as district leader... That was kind of scary. And the dumb Zone Leaders decided that they were going to visit Wonju that day, so I had to give my first district meeting with the Zone Leaders there. But it went just fine. New Years Eve was good, I guess. I don't really know which day it was. We just went to bed like normal and then did missionary work the next day. I don't even know if they do fireworks here. So New Years was pretty lame. But, I turned 21 this week! Koreans count age really weird... when you're born, you are 1 year old, and then you change age on January 1st every year. So if a baby is born on December 31st, he would turn 2 years old the next day. It's a messed up system, if you ask me. But it's cool to be 21 years old, so I'm not complaining.

Elder Murdock and I killed it this week. We worked really hard, and the Lord definitely blessed us for it. We're teaching more people on the street and finding more investigators than I ever have on my mission! It's really exciting. On Thursday we were walking home after a long day of tracting. Normally it's a temptation to just put your head down and get home as soon as possible, but we were still talking to people. And we totally found this sweet guy who invited us into his office and we talked about the Book of Mormon for half an hour! It was SWEET. I don't know if we'll be able to meet with him again... but that definitely strengthened my testimony that if you're working hard all the time, the Lord will bless you all the time. 

A crazy guy punched me this week. He was kind of mean. And another kind of crazy guy was trying to speak Spanish to us... I think he spoke a mixture of Korean, English, and Spanish. I understood a total of zero of his words.

I loved the proverb quoted by President Uchtdorf in this months Liahona: "The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now." It's so easy to moan and groan and regret about things that we should have done that we didn't, things that we should have started earlier that we didn't. Regret isn't the solution to those problems... Starting NOW is the solution. There's a power in NOW. Doing things NOW. Living in the NOW. Learning from mistakes, and using them to improve and make a better NOW, which will inevitably make a better FUTURE. I love the opportunity we have to change, to become better NOW. To change ourselves and become more like Christ.

I love you all! Korea is to cool for school!
Love, Elder Edwards

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