에어콘은 완전 좋다

(Translation courtesy of Google Translate: "Air conditioning is completely good.")

Picture taken at the most recent mission conference.

A good week this week that involved A LOT of proselyting. None of our investigators but one could meet because they're all busy, so we spent a lot of the time out on the street talking to people. Proselyting is good, but it's just kind of frustrating because we need to meet with these people to get them ready for baptism!! Hopefully this week they won't be busy. We did have one investigator come to church yesterday. He's 26 years old and nice and a little shy and has a baptismal date for next weekend... but he's not ready yet. He slept through most of church and our lesson after church because he was really tired, and he doesn't usually meet during the week, so he hasn't had all the lessons and hasn't been keeping his commitments too well. He'll come around. It's interesting as a missionary trying to guide people to join this church, because they are already happy and comfortable. Them keeping our commitments puts them out of their comfort zone for a little bit. Which they usually see as not good, but they aren't seeing quite the big picture. So we have to help them see the big picture!

Elder Lee and I with 3 vietnamese kids. They're awesome.

We're teaching a Muslim man whose lived in Korea for a year now. He can speak a little English and is okay at Korean, but communication is still difficult. It's hard to teach an investigator about baptism when they don't know the word "baptism". And the church apparently doesn't have a Book of Mormon in his native language... lame. I think we'll try through the church website next time we meet him. We also met some kids from Vietnam, and they spoke zero English and knew maybe 200 words in Korean. That was really hard. At that point it's almost impossible to teach anything... lame. We were going to meet them again with pamphlets and a Book of Mormon in Vietnamese, but it turns out they don't actually live in our area. Something I've learned a lot while on the mission is language is IMPORTANT. Well, communication is important. And a lot of communication comes from words. It makes me grateful to have a family and friends who are all fluent in one language and can communicate easily and freely. That's a weird thing to be grateful for, I never thought about that before coming here.

The Eemoon elders!!

I went on exchanges to Eemoon with Elder Redd, the district leader there. He came to Korea with me, and he's awesome. He's an awesome missionary because he's FEARLESS. He talks to every single person on the street, even when it's awkward or the person is kind of far away, or for any other excuse, he always just talks to the guy. I learned a lot through that exchange about being more fearless... mostly because we did something on that exchange that was absolutely terrifying. Elder Redd is always looking for new ways to proselyte, and his favorite one right now is getting on the subway and standing at the far end of the car and then preaching to a crowded subway car. We wouldn't preach for long, we would just introduce ourselves and the Book of Mormon and then testify about it and offer free copies. Most of the time people ignored us, but we were able to give out a few copies of the Book of Mormon and get some phone numbers during the hour that we did it. It was honestly the most terrifying thing I've ever done. Getting on a subway full of tired and kind of cranky commuters and yelling to them that we're missionaries for The Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and have a happy message to share in the form of a book, the Book of Mormon. So scary. But it was honestly really cool to conquer that fear and get more comfortable talking to all the people on the subway. I won't lie, I was shaking so bad when I did it with him for the first time, but it was cool to feel the fear go away by facing and confronting the very thing that gave me fear. I fear no man!

The sky is blue, the weather is cool, Dongdaemoon is awesome, the tank is clean... the tank is clean!!

Love, Elder Edwards

Laurel here: "The tank is clean..." is from "Finding Nemo." Yes, perhaps a bit on the random side. :) 

Crabs in the market. Mostly dead.