wow i can't believe it's getting so close to your wedding day! i'm so excited for you jee :P anyway, it's been another rainy week but we've had some cool things happen.
so first the bad news: the lady who is getting baptized wasn't able to make it to church this past sunday :( it's always sad when the time ticks closer to church starting and the one person you really want to see at church isn't there! and every time the back door opened, we kept hoping that the person coming in late her but it wasn't. so she probably won't get baptized til next month which is next transfer. but it's okay! at least she is still doing well and still making progress! oh and she found another job! yay! she was really worried about that but when she put her faith in God and she went out and did everything she could to find a new job, everything worked out for her. so that was a blessing :)
but for good news: on thursday, we were streetboarding and it was SO hot. like really really hot. but not cuz the sun was pounding on us (which it was) but because it was so unbelievably humid!!!! so trying to talk to the number of people we wanted to was really hard. but the 2nd to last person we talked to was this girl and she just kept looking back at us because sister hill is american lol and so we said hi in english and that usually turns people away but she came up to us and started talking to us! and she was carrying a bag of 야쿠르트 and she
gave us some cuz she wanted us to have something cool to drink in the crazy heat! she was soooo nicee!!! so we set up an appointment and we met her on friday! when we met, she was a little hesitant in learning about the gospel cuz she had mainly english interest. but she told us that she was atheist and then her friend wanted her to come to their church for years but then a few weeks ago, she finally started opening her mind to church! and ta da! enter missionaries! :D so we don't know how it's going to go cuz she seemed a little hesitant; we are hopeful! yay for miracles that happen even when it's hot and sticky :P
anyway, the other cool thing was that elder choi yoon hwan (최윤환 장로님) came to our ward this past Sunday because 금천 is their homeward! so we got to hear from him and his wife and it was great!
gah i'm running out of time but the spiritual thought of the week comes from President Uchtdorf: "Love is the measure of our faith, the inspiration for our obedience, and the true altitude of our discipleship." wa bam. so true. so i'm working on showing more faith by loving more :)
have a great week!
sister cho
wow another week has just flew passed! gahh i can't believe how fast everything is going! guess what? on the 19th of this month, i'll be halfway done with my mission already! gahhh! i want things to slow down! sister hill can't believe she only has 1 transfer after this one!
anyway, so it rained a ton this past week so we had a lot of time to just make phone calls. it's way harder to get ahold of people through the phone so it's made me really take advantage of the time that we have to 전도 outside even if it's really hot. so sister hill hates doing phone calls because she says it makes her a little nervous (even though she's super great at it!) but on one of the rainy days, she said she wanted to do the phone calls because she wants to get better at it. so she did and guess what happened? well, the same thing that
happens when any of us stretch ourselves and take a step of faith to do something that we are prompted to do. we saw a miracle. what do you know :) so she contacted a lady who was just sooo nice (cuz a lot of the times, they just hang up before you even get to say anything more than "hi we're missionaries for the church of--") and she just invited us over on friday!!! yeeee! it was real rainy on friday too but we got there and she had us come in. she was doing like a tutoring session with her son and his two friends. she was teaching them how to write good essays in korean. so we got in there and we were so confused because we didn't know what she expected from us. we thought we were going to BRT a little and then after getting to know her, explain a little about what we do as missionaries and see if they wanted to learn more. but instead, the 6 of us sat in the room and the mom just wanted to talk. and she didn't really lead the conversations anywhere! so yes, in the beginning, IT WAS AWKWARD to say the least lol but then we've gotten really good at just making awkward situations FUN :D so we just talked about random things and it was so fun! one of the friends' name was bella so we even talked about twilight; did i ever think i would talk about twilight as a missionary? nope haha but it totally worked and we may or may not have all took sides of who we'd pick between edward and jacob. and i guess the korean school girls like edward here :P sister hill was like "ah nee yo!!!!!!!!!! jacob 짱 ee ay yo!" bahaha it was so fun! so anyway, the woman asked us to come back next week because the kids had so much fun! so we just realized how important it is to really build relationships with the people we meet :) we're excited to meet next week!
On Friday, we also had a mission conference to meet the new mission president! President Christensen is from Salt Lake City, Utah and he is a doctor! he majored in Chemistry and went to med school at the U. (it was cool because Brother Collins, the ward mission leader for one of the wards that i was serving in in the SLC mission, told me back in december that his friend's son just got called to be the mission president for seoul korea! so it was cool to meet him!) He is a sharp guy and he gave a great talk! He said that while he was serving a mission, there were 10,000 missionaries. and now, we have almost 60,000 missionaries all over the world! and he said "isn't it wonderful to be a part of this army of Christ?" i guess i never thought about it like that! and sister Christensen spoke and i was asked to translate and it was my first time translating from English to Korean. so i was kinda nervous because the other times i translated, i went from Korean to English for sister Han's talks and that's what i'm comfortable with. but when the time came, as i started with a prayer in my heart, words just flew out of my mouth; not because of me. but because that's what the Spirit does! it was so cool to hear myself (but not really me, because it was the spirit just doing his thing!) put together sentences that i don't think i could have done normally in the short time span that i had. YAY FOR THE SPIRIT :) anyway, so that was really neat.
so to end, i want to just share with you what President Christensen shared with us that he learned at the MTC in a mission presidents' seminar. He said Elder Allen (i think :P) said that we are now in a "Mormon Moment." He said that because of a variety of events that are happening now (BOM musical, Mitt Romney, etc), people are starting to wonder about our church. and he said that he calls it a "mormon MOMENT" because we don't know how long that moment is going to last. and he challenged us to figure out in our own ways how we can use this
Mormon Moment to introduce the church to the people around us. So I'd like to ask you to do the same! :D let us all figure out how we can, in our own circumstances, use this Mormon Moment to help fulfill the purpose of God, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man! isn't so cool that we can all help with this work? :)
anyway, love you all! have a great week!
sister cho
first off, JEE YOU LOOK SO GORGEOUS IN YOUR PICTURES! you and max are super cute in all of them!! i'm so excited for youuu!!!!! (i'm going yellow dress shopping with sis hill today! :D) i love your outfits! and the balloons! and the chalkboard!!! it's exactly what you wanted ever since NPS lol :D congratssss!
this past week was AWESOMEEEEE!
so we had our english class presentation on saturday and it was SUPER SWEET! we had a rehearsal before the presentation and it was chaotic! and the kids were just being kids so they were having a hard time focusing and it was especially hard because we had the youngest class! but everyone had a prayer in their hearts and the presentation went soooo well thanks to all the amazing members who put a ton of work into english class :D so instead of just doing a presentation, i thought it would be cool if the theme of our presentation was presenting what we learned in the format of the viewers flipping through different korean TV shows! so we turned our stage into a huge TV screen and sister hill and i made signs of different TV shows and had someone walk across the screen with the sign so that the viewers would know what they were watching when each act got on stage! yay for watching lots of korean TV :P
i hosted the beginning of the presentation (elder choi, another 교포, hosted the other half/ while our class was presenting and he did a great job cuz he's really good at korean and english!) and started off by asking everyone to help me turn on this huge TV with my cute remote control (sister hill made it and it was so huge and SO CUTE!) so we did a 뽀뽀뽀 act and everyone loveeedd it when sister hill started off by saying "HELLO MY PPO PPO PPO FRIENDS! i'm ppo mi unnie!" it was super cute! and our students counted to 20 with the song "1 little 2 little 3 little indians" they sang the wiseman built his house upon a rock and popcorn popping that we taught them and our last act was a news desk and we had a little girl be a reporter asking all her friends "where are you? what are you doing?" which is another thing we learned! and the upper class did lots of acts of describing their family and mini fable skits (sister hill made all the animal posters for them and they looked fabulous! SHE'S SO ARTISTIC!) as part of different tv shows. they were sooo adorable! and we finished with the upper level class doing a puppet show of Finding Nemo! It was soooo fun!
At the end, the audience had to give compliments in english to the performers and the performers handed out fake american money and the audience had to collect them to "buy" their refreshments (cookies, sandwiches, drinks, 떡볶이) this was our bishop's wife's idea and it turned out so cute!!! other missionaries from 2 other zones came to watch our presentation to figure out how our awesome members run english class here and they seemed to have enjoyed it too! our members are SO GREAT!!!!! they worked so hard and invested a lot of time intoenglish class! yay for motivated members :D
so as if that wasn't a cool enough day, we had an appointment after the english presentation with the miracle 구도자 that randomly came up to is a few weeks ago at 구로 digital 단지, remember that one? so we were going to go to a choir concert with her and we were super excited! but then she was feeling super tired cuz she works 11 hour days! so we were kinda bummed but we decided to just spend time with her at her house. and we taught her the plan of salvation and the spirit was just so strong, and she was understanding real well and what sister hill and i taught flowed really well together. and she was excited to hear that in the celestial kingdom, she'd be able to be with her dad and husband who both passed away a while back. and then we felt prompted to invite her to be baptized. AND GUESS WHAT. SHE SAID YES. we were both thinking, 'wait, what just happened? does she know what she just said? we just met her a few weeks ago! she trusts us that much? wha???' and then we set her baptismal date for the end of this month (last saturday of this month!!!) and she got super excited and WROTE IT IN HER CALENDAR THAT SHE IS GETTING BAPTIZED!!
sister hill and i are just feeling so blessed and happy!!!!!! our week in a nutshell: our members are awesome. and miracles really do happen. all the time.
look for miracles. every day. and you will find the tender mercies of the Lord that guide you and uplift you every moment of your life.
love you all :)
sister cho
pictures:
us making props/preparing for the presentation
our finished TV stage! (our bishop is such a handy man! he put it
together for us!)
our class kids :)
an act from the show
our students with their indian hats! (sister hill made them! cute huh?!)
leading the popcorn popping song
our investigator who is getting baptized! she's so great :D
(June 10, 2012)
wow so much happened this past little while!! so here we go!
1. so last week when i didn't write much, IT WAS MIRACLE WEEK!! because we got 4 new investigators and another one this past week! so basically, sister hill and i have been doing everything we could think of to find new people to teach but we couldn't find new investigators. but we kept going and doing the things we needed to/could do in order to keep showing faith--like 전도, we 전도ed A TONNN!! i got to the point where i questioned whether or not i really knew what faith is because i thought i was exercising faith in finding new investigators, but it didn't seem like our efforts were bringing about anything! and right then, we got a phone call from our district leader who gave us a referral of a mom and a daughter who want to do the 30/30 program so we met them AND WE'RE MEETING THEM EVERY THURSDAY NOW YEEE! and then, we had a lesson with an investigator that we recently met AND SHE BROUGHT A FRIEND. wow. that was AWESOME. but here's the best part: so last saturday, sister hill and i were wondering where we should go 전도 and we thought of a place called 구로 Digital 단지 역. we hadn't really 전도ed in that place much so we decided to go after English class. we tried to get on a bus that would take us there but all these buses lined up in a row and the ones we wanted to get on were in the back and we figured they'd stop closer to the front but they just left!!! so we missed a few buses like that and then we missed another bus because we asked the bus driver if his bus goes to that place but he said no but then while it was driving off, someone told us it does. lame huh? so 10 minutes later we finally got on bus but this one dropped us off a street next to the cross walk we wanted to be at. but we decided to 전도 at the crosswalk we got off at first (cuz there were SO MANY PEOPLE THERE!!!) and then make our way over to the other place. so we talked to people there for a while and then we were just overwhelmed with how many people there were so we just decided to go down to the other cross walk. and right when we got to the next crosswalk, a lady walked up to us and asked us what we were doing. she came from 부산 so she had an accent and she looked mid 50's. and she was so so super nice!! and she told us she wanted to meet us!!! I KNOW, MIRACULOUS RIGHT? if your jaw just dropped, then you may now close your mouth tee hee ;) so we met her and we told her about a ward picnic we were having on wednesday and she was like "oh great! that'll
be so much fun! i'll take my sunglasses and everything too!" sister hill and i were like "wait, what's going on?!! so many blessings!!" so she came to the picnic and she came to church this past sunday too!! she was like "okay well i'll see you next sunday too, right?" bahaha it was so awesome! so i think i have a better understanding of the idea that miracles happen after the trial of your faith. (i realized i don't get to pick the duration of the trial of faith period :P) and i definitely have a better understanding of the phrase "blessings poured upon you" because they were totally poured upon us!!!
2. so monday we went to the zoo as a zone and it was sooo fun!! i held a baby leopard (that's trained so it was real nice) and a NON poisonous snake!! it was super hot so even when we're not doing anything, we just sweat. so it's way gross but you get used to it :P but nonetheless it was so much fun :D
3. so on tuesday, we visited that girl, remember the 11 year old who asked when the missionaries are coming back? yep her! we visited and she just was totally NOT SHY anymore!! and we played some games and then taught about prayer and turns out she's been going to a random church close to home BY HERSELF because her family doesn't go but she wanted to!!! so she has had a desire to go to church! and guess who popped into the picture: sister cho and hill yeee! yay for the spirit who knows everything and gives us promptingsss! so that went super well! we want to invite her to family home evening with a ward family on an upcoming monday!
4. English class is going great! boy i love teaching! we reviewed "where are you?" "im in the kitchen/yard/bathroom/etc" and "what are you doing?" "i'm eating, playing soccer, washing/etc." so that we can present it as a skit at the end of this month for our english class presentation! it was so cute, this little boy was like "i'm in the chicken!" because chicken was a word close to kitchen! and i remembered jee you and i had that problem too when we were little! and remember "보란색?" bahaha
5. the church is true :) and miracles come in the Lord's time if we are just doing our best in being obedient during the trial of our faith. i knew this principle in my head while growing up in the gospel and attending church and seminary and stuff. but now i can say that i know this principle with all my heart :) read ether 12 if you have time! i always just thought of verse 27 when i thought of ether 12 but there's so much other good stuff about faith in it too!
6. i'll send you all those bows when i can jee :)
7. love you all! have a great week!
sister cho
pictures
1. our zone at the zoo looking at the elephants!
2. a dinosuar play place at the zoo :)
3. the snake!!
4. the kids at the picnic
5. the miracle investigator we met at 구로 who came to the picnic and to church!
(June 24)
HAPPY FATHER'S DAY! i love you daddy :) these past few months, i've learned that a lot of what i have to offer the Lord is stuff i learned from you and mommy. thank you :)
this week just flew by! the hours went by slow because it's just been really hot so time spent outside seems to be going slower but the days and weeks go by so so fast! i want it to slow down!! i love being a missionary :D
anyway, monday, we got transfer calls and sister hill and i were really sad because we thought we'd be split up but guess what? WE'RE STAYING TOGETHER HERE!! YEEEE!! the AP who called us seemed to be taken off guard because when he told us we were staying together, sister hill and i screamed and gave each other a high five and he was like "uh... okay... have a good night..?" hahahaha :D this is so great because first of all i love sister hill, she is so comfortable and way fun to be with! and second of all, the english class presentation is this next saturday and we've both been working so hard on preparing for it (teaching the kids, making props etc) so we are so glad we're going to be here for it! oh, and this other 교포 missionary and I were asked to be the hosts (사회 sp?) for the presentation so that should be super fun! i'll be able to send pictures of it next week yee! :D
so on wednesday, sister hill and i were walking to the bus stop and this lady popped out of no where and said to me "our church made it into this magazine this month!" and she just started flipping through pages of a magazine and went off for 15 minutes saying that heavenly mother is on the earth today. and she's korean. and how the 2nd coming already happened. and the whole 15 minutes she was talking to us while we were walking to the bus stop, she asked me ONE question. it was "you've never heard of our church have you?" i'm not about to claim that i'm a perfect teacher/missionary cuz i'm not. but this lady wasn't really taking the time to get to know me or make her message applicable to me. and i really appreciated her caring for my salvation, because really, she was a nice lady. but even when i agreed with some things she was saying, she didn't realize that i agreed with her and just kept going on with what seemed like a memorized message. i knew that PMG is really inspired but i think that this encounter added to my testimony that Preach My Gospel is inspired. cuz there's this whole section that talks about LISTENING. and then discerning needs of people. and relying on the Spirit to know what to say and do to fulfill the specific needs of each person. this encounter then added to my testimony that our prophets are called of God. and that this church is true :)
on sunday, we had a lady who randomly came to church! WOW huh? yeah so she just came 30 minutes early and so sister hill and i started talking to her so we could get to know her. but she was SUPER SECRETIVE. like when we asked if she lives around here, just to make conversation, she wouldn't tell us. and when i asked about her family, she just smiled and didn't say anything. and then she asked questions like "what category does this church go under? baptist? catholic? etc" and "who is the highest person of the church?" and when we gave answers, she compared them to other churches, and although she did seem to have genuine curiosity, she didn't seem very satisfied with any of the answers. it was awkward to say the least. but good thing i love and embrace awkward situations:P a few minutes before sacrament meeting started, i felt like it'd be best if we just were friendly and let her FEEL THE SPIRIT. so i showed her my family pictures even though she wouldn't tell me anything about herself. and when i showed her our family pictures and explained how i was a normal student before my mission, she asked questions about me and commented that i seemed to have had a great life (she especially liked the picture of our family at the beach, where all of us are wearing those hairbands, including daddy! she was like "your dad seems to be a fun guy." haha!). and then she opened up a little bit about her life! and she told me about how she's kept busy these days with her little grandson who is 3 years old! it was so cool. and then sacrament meeting started; i never prayed harder for someone i didn't know than at that point. i just prayed the whole time in my heart that she would just feel the spirit. and guess what? I'M POSITIVE SHE DID. cuz i did. and back in the salt lake city mission, i learned that we can know if people are feeling the spirit if we feel it too. it was really cool to see her smile at the youth speaker giving a talk on loving one another and watching her listen to a sister speak on following gospel pirinciples. she hadn't seen just normal people give talks before at church cuz usually it's just one person. and then the last speaker
answered the question she had about prophets! not a coincidence :D she was still secretive about herself as she left but we're hoping she comes back! (we gave her a Book of Mormon so hopefully she'll read it yee!)
anyway, sorry, running out of time! spiritual thought for the week: Elder Neil L Anderson said, "Faith is not only a feeling. It is a decision." i thought that this was cool cuz i know that as we choose to have faith, we will be much happier in whatever state we are currently in :)
love you.
sister cho
(i'll send pictures next week!)
