September 3, 2018: Miracles

Dear People,

For the last several months we have been doing mission wide fasts for finding. As we entered our meetinghouse after we started the fast Sunday morning we were greeted by the bishop's wife who excitedly introduced us to her (non-member) younger sister who agreed to take the missionary lessons starting that day after church.
She is super accepting and basically has a date for the 16th, ward conference. We are meeting her again tonight. 

That evening after we ended the fast we had a little time to contact some of our seventy so-called "people with interest" in our area book planner to find out if they actually had interest or not.

One of the first names on the list was a man from Ireland named Niall who neither of us had met and who had very little information on his record. We had called him three times before with no answer so we were just going to move him to the "unable to contact" category but...

"You know what they say, Elder Buxton, fourth time's a charm"
We both were totally not expecting him to answer so when he did Elder Buxton was a little off-guard. After some kind of awkward small talk there was a pause and Elder Buxton asked: "Yeah, so we were just wondering if you had any . . . interest."

He started talking about how his (Korean) wife goes to a church but he has been looking for a church to go to preferably in English and preferably on Sunday mornings. We told him that we meet on Sunday mornings and we translate. He said he would love to come to our ward conference with his little two kids.

Last Saturday night we were walking through this popular lake park that has a lot of people on the weekends. A young woman with her daughter and son approached us excitedly:

"Are you missionaries?"

"Yeah!"

"Wow, I love Jesus so much, my dream is to become a missionary!"

"No way, that's so great, we love Jesus too! We are trying to be like Him."

To her 4 year old son- "You love Jesus too right?"

"Yeah!" *hugs my legs for a second and then holds my hand as we continue walking.

We talked for a while. It sounds weird in English but she said we "smell" like Jesus. Her maybe seven year-old daughter was all like "Mo-om, we didn't come here to talk to missionaries!"

We have her number and will hopefully meet again soon. She asked us to teach her and her kids English too.

Another miracle in Gunsan is that a brother and sister, both recently returned missionaries just moved in. The will be a huge strength.

We have a new bishop, a meetinghouse that was cleaned of junk for the first time in like thirty years and great new members and friends. I sure hope I don't transfer or go home any time soon.

Favorite quote of the week is from President Ballard:

"Life can be filled with faith, joy, happiness, hope, and love when we exercise the smallest amount of real faith in Christ."

This stylized quote was in the Liahona. It didn't mean much to me when I first saw it but I ripped it out and stuck it to my wall. when I read it over the next day or so I kept thinking about "real faith in Christ". I asked myself what fake/not real faith in Jesus Christ would be. I started to feel like a lot of my daily activities aren't actually an exercise in faith because I know that what I'm doing is right and I know what results will come. I'm re-learning that exercising faith is doing things that I don't want to do, that I haven't done well in the past. Getting into unfamiliar, unknown territory, and doing it because we think it's what Jesus would want us to do. That's when life can be filled with faith, joy, happiness, hope and love.

I'm still not doing this very well but when I do have little moments of real faith it works.

Elder Brown

We spent ten bucks each and way too much time in a "teddy bear museum" last preparation day. I don't know what I was expecting but it turned out to be walking through a bunch of exhibits of little teddy bears posed in random scenes. At the end there were actually a few vintage teddy bears and stuffed animals. Most of them were really creepy and had been knocked over for some reason. There were some cute bear head things that we got to wear though. That almost made it worth it.