Week 52

The new church building...I don't have any pics inside, but it's beautiful!! There are 4 floors!

My district from last transfer...these are all of the missionaries serving in my ward. 2 elders got transfered since this pic and 2 new ones came this week.

Hey Family!!

So this year I will officially hit my one year mark of being a missionary...crazy!! I am super thankful for my decision to serve as a missionary and especially here in Korea! I still remember so clearly when I opened up my letter and read that I would be serving in the Korea Daejeon mission...nothing can express the shock that I experienced, but as I have served here it has been clear to me that I was meant to come to korea all along. Thankful to have modern day prophet and apostles that could assign me to serve here. I have had such awesome experiences and learned so much while serving. This has truly been a blessing :) Thanks for all of your love and support!!! Can't wait to bring some korea back home with me haha

We had a good week here. We spent a lot of time in the area that we just combined with to try to get to know the members there because they are a part of our ward now. Which also means that we got to serve with the other two sisters serving in our ward sometimes and that was a blast! We had some lunch and dinner appointments all together with members and it was fun :) I love visiting members and hearing about their conversion stories and meeting their families.

We had an awesome lesson with Sister Cha and her daughter this week after they had been baptized. We taught more about the Holy Ghost and then they received the gift of the holy ghost yesterday at church! They are official members of the church now. yay!! They are going to do so well. And Her husband started meeting with the Elders so hopefully he will also be able to follow his family's example soon! I love their family.

This week we had a really fun family home evening activity at a member's school. We played volleyball together and a lot of investigators, less actives and members came. It was awesome! our ward mission leader is so great and has helped our investigators get connected in the ward a lot. Super grateful for him.

Also this week we at church at our new stake center and it is BEAUTIFUL!! I looks almost like a temple. It is so huge and clean and there are beautiful paintings and decorations inside. It made me emotional to look out at sacrament meeting and see all of these people that I love and am serving in this beautiful building together and think of how we are all so blessed.

This week we will have our mission conference and Elder Christofferson is coming on Saturday!!! Then he will visit and dedicate the new stake center on Sunday. We feel super blessed to be serving in this area right now!!

I love you all!! Hope you have a great week! Happy Memorial Day!

"The Lord is My Light!"

Love

Sister Livingston

Week 51

baptism!!!! There was also one of the elder's investigators that got baptized too :)

Sister Cha and her husband Brother Lee

Sister seo and Sister na and me :)

At the rose garden today!!

Winning egg team!!

More rose garden pics :)

Hey there family!!

 

So fun to talk to you all last week!! You all look and sound great!

 

Today transfer calls came and guess what......I'm staying...again!!! This will be my 6th transfer here in nongseong. My companion is staying the same so it will be my third transfer with Sister Lee. I won't lie, I was surprised to be staying again, but I am happy! I love this area and the people and my companion so it's all good. We just need to find some new investigators because all of our progressing investigators have already gotten baptized so we need to find some new people to teach.

 

Yesterday Sister Cha and her daughter guk soer got baptized!! It was a happy day :) I'll send some pictures. But this week was spent mostly finishing the lessons with them so they could get baptized on Sunday. We were supposed to move to the new chapel yesterday, but they had to delay it another week so we were at the old building still. But it was still a great baptismal service. It's been such a blessing to see this miracle family accept the gospel!!!! The father of the family ended up not being able to attend the baptismal service because of work, but we saw him last night when he came to family home eveing at the church with his wife and they set up an appointment with the elders to start teaching him the lessons in the evenings when he gets off work early.....yay!!! so excited for this family! Our ward has done a great job in fellowshipping them into the ward. Our new ward missionary leader is super awesome and proactive so he has set it up that we have a family home evening everyweek for our investigators to come to so they can meet members and see how our church is so family oriented. It has been working out so well. Sister Cha always talks about that it's been at the family home evenings that she has felt the spirit the strongest.

AT last night's family home evening I gave the spiritual thought...I was way nervous, but it went okay :) Then for the activity we did an egg drop and we had to make something to catch the egg...our team was the only one that kept the egg safe..woohoo! 

Today we had a sisters activity and went to this pretty rose garden in our area and had a picnic. It was fun! I'll send some pics.

I love you all and am so thankful for all of you and the gospel of Jesus Christ. I know that it's true and through living according to the gospel we can become better people and eventually become like our Savior.

You all are the best!!!

Love

Sister Livingston

Week 49

Sister Cha in her studio with her artwork!!!! so awesome!!

Surprise! My pday got switched back again to monday....so hey!! glad I could catch some of the family members and catch up with them. And next week is mothers day so we get to skype!! woohoo!!!

Here is the plan: Monday morning 8:00 my time I'll skype at a member's business where she said I could use her computer. So that will Sunday evening for you all. And hopefully we will be able to figure out how to do a group skype date. If it doesn't work for some reason I can split up my hour to talk to the individual families. But it should work right?! I'm excited to see you all again!!! can't believe it's already May!

So this week........our investigators have been kind of flakey recently. But Sister Cha and her daughter are progressing well. They came to church yesterday and their daughter that is living in salt lake city right now started meeting the missionaries there as

well, so we're really praying that their whole family will be able to progress to baptism and eventually become sealed!! And another great thing about them is that Sister Cha is a legit artist...like she has a studio and this really cool artsy part of town and we went to her studio this week to see her artwork! it was awesome!!!! i loved it!! I will send you pics. She mostly paints beta fish and there are all of these really detailed patters that she does all by hand. And some of her paintings are really huge. It was really cool to see. She had also done some intaglio printmaking and she was showing me the copper plates so that was cool :) made me excited to do some more printmaking when I get back to byu! But the members were great with her yesterday so fellowshipping is going well. 

The other things that happened this week weren't really exciting, but they were definitely memorable haha. So last week when we were walking to church a woman saw me and asked if I remembered her (I honestly didn't remember her, but I said yes anyway because I've talked to so many random people on the street that I probably had talked to her before) and she said that we talked on a bus one time and she wanted to meet me again so it was a miracle that we met again. At that point I was thinking to myself, yes! so we set up an appointment to meet with her on wednesday. We met her and sat down and her friend came too (these are middle aged women) and we sat down and then all of the sudden they pulled out their bibles and started trying to teach us. Turns out that they were jehovah's witnesses and wanted to teach us haha. It was denfintely and interesting experience. We just smiled and bore testimony to them haha. It was funny though. Another experience this week was on the bus, I sat next to this woman and I introduced my self as missionary and how we were teaching about the book of mormon. She had never heard of our church before, but she was appalled that we would believe in another book in addition to the bible. She kept telling me over and over again that our religion is wrong and not from God. She said that because she loves the korean people she wants to ask me to stop teaching people about our church. I was kind of taken a back because she thought it was so terrible that I would come to korea and teach people about our church. Again, all I could do is smile and bear testimony to her. 

But through these experiences it just makes me grateful for the experiences that I've had in my life to know for myself that this church and the Book of Mormon are true. I am so confident about that. I know that Heavenly Father is our Father and Jesus Christ is His son and our Savior. And I am so so grateful for the Book of Mormon in my life. Through reading and living its principles I have definitely come closer to Jesus Christ.

I love you all!! I'm excited to talk to see you next week when we skype!!!!!

Love

Sister Livingston