Week 8

Hello everyone!

 

This week was a great week! I feel like the MTC has gotten better as time went on, the language is coming along, I'm getting used to the schedule, and it gets closer and closer to Korea! I leave in a couple of days! Monday I'll fly out to San fransisco, then to Japan, then to Busan Korea! I can't wait. On Sunday, for the devotional, we watched an old MTC devotional from a couple of years ago by Elder Bednar title "the character of Christ". It was probably my favorite talk ever. He talked about the characteristics that Christ had, especially selflessness and charity towards other people. He explained that Christ was always turned outward to other people instead of turned in to himself. He did everything out of love for other people and never anything for himself. He gave really good examples of this throughout Christ's time on earth. He suffered for our sins in the garden, on the cross he asked God to forgive the people, Judah betrayed him but He still loved him, when Peter cut off the soldier's ear Christ healed him even though he just went through so much pain and mocking. All examples of Him looking outward and being concerned with other people instead of Himself. Elder Bednar then talked about the scriptures and talked about examples of when people in the scriptures "turned away from their sins and turned to God". He likened these examples to what he was talking about before and how Christ turned outward to other people. When these people were committing sin, they were turned in to themselves, but then they were able to repent and "turn outward" to God and be more like Christ. I don't know if this is making any sense but if you were there it was really cool. haha sorry if this is a little bit confusing! Elder Bednar continued to blow my mind with all the examples he gave and it really taught me how to be more Christlike and made me want to be more selfless and charitable towards others. Such a great talk, dang.

 

The rest of the week went as expected with the schedule being about the same as always. We finished teaching our investigator last saturday and then monday we got new investigators. This time, we were supposed to do a member referal so we knocked on the door of our investigator and told him that we were missionaries and that his friend Brother Psy referred us to him. haha Our teacher started to laugh when we told him that his friend brother Psy talked to us haha (if you don't know who Psy is, ever heard of Gagnam Style? ya that's him) Our lessons with our new investigators went well except we were only able to teach them 2 lessons before today so we might not be able to commit them to baptism, but we will see after tomorrow!

 

So last night during class we talked about Korea and there were so many similarities between Japan and Korea! Our teacher talked a lot about the different types of foods they have there. They have shaved ice with ice cream, my teacher actually said "its a summer treat!" just like mom would always say haha they have winter tangerines, barley water (mugicha?), small street vendors with grilled chicken on toothpicks (yakitori), sweet potatoes. They have shabu shabu and a ton of other things that are really similar to Japan! I can't wait to go! I'm not sure when my next letter will be, but I'll be in Korea preaching this great word! Thank you everyone for all you do! Love you all!

 

-Elder Carter