Elder Nathan Stagg: Toungyoung: My First Baptism

Anyonghasayyo!!

This has been a super fast and incredibly amazing week! The success and miracles are just pouring in! And I love it!! Our small ward went from 1 youth to 3 in the past month! (1 is 7 years old and the two others are our recent converts who are both 16) We finally have a priest age kid in the ward!

So yesterday we baptized E sung Joon! His testimony is remarkable. He was so nervous/excited before the baptism but super prepared! He wants to serve a mission so bad, and so we are going to start inviting him to help us teach. We will start with just members. But hopefully if he wants we can start doing proselyting with him!

Next We have gotten 4 new investigators!

2 of them are in 6th grade, and we got permission from their parents to teach them. although we need to work on making simple lessons hopefully with interactive activities to go along with them. If any of you have any ideas please let me know!

Next we were at our english class when we heard someone playing piano, so we went up stairs and there is the kid we have never seen playing the piano! haha we talked to him and he said he had met with the missionaries about 2 years ago and just felt like he should come back to our english class. we haven't me with him since because we have been super busy! But i think he has lots of potential! He is 24 in american age

Next, about 2 weeks ago we got a call from random number that said he wanted to meet but was super busy and didn't know when he could so he said he would call back later. So about a week later he called us again and basically did the same thing. But then he called us yesterday and asked if we could meet in 20 minutes.So we met with him. He is from Uzbekistan. He can speak a very little bit of english, and decent Korean. However he knows no religious words in either language. He has been here for 2 years doing construction work, he works EVERY day from 6am to 9pm. He send most of the money back to his family. So he has only learned Korean from people talking around him. He is muslim, and 24 years old! half of our teaching his acting. He didn't know the word for god so we were pointing up and pretending like we were praying and a bunch of other stuff... he said he understood but we have no idea if he did our not. There is no church material published in his language either, so he is going to be hard to teach.

And last, Elder Choi (from the 70) came to busan on our mission tour. He had a really powerful talk and i felt the spirit strong! He focused a lot on suffering. Christ had to suffer in almost all of his life. He died for us, atoned for us, got mocked, beat, scorned, the list could go on and on. He suffered more than any man could handle. So if Christ was perfect and he had to suffer why would we as imperfect people not need to suffer? But it is when we suffer and how we react to the suffering the defines us. We need to learn to suffer with and in god. Lots of the apostles that have spoken to us have told us to not take notes and what they say, but on what the spirit tells us.

When we suffer "look up". That was his famous Quote of the day. Just look up, in everything we do and all of our problems will go away. That doesn't mean that Christ will heal you, or take away all of your trials but he will ease your burden. After all we have trials and afflictions to help us remember Christ. When Christ got nailed to the cross and stabbed with the spear, did he heal his scares? No! The reason why is so that we will always remember him, he has engraved us upon his hands. And so when we have trials or afflictions and we turn to god but he doesn't take them away, the reason is probably because he wants you to always remember him. Just like christ kept his scares even though he had a perfect body. So remember LOOK UP!!

Thats my spiritual thought for the week!

Love you all

--Elder Stagg

Korean Fried Chicken, probably the best thing in the world.

Yummy,
It is mission tradition to get it most pday dinnners, every transfer night and the first meal with you new companion. It is super good and they deliver it to your door!