Chusuk, A Korean Thanksgiving

Our Mission! See if you can spot Jordan....

You're right about XXXX. But he gave up tea pretty easily. He doesn't understand why we can't drink red or green tea, but we just suggested to switch to a different tea. God commanded it, so just switch one tea for the other. It wasn't hard. But, smoking is. This week was 추석, Chusuk, a kind of Korean thanksgiving. He was out with his family, so he didn't smoke at all. He was able to go over 2 days without smoking! He's doing really well, and we are really excited for him. We moved his baptismal date back a week, but we're still going to be trying really hard with him.

This week was very strange. On Tuesday we had a Chusuk party for English class, which was really fun. We had 3 investigators come and the sisters had one come. We will cancel our English class until October 1st, because we're switching books and starting a 'new semester'. Wednesday we did a mission-wide fast, so we ate at a buffet for lunch and then just went out and proselyted for hours. 

Thursday was mission conference, which was amazing. Missionary work has been going through a 'slump' in Korea over the past few years, so President thought it would be good to have a fast. They gave training and talked a lot about 'daily bread'. We watched a few videos on it that Elder Christoffersen narrated, and President talked about how we need to take missionary work one day at a time. We expect big miracles right now, but we need to be grateful for the little ones we collect every day. After all, getting manna from heaven was definitely a miracle. So when it's hard, when you don't want to work anymore, just take one more step. One more step. Take it one day at a time, and look for the Lord's hand in your lives. It's there, and when you express gratitude for what He's done, he'll open the gates of heaven and pour out blessings. It was a great conference, and it was really fun to see friends and old companions. 

On Chusuk, there's 'travel days' where, on Wednesday they travel to their family's house, then Chusuk is Thursday, then Friday is another travel day. It's eerie, because during Chusuk, there is NO ONE on the streets. You can't find anyone. And you can't knock doors, because partly of culture during Chusuk and stuff. So we had our mission conference on Thursday, then Friday was 'clean day', where we deep cleaned our whole house from top to bottom. It didn't take us too long, having 4 elders who are fairly clean anyway. So after we went to the market to see if they had any 'black Friday sales'. 

Saturday was our P day, so we got together with another zone, and all 50 of us played basketball, ping pong, Uno, all sorts of games, then we got permission to watch the movie "The best 2 years."  I've never seen it before! It was funny because we were all seeing this from a missionary's perspective. Quite enjoyable. 

Sunday was good, none of our investigators showed up to church, but it was still a very spiritual 3 hours where I enjoyed the company of our ward members. After church 2 girls called us. We met their dad on the street last week and he sent them to us to learn about our church and to practice English. They are really nice, and we'll probably refer them to the sisters this week.

Then, for dinner, we got meat from a member as a gift, so we had a really good dinner, then finished it off with SMORES! Thanks mom, Elder 장 loves them.

Today isn't P day, but we're still emailing to keep the regular schedule of Monday emails. After this we'll go visit members and share the news of our stake game night this Saturday. It'll be fun, and I PROMISE I'll take more pictures. We didn't take many pictures during Chusuk, we were kept pretty busy, but I have a few to send to you.^^

Love you all!

Elder Franchina