Time Keeps on Slippin'....

This week has really just screwed up my whole perception of time and how it works!  It felt like just yesterday that we had our P-Day and now it's back again!  It most certainly hasn't felt like a whole week!  When I first got to the MTC and would try to speak in Korean, the words I didn't know would be filled in by French words because of my 3 years of French in school.  Lately I feel like I've forgotten just about all the french I knew!  I was talking to some elders going to France and I just could not remember how to say anything to them!  Maybe that's just cause in Korean the things I know how to say are all about the Gospel and about teaching discussions, but my mind just couldn't draw up anything that I knew how to say!  It's amazing how far my Korean has come already!  Not to say I understand most things or that I can say what I want to (Far from it!), but I definitly can get a handle on all of it!  Even if all of the grammar is backwards for English oriented brains!  (i.e. "We Christ follow through blessings receive" is the literal word for word in order translation, but it actually means "We receive blessing through following Christ."  Yeah...pretty intense!

We just got 32 new Korean missionaries in our branch yesterday.  They're all going to Korea (the Seoul South and Seoul missions I believe) except for 1 of them who is going to Australia!  They basically double our branch size!  And in 3 weeks we get another group coming in of a comparable size going to Daejon and Busan which will make our branch really big!

Each week we get to go to the temple on our P-Days (except for today and next week because of cleaning.  The group of missionaries 3 weeks earlier than us get to actually help with the cleaning!)

Each morning we get up at 6:30 (and sometimes a little earlier) as most everyone knows, and lately I haven't ever heard the alarm.  I sleep in the bed closest to the door and the light switch and the first few weeks I would be the tough guy and get up to turn the light on.  But the past week or so my body has physically not even noticed it until the lights have gotten turned on by Elder Tucker (one of my roomates).  At gym each morning I usually play a lot of volleyball with people, because it's so sweet and I never have had the chance to really play in the past.  So that's always a good time.  A lot of the elders will play four-square and those games can get really intense, surprisingly enough!

My hair has gotten just too long to deal with normally these past few days so I started gelling it to keep it together and everyone keeps asking me if I got a haircut.  Nobody thinks that I would have just done something different with it for once, oddly enough!

On Sunday our devotional speaker was Stephen B. Allen, the current member of the 70 that's most involved with missionary work (managing missionary something or other).  Back in the day he was a top-dog in the church media stuff and he was behind the church Homefront ad campaign.  So we got to see some of those during the devotional and all of the missionaries loved it! TV, right? One of the ending lines for one of the commercials said something like "The people in your heart don't know what's in your heart.  Let them know it each and every day."  (a very roughly paraphrased quote)

Then on Tuesday we got to hear from Lowell M. Snow who was a former 70.  He's been on like 5 missions in his life, not counting the 2 different times that he was a mission president!  That's a lot of missionary work!  He talked to us about being a disciple of Christ and it was one of the best and most straightforward talks about that that I've ever heard.  He said that (yet another very roughly paraphrased quote), "God won't force us to learn.  We have to act according to what He needs us to, in order to authorize the Spirit to teach us."  I thought that was pretty true, because Heavenly Father really won't force us to do anything.  We have our agency.  And although he strongly desires for us to do certain things - like study our scriptures, pray for guidance, and study Korean in my case! - he won't make us.  But when we do allow that to happen and authorize the Spirit to work in our lives, then we are able to do so much more than we ever could on our own.

I hope everyone is doing well!  I love you all! Thanks for all of your support!