Coming at you from 2018!!!!!

Question of the Week: Does South Korea celebrate the New Year on January 1st, or is Chinese New Year in the Fall a bigger deal?

Answer: So they do celebrate it on the 1st here but I've heard it's a lot bigger on 설날 [New Year] (based on the lunar calendar?? and Chinese things maybe? I don't know haha) and this year it's in February (: but as far as celebrating it on the 1st everybody gets up super early, climbs a "mountain" ㅋㅋㅋ and watches the first sunrise of the year together! And because it's p-day and a Korean tradition, we got permission to get up early to do it!! It was really fun! I'll probably just do a lot of commentary with the pictures, so I'll end this part here.

So, so many sunrise pics! 

And then my pants are amazing, directly translated they're either called grandma pants or country pants depending on who you ask ㅋㅋ and they are supposed to be as beautiful and comfortable as possible (:

And then an awesome member from Nepal who took us to a cow buffet!! My goodness that was crazy! I love him! haha and his name is close to my first one. 

I'll tell more later, my time is being cut short! I love you all! I hope all the pictures went through! Choose some good ones! (: Oh and the dogs are so cute! We were helping someone move that day, and they had puppies!

Ahh, but the rest of this week has been amazing too! With the holidays winding down a bit and the end of the year, we were finally able to meet with a lot of our investigators again! Granted, we live in a pretty small town so we see them around on the street but we were actually able to meet and talk for a while and it was great! Oh!! Super awesome experience with that!! So this week when we were meeting with one of God's investigators at our church building, we were just talking before the lesson and seeing how things were going when all of a sudden a member walks in, and we're like "Oh! Are you here for English class?" (Because she sometimes comes and we had had it earlier that day) and she's like "Nope, I just got a prompting that I needed to come and clean the church right now so I came." (Which is a bit weird because the church is always locked throughout the week unless we're there or there's a youth activity, so she would have had no way to get in but she came anyways) and we're like "Ok, that's cool! (:" And then she noticed we were with an investigator and offered to help, and we just continued to talk and teach and it was soooo great!! So this investigator is in an interesting situation because his parents don't know he's meeting with us and he knows they'll not like it, but we've been inviting him to tell them and been trying to build his faith in that if he asks God for a way to tell them, He'll give it to him and help him. So anyways we're following up on this commitment, and then the member is like, "That's exactly like how my situation was!!.." and then goes on to tell about how she went about it and how it all worked out, and bore a beautiful testimony and ahhhhadlskfj!!! It was just like ahahh Miracle!!  And then to make it even better she lives like 5 minutes away from him (which out in this area is suuuuper close), and will now be giving him rides to church!!! Aaaaaaahhhhhh it was just sooooo perfect!!! There is no way we could have gotten something like that to happen on our own! God's hand was in all of that and it's so amazing and so perfect!! 

Also along those lines I would just like to share another experience with following promptings. As we were walking along one way, we're at a stop light and a kid walks up and waits there with us and I swear I've talked to this kid at least once before if not more (like i said it's a small town haha, we run into the same people a lot) and from what I remembered he wasn't really interested, but I got the prompting to talk to him again as if I'd never met him before. And so I did. And as we were talking I found out that we had actually never talked to him (I'm still not to sure of that, I'm pretty sure we had, but hey maybe God made him forget or something) and as we were talking I also found out that he's Buddhist and that he got his faith from his parents (before now I've never had success talking with someone who was actually Buddhist like this guy and didn't just use it as an excuse). But then the spirit prompted me again to just simply say that I know God loves him, so I did and then we talked some more and we exchanged numbers and he's open to hearing what we have to say!!! Ahjhaldkf, it was so flipping awesome! (: 

And so I would just like to bear my testimony that this is God's work, and we all can play a part in it. It may not seem like a huge thing He's asking you to do and it may just come as a thought to go clean the church or send a nice text to a friend you haven't seen in a while. Whatever it may be. I invite you all to act, act without hesitation and in faith that what you are going to do is what God wants you to do. You won't always see the outcome or the blessings right away, but I promise you as you continually strive to follow and obey the commandments and the promptings of the spirit, eventually you will see God's hand in your life and in other people's lives through you, and personally there's no better feeling in the world than that. I know God lives and loves us, and through the Gospel of Jesus Christ we can find unexplainable joy and peace in this life and in the life to come. I love you all and say/type these things in the name of Jesus Christ Amen.

Love Elder Lott

President Thomas S. Monson
Ensign, February 1986