Love, Charity and Fear

Where to begin this week? So many amazing experiences but too little time!! (and I can't remember them all) I guess I'll just talk about love, charity, and fear. Those were a big part of my personal study this week and came up in comp. study as well. Anyways to tie it in to some stories from this week, basically I was having a little trouble with 전도 [proselyting] and talking with people because honestly it is a bit scary sometimes to just go up to the big guy on the subway who looks like he's having a bad day and say "Jesus loves you! Do you want to know more??" (ok a little more elegantly than that and in Korean, but basically the gist haha).

So something I've been working on is loving everyone and trying to love them and see them as Christ would, and every time I fear talking to someone saying a little prayer in my heart and then going for it. This is because through those studies and talking with my companion, we came to relize/re-relize the truth that Satan has always done the same things over and over to try and frustrate God's work. For example, with Joseph Smith and the 1st vision. He knew what was going to happen, so he tried his hardest to overcome Joseph Smith with fear to try and stop it. Aren't we all glad it didn't work? To bring it back to me and you though, Satan knows us and what we are capable of doing. He uses fear to try and stop us from accomplishing the amazing things God wants us to. But with that knowledge, we can use it against him. Whenever we have a fear about doing something righteous, we just have to recognize who that feeling is coming from and why. (Satan, and because he knows you have the potential to do something amazing like Joseph Smith). As I've been trying to apply that knowledge in my life as a missionary (especially in 전도), I've seen sooo many more blessings. I've been able to have more love for people and I've been able to have deeper, longer, and better converations with people than ever before thanks to the gift of tongues, just to name a few.

I would just like to end this one by bearing my testiomony that God lives. He wants us to succeed and provides opportunities to do so and become better every day through Christ and His atonement. This is a beautiful world and a beautiful plan. As we strive each day to become better, the Lord will always give us strength to do so. I know Jesus Christ is our Savior, Redeemer, our Friend, our Brother. In the name of our brother, Jesus Christ, Amen.

I love you all and hope you have an amazing week!

Elder Lott

Question of the Week: Do the apartment doors mostly have digital keypad locks like we see in K-dramas, or are they lock and key like the homes here in the US?

Answer: Where I'm at it's all key pads, it may be different other places though. It's nice because then I don't have to worry about a key, but then it's also frustrating sometimes because a couple weeks ago the batteries were starting to run low on ours so we sometimes (often..) couldn't get in.... and we were putting off replacing them because batteries are expensive here! But we finally broke down and replaced them haha, so now we can get into our house 100% of the time.