Serving The Lord With Heart and Seoul: Christmas Hope

Christmas is coming SO FAST. I can't believe I am going on round two of the holidays on my mission. But I am so honored to be a missionary during the holidays. It is so special to celebrate Christ's birth while representing Him here in Korea. The stores here have started playing Christmas music... in ENGLISH. I mean a few are in Korean but since Christmas isn't really a big Korean holiday, most of the Christmas music is in English. A few places have put up Christmas trees and Christmas lights. It is definitely nothing compared to Christmas in America, but the little hints of the season that we see and hear here and there and well appreciated. :)

If you haven't seen the new Christmas initiative the church is putting out this year... go look it up. It is super good, and it has helped us in our proselyting. We have cute little cards that we can give to people with the website on it, in Korean. :) The website, in English, is: https://www.mormon.org/christmas
I super suggest watching the video. :)

So this week I had to give a zone training, and it was an adventure as always. I am always nervous before zone trainings. During personal study on Wednesday, I sat there and looked at my notes from Mission Leadership Council meeting and looked at the page full of the missionaries' pictures in our zone. I was trying to get inspiration for what exactly needed to be shared. I thought about each missionary and how I could help them. I was legitimately at a loss for what to share.

Thursday rolled around (the very day of zone training) and I started planning for it that morning. Finally I knew what I was going to share. I can testify that if we open our mouth, it will be filled, and that God will give us what we need to say, in the hour that we will say it. I ended up sharing about hope and about being positive. I kind of ran out of time because my training was at the end of zone training, but I ended by talking about Christ being the ultimate example of hope, and then I shared the Christmas video (the one with the url above). Most of the missionaries hadn't seen it yet. After the video, I got up and basically told the zone that I was going to sit down for the rest of my training, and that it would be a testimony meeting for 20 minutes. I bore my testimony on hope and Christ and sat down. After I sat down, so many good things happened.

So many missionaries got up and said that zone training... everything from what the Zone Leaders trained on to what I trained on... was exactly what they needed.

And the funny thing was... my training was exactly what I needed as well. I had been a little bit down because two weeks ago, we had seven investigators. This week, we have three. Four of our investigators either got too busy to meet, or just weren't progressing so we had to drop them. Two of them had accepted baptismal invitations but just got too busy to meet us, and dropped us. I needed the hope talk too. And from the testimonies of other missionaries, I learned that I had not been the only one feeling a little down. Almost every missionary that stood up had been feeling the same way, and needed that zone training just as much as I did.

I know that the Lord is allowing us to lose investigators to make space for new ones. And I also know that Satan was trying to get all of us missionaries down because we have been trying so hard to have faith. Like I have said, the more faith we have, the harder Satan works on us. But we just have to turn to our faith and remember to hope for good things to happen. If our faith and hope is in the Lord we will not fail. Sometimes we do have to lift each other up, and I am so thankful that I got to be a part of that zone training on Thursday. But when we rely on the Lord, we will not fail.

I love you and miss you all! You should go watch that video now if you haven't seen it yet. ;)

Love, Sister Maughan