the work is hastening!

Hey peeps!!!

 

I wanted to send this email before I read the rest because we have one computer to now five missionaries!! This week we will be doing computer 전도 aka while we are going around proselyting we will be looking for a new place to email.

 

So you ask, why five missionaries? Well this week, I got a text from President Gilbert on Friday at about 9:40 at night to call him. So we finish calling our contacts and give him a call. Well, he asked what we would be doing the next day around 3:30. Well, long story short my very first trainer Sister Kim 김소라 has returned to the Korea Busan mission and is my companion again. It is very different adjusting to the dynamic of being with my first trainer and my first trainee but it is alright. So I am still the trainer and the senior of the area but Sister Kim is my support. It is really funny trying to fit all of us in our little apartment. The new bed is a king size so when we all roll out our beds we are all overlapping each other and every night looks like a giant slumber party. It is so fun having Sister Kim back and catching up, but also hard adjusting to another huge change in the dynamics. But I know as I rely on the Lord that all will be okay.

 

This week was 주석 or Korea's version of Thanksgiving. We were all able to get together as a zone and have an activity that day. We played games and shared thoughts about gratitude and ate lots of delicious American food! The senior couple organized all the food. They are the best! He was in the Air Force, so they can get on the military base, and they made little bags for all of us with things you can't buy in Korea. Including Mac and Cheese and root beer!!! so heavenly!!! It was the greatest thing!! 

Also sorry no pictures this week. I took out my camera to take some pics, and then one of the elders took it to take some epic selfies, and it got left at the church. But the sisters from the area have it for me, and I just need to wait until I see them again to get it back. So who knows when that will be. We are supposed to go on exchanges with them this week so I hope I can get it back fast. 

Amazing miracle: a less active who is very not interested in the church called on our way to the activity and wanted to have us over for lunch but since we were already out of the area she said she still wanted to bring us food. So she took a taxi all the way to 수성 to bring us some food. We met quickly with her and her two kids and hope to meet with her again this week.

 

Last night we took a two hour bus ride to the boonies of 상인. We have a member (the Filipino who speaks English and we teach Korean to) who just moved out there so we went to meet her and introduce her to the sister missionaries in that area. It was so much fun! She bonded really well with the new sisters, and it was so much fun being back with the sisters who I lived in the four-man house with. 

 

The work is hastening so quick. We have so much work to do. It is such a blessing but also a struggle. I am so grateful for this opportunity. I feel so privileged to be counted as a missionary out serving now along with Tanner. I am so excited for you T-Money!! You will love it! I promise time flies by faster than you think. Keep calm and carry on :)

 

Thank you so much everyone for all your prayers and thoughts and letters. Please continue to keep me and my stress in your prayers :) This is a time that I am really learning to fully 100% rely on the Lord. I can not do this with out him. Even with His help, it is incredibly hard. I am working on putting all my pride aside and truly putting everything in His hands. It is much safer there and that is the only way I will be able to survive.

 

I love you all so much!! I know with out the slightest doubt that this Church is true! Spread the gospel and refer a friend to the missionaries! :) This work is so much easier with your help!!

 

Love you all!!!

 

Sister Cheney

new trainee and baptism dates!

Hello from the newest trainer in the Korea Busan mission!!!

Well this week is 추석 aka Korea's version of Thanksgiving. Which means that we can't set up appointments with members on that day, and also that their will be NO ONE on the street to talk to. But we got permission to do an activity as a zone so that should be good. And then that night, our ward mission leader invited all of the missionaries over to his house for MCM and dinner. He will be alone that night, so I am glad we can help keep him company.

So Dad, I told Sister Gilbert (the President's wife) about your prediction about me being mission president by the end of my mission, and she starts laughing and goes wait! You leave after us right?! Hahaha, it was so funny! So now she thinks it will happen too! 

So my new companion is Sister Lee. She is a Korean that is also amazing at English!! She went to UVU for a year and than BYUI. She is really cute but also super shy. This transfer will definitely try and test my patience, but I know the Lord will bless me. You know you are going to need extra blessings when after you are assigned your new companion and you are about to leave, the mission president says he wants to talk to you and tells you to take things slow and to keep him updated on how everything goes. Sister Gilbert told my companion to call her every night, and President Gilbert pretty much told me that it is going to be a hard couple of transfers. But that is okay. My companion is really sweet just a little different  We have a lot to learn as we make our companionship work. Also President Gilbert let me in on a secret that Sister Kim - my very first trainer who had to go home sick will/should hopefully be back this transfer!! She emailed me today and said she is coming to Busan this week. I don't know for how long, but I hope it is to finish her mission! Also President Gilbert said that since she will be a midtransfer transfer, he is probably going to send her to be my companion. Which would be super awesome! But also hard because I will be trying to train still and help transition her into missionary work again, and I am sure I will still be super concerned about her health and everything that happened my first few weeks. So we shall see. I will keep you all updated!

So miracles!!! Who committed two people to baptism this week for the first Sunday in October?!?! Woot woot!~! Go the Spirit!! It is a couple who is incredibly prepared! The lady who approached us on the street and wanted to attend our church and her husband. I am so excited!! And our bishop is ecstatic!! Like imagine a little kid at Christmas!! Who just ate a lot of sugar!! He is so antsy and ready to help! He has now given us the task of teaching and baptizing their two daughters at the same time, which might be a little hard considering one lives in Seoul :) But one step at a time! :)

So funny moments for the week!

Sister Yum to me: "You're Jesus!!".... huh? "No, genius, genius!" I was literally rolling on the floor!

Me to my temporary companion Sister Choi- "This yogurt expired over a month ago! Do I need to wash out the container or can I just throw it away?" (stupid Korea trash system!) She opens the yogurt. "It looks good - how about you try it?" Me: "No! You first!" So she licks the lid. "Tastes fine!" I do the same. And yes then we proceeded to eat all the over a month expired yogurt! Haha. We were joking about what Sister Gilbert would say if she found out.... :) We are epic people I know! And this is who they choose to train? ^^ hehe

So going to find out our new companions after sleeping in Busan, we were going with the elders - Elder Mitchell who is the old AP and Elder Lamb who went to east and was my district leader last transfer. Well they stop so we can get breakfast- we didn't have time. And while Sister Choi and I are grabbing our breakfast, Elder Mitchell grabs my blue girly bag and starts carrying it. I told him I could carry it, but he just told me to eat and there he went walking down the street, proud with a girl's bag in tow. Oh man, I love Busan's awesome elders!

Love you all so much!!!

사랑,

치니 자매!!! ^^

{Editor's note: there were two photos this week, but they didn't transfer through. Sorry! Note to Whitney: based on your descriptions, they were photos of you and your temporary companion, Sister Choi in Masan the morning you were going to meet your new companions for the first time and one of you with your new little trainee Sister Lee.}

i'm a trainer!

Hi!!

 

So this week. Honestly, I feel like my brain can not think of anything that happened before Thursday night. Transfer calls night. If you train, President Gilbert usually calls. So 9:15 roles around, and the AP calls. Tells us Sister Freeman is leaving to go back to Busan. The little bum wont tell me who my companion is. Well 9:45 roles around, and he calls again. Tells us who Sister Freeman's new companion is, and then says, "Sister Cheney you are training." Huh?! Lets try that again! I think you just said that a foreigner who is horrible at the language and is just finishing her 3rd transfer will be training. In the area where she herself finished her training. I tried to tell him it was a joke and that they were pulling my leg but he just laughed and said he was serious. So as of right now, my new companion is still in Utah sleeping at the MTC for her last night. I am one of only 2 sisters training this transfer. I have to be honest and say that I feel so inadequate and under qualified, but I know the Lord will bless me as I turn to him in prayer and faith. "Doubt not, fear not." But all the extra prayers you have would be greatly appreciated.

 

So I am with a temporary companion for the next few days, the only other training sister. We are traveling between our two areas to prep our apartments and do cleaning, shopping everything like that. Today after transfer meeting, we had a training meeting and lunch aka, lots of Korean and me sitting in a room filled with missionaries who have all been out for a year or more. Wednesday we do an activity with the new missionaries were we go out and do contacting and have dinner. That night we sleep in Busan, and the next day they give us our new companions. Then we have practice lunch and head off to our areas.

 

We had many miracles this week but no time to write. Please pray for my new trainee and me. I need lots of help and blessings. 

Funny - today an elder was saying how a bunch of missionaries were proud because they were going to be co-senior companions, and then they heard I was training, and it floored them! Haha. The first one from my MTC group!

 

I will no longer be sister training leader thankfully. After talking with Sister Gilbert, I feel so much better not trying to juggle that as well. I am still in the same area which means I will probably be here until the beginning of December. Here we go baby!

 

Love you all!

 

Love Sister Cheney

six months :: testimony

Hi everyone! I hope you are all doing well and staying cool and happy. This life is the best and is meant to be enjoyed! Don't forget that!

 

So I could email you all and tell you about how I got dropped by my first investigator this week who was scheduled to be baptized in three weeks, how I dropped my toilet brush in the toilet and had to boil it at 10:27 one night, how I took an hour and a half bus ride to 안동 for an exchange, and than to 구미 where we found out a train had blown up so we had no way of exchanging back and  my companion wasn't picking up the phone so I had to figure it out alone and was on the phone with the mission president and his wife trying to figure it all out, how I have been on exchanged with all the first transfer trainees who are all foreigners, how our less active who speaks English just moved back to Utah, or how our member who speaks English just moved to a new area.

 

Or I could tell you about the Buddhist lady on the subway who gave us her contact before we even could talk about the church, and gave us four leaf clovers and wants to feed us this week, or about the time the lady I casually talked to on the bus invited us up to her apartment right there to feed us dinner, or when the two cutest little boys who are three and two and haven't been to church in the last three weeks came yesterday and ran up to me and showed me all their Poweranger cards and toys, and even tried to give me their watch and played with me all Sunday, and kept running up to me during sacrament to say hi, or that I meant the coolest lady on the subway who is a dancer from China and had to sickest outfit.

 

I could say all this things but my mind is in a different place right now. This week is my six month mark. I can not believe how fast the time has flown. As I reflect back on all the things I have done and learned, I am so grateful for this amazing experience! The Lord knows just how to push me to help me grow and how to be able to help the people of Korea. Yes my Korean is still far from perfect, I am so tired and exhausted all the time, I feel so much pressure from being sister training leader, I sweat all the time and eat some questionable things. But these past months have been the best time of my life.

 

I have never known so many struggles and weaknesses, but also seen so many miracles and grown so much. The mission is the last thing I would have ever picked out for myself a year ago. Even six months ago, had I known what I was going to go through my first six weeks, I would have not come. I would have stayed in the comfort of home with English and familiarities. But the Lord knows me so much better than I do, and He knew I needed to grow and become something greater than I was.

 

My heart is filled with so much gratitude for this opportunity. The chance to be rejected, to cry, pray with all the strength I have, to climb an apartment building and knock ever door with no luck. To not be albe to communicate, to eat weird food, wake up tired after a good 8 hours of sleep, to sweat out every fluid in my body. To get lost countless times. To catch the slightest glimpse of what our Savior Jesus Christ did for all of us.

 

This mission is something I would have never planned or expected, but I know that I would be so lost without it. That I would be missing so much of who I am and what I am capable of doing, and truly what our Father in Heaven is capable of doing with us if we just allow him to do so.

 

May we all take time this week and express deep gratitude for all the blessings we have in our life. For the love God has for everyone of us. For our struggles and our triumphs. This Church is true and I will never be able to deny it.

 

I love you all and pray that you might all find happiness and those moments to smile and feel deep gratitude for all we have.

 

Love,

Sister Cheney

 

P.S. My last exchange this week with Sister Wadsworth. (Photo above.) Her older sister was my MTC teacher. 

moving and exchanges

Hello my peeps!! I hope everyone is doing well. I am good. This week has been completely exhausting but good.

We have a new investigator we met with this week. She is a contact I made last week. She is kind of a crazy old lady who ended up teaching me Korean in our lesson, but hey, I will take it. Later that day we had a member lesson, and the member tells us we are going to eat hamburger so we are like okay that's cool. Well turns out she had ordered McDonald's for us! Hahaha in Korea you can get McDonald's delivered 24/7 pretty funny. The elders were super jealous when we told them.

This week was filled with a lot of packing, moving, and not so much unpacking. I have spent literally hours on the phone with the APs and the office elders. We had to coordinate our move then the APs came to move us, which went pretty smooth because they brought the mission van. Except the AP that I served with in my first area (Elder Mitchell) told me that morning that I had a 6 lb limit on things I carried. He was pretty adamant about me keeping that because he served with me he knows how I am and that I hate being treated like a dainty girl. But we got all moved. They then took us to Homeplus to buy some kitchen supplies and spices. When they picked us up, they said they had some news. Hahah, that's not usually good... :) The Korean AP was so afraid to say it, and Elder Mitchell was just laughing because he knows me. Well the Korean AP is like, "You don't have a fridge..." So I just started laughing, and said it was okay, and then he got even more nervous and said that we don't have beds....or blankets...hahaha. We were going to have to sleep on the floor, and he was so afraid to tell us and of what our reaction would be. I just started laughing and said that was fine. He was pretty shocked by how calm I was. Haha. 

When we got there the next morning, we had to call Elder Mitchell again because our shower wouldn't train and the toilet was leaking. He had me try to fix it, which was a joke because I had no tools, so the next day they called the super and had him send someone to fix it. Well while having a meeting with our elders, the office elders call and Elder Jung who I served with in my first area asks if we are with our elders. I told him we were, and asked me to give the phone to Elder Park. I proceeded to make fun of him telling him that my Korean has improved, but I still passed the phone. When they were done we had to go to our apartment again because the man was there and the elders had to take us because the office elders didn't think it was safe for just us to go. Bless their little hearts :) On our way over there with the elders it was raining and as we were crossing the street my shoes came off twice! So finally I just picked them up and ran across the street barefoot. Elder Park was dying laughing and I am sure all the cars were so confused and concerned for their country having this weird barefoot foreigner running around.

So many stories to tell! This week we did exchanges again, and I got put with a sister on her first transfer who hasn't even been here for a month. I am not sure what Sister Gilbert wants me to teach or learn but she has paired me with a new trainee again for today's transfers. I will be going to 안덩 the farthest north area in our mission, where it is pretty much fields. So that should be fun. Everyone keeps telling me about how far away it is. Elder Mitchell told me to pay attention to the elders too because they don't get out there very often to check on them. So I feel like a spy now :) 

Oh! Also, our new home's name is Happy Town! Hahaha. It is written in Korean, but when you read it it literally reads Happy Town. So funny!

There is so much I wish I had more time to tell you it all! Just know that I love you all so much!

Love you,

Sister Cheney

a new house and splits

The four sisters I live with when we went on splits.

I hope you are all having a good week! I don't have much time this week, but let's be honest do I ever really? :) 

Okay, so this week...

Well after our English class this past Saturday, we got a call from the APs. I picked up and he said, "So what have you heard about your new house?" I said, "Well this is the first I have heard of it! Do we have a new house....?" So we do, and this Thursday, the APs are making the trek from Busan to come up and move our elders to a new apartment and then us. So that has messed with our planning especially because we are trying to get our exchanges all coordinated. But it should be good. I am excited but also so sad to be leaving the 4-man house. I have grown to love the girls I live with so much! I am just so glad I get to see them every week at district meeting and on Sundays because we have zone singing practice, prepping for a stake singing performance we are doing the first Sunday in September. 

So other highlights of the week. We sat next to a cute old grandma on the subway who was so nice! At one point the security police came on to do their random checks and she starts making fun of them! Like pretending to be handcuffed and everything! And this lady was OLD! So hilarious! I died!

We did exchanges with 경산 this week. It was so much fun! In the first two hours together, I got two solo contacts. It was pretty epic! We had a blast and learned a lot. I love getting to know the sisters I serve with more.

This past week was Korea's Independence Day. They don't do much, but they hang up flags all up and down the street, and it was so cool! Man, I love Korea!

So in keeping with my streak of always having to pray...last week when I had to pray at district meeting, I choose the song, Sisters in Zion to sing as the closing. Hehehehe. When the elders opened their hymn books at the end they died! So this week when I had to pray again, I chose Elders of Israel to be even. 

I got pulled out of Sunday School by another teacher who wanted me to explain the importance of marriage and family in the older class - in English thankfully! So when I was doing it, I said I had seven brothers and sisters and everyone gasped! Hahaha. It was so funny! And when I went on to explain how big the fam really is they were all dying! So funny!

Also at ward council this week it was so hot, and I was so tired trying to not fall asleep and take notes. Well, at the end I looked at my notes and I had written.... 

teach with members

cereal

friendship night? 

Don't ask about the cereal I have no idea! But I swear they had written that on the board in Korean.... Oh man bless my little heart. Sundays are a killer!!

Well love you all so much!

Love,

Sister Cheney

This is the cutest Korean ever!!
She hardly speaks any English at all, and it is all slang that she does speak!
Love Sister Yum!

baptismal dates!

So this week was super awesome!!

We have two investigators with baptismal dates!! One is the girl who doesn't have parental permission so it isn't until December, and the other is Molly, a girl we have been teaching English to. When we asked her, she agreed right away. It is scheduled for the twenty-second so we hope all goes well with that. 

I got a CT scan on my arm and all looks okay according to the limited details I could understand at the hospital.

Last p-day we went to Costco! Love that place! I have been eating real cheese this week and it is glorious! :) 

We had interviews with President this past week. I love it because he always tells me so many funny things, and it's pretty much my way of staying up to date on the whole mission because I never have much to say. :) President said, "So, you have fifteen months left right?" I said, "No just like a year." Well he proceeded to have a mini freak out! Hahaha. I was like ya welcome to my club! He asked when I would go home, and I said I was not sure, and I had no idea what I was going to do with my life after the mission. He proceedrf to say that it is okay because I have time, but than goes on to tell me I have to tell him by November what my plans are. Ah!!! My mission president has now given me a deadline! 

Also a really cool stat we learned last week at missionary leader meeting: 48% of the mission has come out in the last six months. So cool!! I am pumped man!!! We are working so  hard to get a temple in Busan!! Its gonna happen soon!!! Please pray for it!! :) We are working so hard for it!

And now for that funny/awkward moment when: The automatic door of the restaurant closes on you while everyone in your district watches, and your district president tells you that it is the greatest thing he has ever seen! I wish I could say it was the first time it had happened to me.... 

Well the mission is so awesome! I continue to learn and grow and love it even more. It also continues to come up with more challenges, but it is great! Thank you for all your love and prayers! It means so much and blesses me greatly!!

Love you all so much!!