A Blast From the Past!

07/31/16

안녕하세요, 여러분!

It's been a pretty awesome week.  We definitely saw some miracles this week.  One of which is that we were able to meet Eliot again, for the first time in a nice long while.  We haven't been able to get in contact with him for about 2 weeks now, so we just went to his house and knocked on his door, and he said, "Yeah, let's go talk."  He is super prepared.  His questions are awesome, and he is super willing to listen to our message.  It's really awesome.

Another miracle for me this week is that I got to go on exchanges with Elder Dye, our zone leader.  And that means...................

I got to spend most of a day in 원당 (Wondang)!!  ^^  That was so great.  I love 원당!  I was able to go to the English Class and then go streetboarding there, in the spot that we usually do it at.  It was so great.  I love Elder Dye.  He helped me out a lot with my question of how to help 일산 (Il-San).   I got a lot of answers from him.  

I also got a lot of answers from a certain President Brown.  He is President Sonksen's (our current mission president) old mission president!  (He became mission president in his mid-30's or so)  He is an awesome person!  He gave a wonderful talk about the people of Korea and about the wonderful members we have here, and it's so true.  Korea has the most wonderful members!  I love them all so much!  We visited a member yesterday, and I love him so much, because he literally just constantly smiles.  It's so great.  

It's been a pretty awesome week!  Thank you all!

Love,

Elder Tyler Conley

여름이네...‏

07/24/16

안녕하세요, 여러분!!

This week was a pretty great week.  We were a little bit busy this week with various meetings, including district meeting, many planning meetings, and interviews with President Sonksen!  I love President Sonksen!  He's the best mission president I've ever had ^^  In all seriousness, though, I love him to death.  He has helped me so much on my mission, and I love serving under his authority.  As far as planning meetings go, they were definitely a necessity.  일산 (Il-San) ward is a little tense as far as member relations go (I had a witness of that today. I called a member and it was literally the most awkward moment of my entire life), so we, as missionaries, decided to plan some activities to help the ward get closer to each other as well as to us.  One thing we decided on was a barbecue party!  That was a great idea, because 원당 (Wondang) had the most awesome barbecue party ever, so we decided we would like to do something of that sort.  I am excited to work in 일산 (Il-San), and to really help this ward out, and serve the people here.  

We saw some cool miracles yesterday.  Eliot wasn't able to come to church, so that was a bit of a bummer.  But, while we were walking to go streetboarding, we started talking to this kid, who is fluent at English (because we're in 일산).  He really liked us, and when we started introducing ourselves, he said, "Actually, I really want to come to your church!  Is it all right if we go together next Sunday?"  It was pretty great^^  His name is Kevin.

We also met a guy that said he was named 현 (Hyeon).  He really liked us too, and started talking to us and wondering how we got so good at Korean, and it turns out he had a lot of interest in learning English.  We gave him one of our English class flyers, and he looked like a young child on Christmas Morning.  He was so happy that we teach English for free!  He says he'll come next time, so hopefully he does and we can get to know him better and pick him up as an investigator.  

That's all for this week!  Love you all!

사랑해용!~

Elder Tyler Conley

 Hence the subject line . . .

 There's a spider on my hymn book ^^

 Lake Park

친구 (Friend)

Miracles for Days!!!^^

07/17/16

안녕하세요, 여러분!

It has been a pretty awesome week.  We had a most excellent zone training from our wonderful zone leaders, Elder 이호현 (Yihohyeon) and Elder Dye, and Sister 김희라 (Gimhuira).  They taught us about many things, the most prominent being our calling as missionaries to teach repentance.  It was really awesome.  The most striking part to me was the ending of it, though.  They showed us a clip from a football movie (YEAH FOOTBALL!).  I actually have no idea what this movie was, so if someone recognizes it, good job!  The clip that was showed was introduced by having the star player of the team making a comment that he does not believe that their team can beat the rival team.  The coach has him come up and tells him to carry another player on his back and crawl on his hands and feet, and commits him to do the very best he can, while blindfolded.  The player says, "I can probably make it to the 40" or something like that.  They start, and the coach pumps him up so hard, and pushes him so hard, until he can finally not take one more step, and collapses.  The player starts whimpering, and the coach says, "Look, you're in the end-zone!"  This part really struck me because I have also been studying the "Becoming a Consecrated Missionary" talk by Tad R. Callister.  I guess it just really struck me what "giving our all" actually means.  It means every single day, making so much sacrifice that there is absolutely no more to give when we come back home and make preparations for doing the same thing tomorrow.  This is kind of the setting for the miracles we saw this week.

1.  Eliot, our investigator, came to church!  This is his first time here.  Ever since I got here, he has not been in contact with us at all, and we thought he was ignoring us.  So, on Saturday, I was making calls, and I had the thought to call him, so I did, and he picked up!  He said he would come to church, even though he's never even seen me before.  Then, he woke up early and called us and came to church.  And liked it!!!!  It was pretty great.

2.  We were calling on Thursday, and I called this one guy who did not seem to have too much potential.  He picked up, and I told him we were the missionaries, and he was like, "Oh, yeah!  Actually, not this week because I'm busy but next, I was planning on coming to your church services" without me asking or anything.  So, we are calling him next week, and setting it up with him.  

3.  One of our members here came up to us at church and said, "I brought you all some phone cases with a special design that I made, so here you go!"  This one's just kind of funny.  It gives me a lot of hope for 일산 (Il-San) ward because when I first came here, the ward didn't seem all too friendly with the missionaries.  Now I understand that there are a number that are willing to help us, and through them we can really make this ward strong^^

Yep, we had a pretty awesome week this week.  Can't wait for the next one!!  Love you all

Love,

Elder Tyler Conley

 ^^

 Elder Skinner

 My area

Our squad

What a week!

07/10/16

안녕하세요, 여러분!

It has been a pretty interesting week in the making, with my move to 일산 (Il-San).  It's pretty interesting here.  It's weird because, due to my being in the same zone for almost my whole mission, I have served a number of exchanges over here in 일산.  Which leads to a pretty cool miracle that I saw my first day in 일산.  Way back in the old days, in January or February, I went on exchanges with a certain Elder Flora.  With him, I taught a lesson to a certain 황대연 (Hwangdaeyeon, does that help? Haha), a student about my age who was really nice and seemed to have some interest.  We made some calls in the middle of the day this Wednesday, on my first day in 일산, and I saw a name on these records: 황대연.  "This name looks rather familiar,"  I thought to myself, "I'm pretty sure this is the guy that I taught with Elder Flora.  It says that they started teaching him.  I wonder what happened to him..."  so I called the number, and he picked up and he remembered me, and said that he would call later when he has some time to meet.  

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE

We were traveling on our way to the big shopping area later that day to go streetboarding.  I stopped to talk to a student aged person in English, and I asked what his name was.  He said, "Daeyeon." (대연) and gave me an awkward little smile, so I smiled back at him and I knew exactly who he was.  He was the same guy that I had taught a lesson to, and that I had called earlier that day.  We talked a little bit more, and he says he can meet as soon as testing is over.  

Yep, 일산 (Il-San) is a pretty cool area.  I am excited to explore it a bit more in the future.  It's pretty fun being here, because since I've been here a lot, I already know a lot of the area, and I know a lot of the people that the areas here are dealing with.  Doing calls is really fun, because I was there when a lot of people gave their numbers to us, so a lot of the time, I can ask if they remember me.  

Have a good week, everybody!  사랑해요~

Love,

Elder Conley

Bu-bye Now~

07/03/16

안녕하세요, 여러분!~

This week was a very fun week.  We got transfer calls this week.  And let me just say, Wow.

Our whole zone's getting destroyed.  Elder Peterson and I are closing our area.  Elder Peterson is going all the way out to the boonies to 원주 (Won-ju).  I'm also going extremely far, to 일산 (Il-San)(That's a joke about the far part.  일산 (Il-San) is literally the next area over).  I have been on exchanges over there a number of times.  Since our area's closing, 원당 (Wondang) only has the zone leader team and the sister team, so it's actually combining as a district with 일산 (Il-San), anyway.  I might as well not even move, because it's all so close.  Everyone keeps cracking jokes about me being able to walk to my new area, and I keep telling people as a joke that it doesn't matter if I pack or not, because if I need to I can just take a couple of trips to move all of my stuff, and that would still only take the morning.  3 of the elders in 일산 (Il-San) are moving out , and am co-senioring with a certain Elder Skinner who is the lone survivor of the 일산 (Il-San) elders.  This will be pretty fun.  

That's the big news of this week.  I went on exchanges with Elder 이, too.  That was fun.  I finally got to visit a member in our ward that I had been meaning to visit for my whole 7 months in 원당 (Wondang).  Their little boy reminds me exactly of Grant, my youngest brother.  He calls me 엘사 장로 (Elder Elsa).  I don't know why he calls me that.  He really, really likes Elsa, so I guess that just means he really likes me.  Wow, I'm going to miss this ward.  They are all so wonderful.  It'll definitely be a challenge for the 일산 (Il-San) ward to top this one.  

Yep, so Bu-bye now~

Love,

Elder Tyler Conley

This Is Cause For a Party

06/26/16

오, 안녕하세요, 여러분!~

This week was really great.  The cause for a party is that this week, I had my first member present lesson of my whole mission!  Yay!  Having a member attend missionary lessons is extremely important, and now I am a first hand witness to that.  A member is important because their additional testimony to our own definitely causes some great miracles.  It is also really good because it is like having a normal person at the lesson, that can actually give the investigator some real life insights that they can really trust, because to most normal people, us missionaries kind of look like we live on a different plane of existence, where nothing actually goes wrong and we really don't have normal people problems, so having a member attend the lesson is a huge asset.  This week, we met with Janett and Blair, who are two women that attend our English Class at the community center.  We had a woman from our ward there, who has both of her kids on missions right now, and when she bore testimony to them, and shared how raising a family on a gospel basis helps, the Spirit was so strong.  Sadly, they didn't accept the invitation to meet with us continually, but the lesson was still awesome.  They will still be our friends, so this was definitely a positive experience for all of us.  

I don't have too much time this week, so this is all you get.  Have a good week!~

Love,

Elder Tyler Conley

Mission Tour

06/19/16

안녕하세요, 사랑하는 여러분!

That's right, we had Mission Tour this week!  That was very exciting.  Elder Yamashita from the 70, who is in our Asia North Area Presidency, came to speak to us for a whole day!  He is so funny.  His wife taught us how to make lips out of origami! But, trust me, I learned other things that were slightly more important than that. ^^  He taught me a lot about my ministry as a missionary.  Through learning about that, I have discovered a lot about my own missionary purpose, which is to invite other people to come unto Christ by helping them receive the restored gospel through faith in Jesus Christ and His Atonement, repentance, baptism, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end.  Probably one of the biggest truths that was made manifest to me is that, since we're not really in one place for long enough to help people we deal with go through the entirety of all 5 of those steps, but, as long as we help each person we meet progress in at least one of those steps, we are still accomplishing our purpose.  Learning this comforted me, just because, in Korea, people are, for the most part, rather reluctant to accept our message with haste.  

Another cool thing that I learned in personal study today is about Nephi in the book of Helaman receiving the sealing power.  God pretty much tells him that he can do anything that he wants to do, because God knows that he wasn't going to do anything that was contrary to His will.  That must have taken a lot of humility on Nephi's part, and as a missionary, a goal for me is to be able to achieve that kind of humility.  

That's all for now. Have a most excellent week!

Love,

Elder Tyler Conley

He sent a video!

https://drive.google.com/a/myldsmail.net/file/d/0B1NRi3nNlX4DTlRKN1JDR0Jxbkk/view?usp=drive_web

 Street boarding

Elder Baird and I