My Fellow Americans, (Ma, Pa, the fam, friends, and other
loved ones:)
What an excellent week it has been! Happy Easter to you and
I hope you had an excellent week too. This week has been especially fantastic
because it was GENERAL CONFERENCE!!^^ (I added the Asian smiley faces because I
think they convey the feeling better than the mundane:) Yeah, we had conference
this week because of translation and time lag it's easier to just watch
conference the following week. And what and excellent conference it was! We had
all of the missionaries, some foreigner members, and investigators who are
really good at English, all in the priesthood room in the downstairs. Normally
we watch it via a satellite broadcast that the church sends in both English and
Korean languages, but we couldn't get the feed through so we just downloaded
all the sessions in HD and watched it on a projector. Movie theater conference.
Man, I love the internet; it lets me hear the prophets^^. It was fun. I pulled
a small desk up right close to the screen so it was just me and the brethren
(and sisters) and wrote furiously in my 계시 book (revelation book--or the "small
plates of Elder John McKay Tucker" as I like to call it). Yeah, pretty
much I felt like Elder James E. Talmage sitting at his desk in the Salt Lake Temple
when he was in the midst of his large writing project. Fun times.
There were a lot of investigators that came out to
conference, the only bummer is that they aren't our investigators. This week
has been a little rough on the teaching pool. We've dropped like nine
investigators and are down to four, half of whom we didn't get to really teach
this week. Funny how everything ebbs and flows. It comes and it goes. Easy and
hard. Up and down. Missions are just real life with nice name tags. And I keep
seeing, both through my personal experience and others', how "if life were
easy, then it wouldn't be hard" (thanks Sherrie Dew for the quotation:) I
think that's one of the things I felt was well covered in conference: life is
difficult. There will be difficulty, challenge, and opposition. But God sent us
here knowing all that. He sent us here because of all that! I hate growing
pains, though I guess I take some comfort in knowing that if life is hard, it's
because it's supposed to be that way. That if I feel weak, if I feel human, it's
because I am human and we are all supposed to feel that way. We have weakness
so we can (borrowing a phrase form Mormon) learn to "look to God, and
live"!
It was funny, I was doing so good at taking notes during
conference. In years past I have always tried to test my transcript skills and
basically record the entire talk in my study notebook. I think this conference
marked my first really good attempt to follow the counsel of Elder Bednar and
write was the Spirit was telling me, not necessarily what the speakers were
saying. So I did. And I had pretty great notes, but interestingly I hardly
touched my paper at all during the talks of President Monson and Elder Holland.
Mostly, I was just so consumed listening that I didn't have any time to write.
I'm okay with that. I felt it a lot in their talks and also throughout the
entire conference that God was talking to me. God was talking to me! For sure
God talks to his prophets and reveals to them what we need to know for our
lives now--that's why I'm so excited to devour the conference Ensign--and He
will talk to me directly. He will tell me what I need to do to find
fulfillment, to know what to do for work, to know how to help the family or the
individuals I'm teaching, to know how to escape mediocrity, to know how to
become way more than I can now hope or dream to become. I know that God lives.
I know that He is there. I know that He knows you, He knows me, He knows it
all! And He'll tell you what to do. Every time^^
2.0
I also wanted to add a tidbit from my recent personal study.
I think it was originally influenced from Sister Burton's talk from conference.
I loved the quote she shared, "you lift me, and I'll lift thee, and we'll
ascend together". I was pondering on that and looking for like prose in
the holy word of God and came across Moses 6:34 "abide in me, and I in
you; therefore walk with me. Here God is talking to Enoch. Enoch is just
getting called by God and he feels, in a hyphenated word, under-qualified. And then the Lord tells Enoch to walk with
him. When we feel like we are smaller than our job description, when we are
"slow of speech", when we feel lacking in what we need, we need just
"abide in [the Lord]". If we will turn to him then he will abide in
us, and together we can walk together. I love that and I love the Lord. I want
to walk with the Lord, I want Him to "always be with me", and I know
that as I walk with Him, his path always leads onward and upward.
I love all of you and my prayers are with you.
Onward and Upward
Elder Tucker
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| Thanks Elder Jensen (our friend in the other companionship) for giving me a reason to sing my own Asian version of Frozen. |
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Fun Fact: Disney actually made Frozen in a bunch of
languages and it is 겨울의왕국 which means "winter kingdom".
I still need to learn how to sing "let
it go" in Korean..#backburnertodolist
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