Harry Potter Ward Party

May 24, 2015

Dear Family,

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My birthday was pretty good, I got to play baseball a little bit with the bishop (he really likes baseball), and the ward bought me chicken and pizza. Just kidding, it was just the same day as the Harry Potter party, and that is what they bought for after the party. But still, it was pretty nice :) I haven't gotten your card yet, maybe next week at transfer meeting.

The Harry Potter party was really fun for the most part.​ To start, we had the Sorting Hat sort the people into teams, Elder Koo put the hat on their heads, and I was behind the curtains with a microphone. Then we played "quidditch" with plastic bottles instead of brooms, and make two goals per team with a hoop made from styrofoam. And then we played basically modified handball. It probably sounds lame, but the members seemed to like it a lot. Next we played a game where we had a projector showing a picture of our district all doing a different pose, and a team got to see the picture for a few seconds, and then had to match it as best they could. After that, we did a potion game. We had 9 different types of juice, and each team had to make a "potion" with five of those, give it a name and an effect, and then the other teams had to taste it and guess which five kinds of juice they used. And then the last game was supposed to be a spell game, we had each person tie a balloon to their ankle, and inside the balloon was a piece of a quote. Then, each team sent one person at a time to the middle of the room, and they had to try to pop each other’s balloons. If they popped a balloon, they got to keep the contents, and the first team to make a full "spell" won. That game didn't turn out too well, since the balloons were harder to pop than we expected. Anyway, that was the party. We spent so much time planning and preparing for it, it's ridiculous. And no one besides the missionaries has any idea how much work went into it. Most people just came and went without really a second thought, but I guess that's just how these kinds of things work. Kinda frustrating.

If I remember, I'll expound about Zone conference in my next letter, I don't have my notes with me right now.

We met with T yesterday, and he said that the more he reads the Book of Mormon, the more interested he is getting. But then he said that if we were to meet 20 hours a week, it would take him at least 3 more months before he felt ready to come to Sacrament Meeting. So to put it simply, progress is really slow. The way he described how he understands the Book of Mormon is like an electromagnet with a bunch of metal shavings on it. The metal shavings are doctrines from the Bible, and in the Bible, it's like the electromagnet is turned on, and the shavings are all lined up nicely. But with the B of M, he said it feels like the magnet is off, and so all the shavings are there, but they're scattered all over the place. I'm really at a loss as to what to tell him, especially because the Bible is way harder to understand than the Book of Mormon, so it would make more sense for the Bible to be the one that isn't organized. And he's under the impression that Mormons barely read the Bible at all, and every week when Elder Koo and I tell him that we study the Bible pretty frequently, he gets super surprised and says that he is really impressed. But this happens every week, and he never seems to remember last week. I think he drinks too much. Pretty 어이없다. (I'm not sure what the translation for that is in English, sorry.)

Have a great week!

Love,

Elder Hines

PS I just remembered that I got the opportunity to play the violin in Sacrament meeting again yesterday. The bishop's daughter plays violin, so he let me borrow her violin. I played For the Beauty of the Earth, and our "pre-missionary" accompanied me. It was super fun, I'm so glad that I get chances to play music still, because I'm starting to crave it. I want to play trumpet super badly :)

Zone conference hike (Busan in the background)

Jungni church building

Tacos!

Missionary kitchen