Confidentiality

April 3, 2016

Dear Family,

It was a pretty good week, but not much luck with our investigators. ​In fact, OCS officially dropped us (for complicated reasons, the main stated reason being that because of "surveillance" in his neighborhood, his neighbors are getting nervous with having two white guys in suits showing up so often) so there's not much we can do about that.  We've been meeting a lot with JHB though. For some reason he keeps bringing up the same concerns of paying tithing and what his wife thinks. But this time, through lots of probing questions, we came to find out that the real concern he has about tithing isn't actually paying it, it's other people knowing if/how much he's paying. Apparently in other Christian churches in Korea, paying tithing is really public, and people who don't pay or who pay less aren't treated very well by the other people. I am suddenly so grateful for the confidentiality our church has with finances. So he seems pretty good with tithing, now we just have to figure out the situation with his wife. She's pretty convinced that our church is a cult. I told him to bear his testimony to her about the church, because he has a really strong testimony. Hopefully it helps.

We spent some time getting ready for a ward party we'll have in a couple weeks. It's going to be really cool, we'll eat dinner, have a "Gospel Art Exhibition" (we're going to get pictures about the first Easter in both the Old World and the New World with explanations, and have them hung up on the walls so members can bring their friends and introduce them to the gospel in an easy way) while the kids decorate Easter eggs, and then watch Ephraim's Rescue (which most Koreans haven't seen because Korean subtitles don't normally exist, but we have connections :)). 

We'll get to watch conference this upcoming weekend, and President Barrow wants us to watch every session, so it will be like 12 hours of sitting between two days. But still pretty exciting, especially since there are five other missionaries in this area to watch it with. It will basically be a party :)

I hope you have a wonderful week!

Love,

Elder Hines

PS The pictures are of how Koreans decorate eggs (since they don't normally have white eggs in Korea) and the cherry blossoms which are coming out like crazy starting last week.