Eighteenth Week Email

Dear Family & Friends,

So as always another awesome week in 광주 (Gwangju) and so many things have happened. So I'll start with last monday when I went to Family Funland with our zone and the other zone in 광주 and it was so much fun. There's a lady in our combined english class named Sunny and she basically runs gwangju. She always loves talking to all of the missionaries so she decided that she would call up the owner of the amusement park and tell him to let us in for free haha. We thought that they would just let us in to go to the zoo but Sunny showed up and the owner with a camera crew haha. They took us on a personal tour and let us do a bunch of awesome things like feed the elephants and hippo's. Than once we were done they had a picnic prepared for us and they fed us so much food. I was so blown away that they would do all of that for us. After we finished eating we played a great game of ultimate frisbee and my team won. I know that's not really a surprise right? haha I'm terrible. Anyways it was just such an awesome day and we made Sunny a card for this week's english class.

 

Another fun thing that happened this last week was I went farming. One of our members owns a pretty big farm and he's getting a little older. He has two sons but they are super busy at all times so he really needed the help. Well he tried moving two of his planting houses down a few rows and what he planted didn't grow very well...so he decided to move them back where he started. The growing houses are made up of hundreds of metal poles that are arched and huge plastic rolls that they cover that with. Well when we got there we had to pull every pole out of the ground and lay it down. After we pulled all of them out of the ground we had to put them in piles. They were pretty heavy pieces of bar and we were just constantly bent over all day and I still hurt from that day. And Koreans don't really drink water ever so I was dying by lunch time. I walked into their house and I have never had the feeling of cold water splash on my face feel as good as it did when I washed my face that day. Another thing that Koreans do is that they eat the same kind of food for all of their meals. Well we got in and they cooked us a bunch of meat with a lot of spicy kimchi and the entire time I was just dying haha. Elder Allred felt so bad for me and I think he finally realized it and asked for a giant bottle of water for me haha. But as soon as we walked into the chapel yesterday he was just so happy to see us. He walked straight up to us and asked how we were feeling and I told him that I was an old man in Korean and he just laughed so hard. It was such a cool day to be up the the country side of Korea and actually helping a member with service. Another thing about Korea is that they have so many spiders. Just walking through that field the ground was always moving with some type of spider. At first I was watching every step but after lunch time I really didn't care. I looked down so many times to see a pretty decent sized spider on me and I'm not going to lie the first time it happened it scared me a little bit haha. I had that feeling the rest of the day that something was just crawling on me haha.

 

Well I've had so many fun times this week but I thing the most important thing happened to me last night. So we have an Investigator who lived in America for a while. I'll first tell you how I thought about him. I thought that he only wanted to talk in english. He records our conversations and he said that he did it so that he could listen to himself speak english later. I didn't believe that. He would always tell us that he visited a bunch of other churches and he would always ask the same question about who killed Jesus and who is responsible. After a while I thought that he was just getting a bunch of other perspectives from different religions and posting about it on his website. I was also getting frustrated because he would talk for an hour straight about religious law and he would always trail off into something else. I was getting frustrated and to be honest my attitude towards meeting with him wasn't the best attitude. When we asked him to pray a couple weeks ago he did it in a mocking way. He would always go back to the fact that he had 99% belief and that he couldn't get 100%. I was starting to focus more on the fact that I didn't really want to keep on meeting with him instead of the reason I'm here. After last night I couldn't have been more wrong about him. Through my flawed and immature way of thinking I assumed those things about him. I found out that I have never met someone looking for more truth in their life than him. He showed up late but he brought us some chocolate's and some gifts from cheju-do which is a famous vacation spot in Korea. He really opened up a lot last night about why he believed in God and why he was searching so hard. He told us that he knows it can be hard to be around him sometimes and a lot of people have given him a hard time in his life. He had such a great testimony of forgiveness because he has seen how it has affected his life. He told us that he's just trying to find something that feels right to him. He also told us that he was building a website so that he could establish a better future and that he wanted to have stability for a family. Our discussion with him couldn't have gone any better than it did. We taught him most of the first lesson and when I was speaking he was very encouraging for my Korean. It was a side that we had never seen of him but it's honestly because we never really tried to get there. I taught him how to pray in Korean and than in english. He offered the closing prayer and he did nothing but bless other people in this world. It was probably one of the most humbling experiences in my life when it comes to thinking and assuming about people.

 

I sat in my chair after planning last night and I have never felt so stupid. I thought about the second talk Elder Holland gave to us at the MTC. Elder Holland has a way to cut through all of the nice talk and go straight to the problem. He's very straight forward and like I said he's an intimidating Apostle sometimes. But he told us how some missionaries will complain and always think about how much they are going to miss in life when they go on a mission. He promised us one thing that we will never get as close to real life as we will while on a mission. That is so true. I'm not going to lie I miss all of you at home and it seems like there is so much going on. But at the end of the day I wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now. Every morning when I roll out of bed (straight to the ground because my bed is an inch thick) I am so happy to think that I don't have to wonder about what I'm going to do that day. I know what I'm going to every day and every night I'm so grateful that I get the oppurtunity to do it.

 

Well there's my deep thinking on the week and I hope I didn't put any of you asleep. I love all of you so much and the things I have learned in the past 4 months I would have never learned in my rut back at home. I hope all of you have a great week and I'll talk to you next week.

 

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