The Ghost of Tsu.. Nonsan 6/26/2026

 Happy Father's day to all the goats out there! Especially you, Pop.

I was in bed the other night and was curious where my comp was, because it was about 10:45, so I left the room to see if I could find him. I found him studying something at his desk in the super faint light of his alarm clock. Now, I wouldn't say I was trying to scare him, but I absolutely did walk up to him quietly so that that was an option if I so pleased. As luck would have it, I didn't need to choose! He stood up to go to bed right then and turned around to see a glowing white guy in the pale light of his alarm clock right next to him. He did the most blood-curdling scream I have ever heard in my life and jumped so high he could have hit his head on the ceiling. Unironically the funniest moment of my entire mission. I couldn't go to bed for about an hour cause I kept laughing. 

We met a guy from Nepal, and bro was STANKY, let me tell you. Heaven's to thank it was an outdoor apointment, but still, everytime the wind blew my way... 하나님의 곁으로 갈 뻔했어요. Anyways, his favorite hobby is photography, so he showed us a bunch of his photos, and like, some of them were aight, but almost all were unbelievable mid. I showed him one of my photos I took from Idaho and bro said I either AI-ed that joint or "edited it heavily" until I proved to him it was original because I have a bunch of photos from the same day that look exactly the same to each other. Once that was settled he proceeded to explain how America faked the moon landings because quote, "cameras weren't invented yet." As if cameras weren't invented well over a hundred years before the moon lndings. Just for the sake of the argument, let's grant that there were no cameras back then... don't you think people would have realized that they were somehow getting footage from the moon?? I genuinely could not cobble together his argument, you cannot make this stuff up. God gives his hardest battles to his strongest soldiers.

Bashed a pastor who told me Joseph Smith was "of the Devil and a liar" who admittedly had never read a page of the book of mormon in his entire life, so I just read him two banger verses from the BoM about Jesus and he stopped talking completely. Have not heard from him since.

Did an awesome exchange with the AP's. Elder Fisher and I talked to literally everyone we saw. I ran after a lady who had just got in her car and gave her a book of mormon through the window, and also ended up praying for her sick cat.... 

We also did our companionship study in front of a helicopter, so that was tuff.

Monsoon season decided to start precisely when Elder Fisher and I were finding on foot about 3 miles away from my house... We got caught lacking and didn't have umbrellas. There goes my Book of Mormon... 

Our friend Sarah came to church and has read all the way to 2nd Nephi!! She is going through the book with serious attention to detail and is finding every single little leaning she can, super impressive.

Spiritual Thought: Our motivation to serve God and be obedient to Him has to be because of our love for Him. If it's for any other reason, our motivation will dissappear the second our environment changes. This is something I've been working on my whole mission because my behavior sometimes changes completely depending in my companion at the time. Live for your love of God, and His love for you.

Love you guys! 

Current Weight: 188.9

Uzbek 6/14/2026

 We found a new friend last week from Uzbekistan who's about our age and is crazy fluent in English. He knows every meme under the sun, so I could make any joke and he understood the reference—probably more than any of my companions, haha. This guy is so cool, and we've been able to start teaching him. He took us out for Uzbek food last week and dropped $70 on us.  No offense to the Koreans, but it was probably the best food I've had since I got here.

I did an exchange with my ZL, Elder Neilson, and it went really well. We did a ton of finding and had so many good conversations—it was awesome. When we went to Daejeon to end the exchange with the other elders, the door to the church was shattered, and when we looked confused, the other elders said, "Yeah... we were here till 10 last night." Revelation is real, y'all. We had Zone Conference the day prior, and our president gave a seemingly random request to always lock the door to the church when you're there and to only let in people who you know. At least, it seemed random, right up until 10 hours later when a crazy guy was going absolutely bonkers outside the church trying to get in to the missionaries and shattered the front door.... He got arrested and all the missionaries are chilling, but still, when Pres speaks, you best be listening. 

Spiritual Thought:  Saints are sinners who keep on trying.

Tap Water 6/7/2026

 

We got invited to a member's house yesterday to break our fast, which is baller. Unfortunately, almost half the ward pulled up, and the dinner also doubled as a doggy play-date (I didn't know this), so there were a million dogs running around. I like dogs—not really indoor rats that much—but truly, I don't mind dogs. Where I draw the line is when you're eating meat traditional Korean style (on the floor with no chairs) and there's a million dogs running around trying to steal the food and licking the dishes. Also, the members just kept putting down those pee mat things instead of just taking the dogs outside to pee, and one of the dogs straight up fire hosed that thang with about 3 gallons of pee and then tracked it all over the house. Keep in mind, this is finger food, and all the members are petting dogs and cleaning pee while also eating and cooking the food. At one point my comp went and got a drink from the tap water (some of the safest tap in the world, btw), and you would've thought he was drinking enriched plutonium the way those members reacted. Immediately after yelling at my comp, one of the members passed a dog over the table, skimming the meat on the way, to a different member, and that dog had literally just peed. Germs don't exist in Korea, but heaven forbid your water has some minerals in it.

We had a pretty good week. Lots and lots of finding, lots and lots of getting threatened (there's a lot of foreigners here). We really wanted to make a green dot yesterday, and God alley-ooped me so hard. I was able to teach a guy almost the entire plan of salvation on the street, and he's coming to English class next week. Hallelujah, baby.

Nonsan is super tiny, so imagine our surprise when some members took us to a nearby town and it had a massive traditional Korean palace. This thing was dope. It even had a replica of ancient Korean villages.

Had DLTM meeting in Suji this week, which meant a whole day of traveling and such. I saw Elder Kofoed for the last time. I'm gonna miss that guy—what a GOAT. Man, I really gotta start making new friends 'cause all of them are leaving.

During the DLTM meeting, one of the elders asked our mission president how we can help our district members grow their desire to do missionary work. Unfortunately for him, however, he used the word 욕망 instead of 소망. Both words come up as "desire" when you translate them, but 욕망 is understood as "lust."  "President, I've been wondering, how do I help everyone in my district grow their lust?" I don't know if anyone caught it, though, cause I was the only one giggling. 

Spiritual Thought:  A member was telling me how he converted this week, and I thought the story was pretty cool. He was going to a different church and even wanted to become a pastor someday, so he studied and studied his Bible. He loves the verse "by their fruits ye shall know them," and after examining his church, saw no fruits—specifically that they weren't helping the poor and the needy. When missionaries came, he noticed how they and the other church members helped so many people. He fasted for 3 days and was praying to God to know if the church was true. On the 3rd day, he prayed sincerely twice to know, and no answer came, but on the 3rd time it did.

Not gonna lie, sometimes I can get a little frustrated when I don't have a massive religious experience after praying for 23 seconds, so this was a wake-up call for me that these kinds of things really do take quite a bit of effort, but that they also bless our lives profoundly. This member is a dawg, let me tell you.

Current Weight: 189lbs 

마지막 토니 버거 6/1/2026

 Phew that was a bussyyyyy week. Closing an area is harder than you might expect. 

I'm back in the Sejong District, this time serving in Nonsan as DL. There's not 16 people in this district so I'm pretty happy about that. My comp is Elder Talbot, he was my comp back in the ol Iksan days. He's my oldest comp in a longgg time. 

My last comp got sent to Osan and wanted to ship his bikes to his new area, but before we did I figured it would be a shame to ship off the bikes before bombing the massive hill in front of the city hall, so that's exactly what we did. This hill is pretty daggum steep and has a sharp turn halfway down that banks a pretty big drop off. In case you forgot, I haven't driven a car, motorcycle, or even a scooter in dang near a year and a half so your boy has been absolutely feening for speed. I used the parking lot to the city hall as a runway and probably hit 30mph before I even hit the hill haha. By the time I got to the turn I was going like 50 mph. That's when I started thinking "erm" you could say, and I started doing the math. I figured I should probably play it safe and use the brakes instead of trying to lay the bike down sideways hard and try to make the turn full speed because if I failed at that, missions over. That's when I found out the front brake actually doesn't work worth a dang, funny prank. I ended up pulling the most baller back brake drift around that whole dang corner like I was drifting the ol' Ford Focus back home,  not because I wanted to, but because it was necessary. I almost pulverized myself against the back of a parked minivan on the back side of the turn but barely missed it haha. It was some clutch gameplay, my mom was pretty close to getting a phone call.

Closing Anseong was depressing but we saw some really cool miracles. We taught an old lady how to pray in English a few weeks ago. She's not very good at English but she came to the last English class and said the closing prayer, which was verbatim the prayer we had taught her a few weeks ago, she had gone home and memorized it and had been saying it every day. That was pretty cool and made me really happy. A different day we left the apartment and ran right into one of our friends. He told me that his mother had passed away 2 days ago and I was able to teach him the Plan of Salvation right then and there on the street and give him a book of mormon. 

Tony was lowkey pressed about us leaving haha. Whether he admits it or not, we've grown on him. He tried to get me to give him my mission presidents phone number because, "it's not fair Anseong doesn't get its own guys" and because we're doing a "good job" so I told him he could've just gotten baptised and it would have stayed open. Then again, it wasn't even my president who made the descision, but...

Man it was just a bunch of absolute RIPs last week fr. Elder McBride died too.  Absolute tragic, but we spent the night at their house for District Council so we were able to run up a bit more spikeball before he left. Go get em champ.

Had to take 4 buses to get to my new area, which sucked, but I ran into Elder Wolfert at the bus station right at lunch time. Miracle fr. He discovered my gluttonous butt sitting in the KFC haha. "As expected. As expected."

Spiritual Thought:  Last week was the 75th Anniversary of the Miracle at Gapyeong. For those who don't know, there was a group of 600 soldiers from Utah, almost entirely LDS members, who were fighting in the Korean war when a suprise attack left 240 of them completely isolated, facing a massive force of thousands of North Korean and Chinese troops. What they didn't know was that these Utah men had recieved a blessing before deployment that if they "remained faithful, they would recieve no harm." And just like the stripping warriors in the BoM, they were able to fight off thousands of enemy soldiers in the middle of the night, killing hundreds of them, capturing 830 more, and not a single American soldier lost their lives. 

Baller story, and a good reminder that we serve an unchanging God who performs miracles today and forever, and that when He makes promises, He keeps them. (And also that He doesnt like communism... at least not when humans try to do it.... idk)

Current Wieght: ERROR

Failure 5/25/2026

 I got a call from headquarters to make sure we don't have anything left in our fridge by next Friday. That's mission speak for, "You suck at your job, Wazowskie. Pack it up." They're closing Anseong. I tried to save it, probably at least doubled the size of our PMG since I got here, but people just aren't staying at church. Sucks fr, especially since my Father opened this area, and I have to be the one to close it.

Other than that, pretty good week. We were trying to get rid of our Book of Mormons, so we don't have to pack them and take them somewhere, and we gave out 17 of them in less than two hours. Definitely my record haha, I've had whole weeks of my mission where I can't give a single one out. We also had hecka member meals... I'm gonna miss these guys.

Got to run up another exchange with the GOAT Elder McBriddle. He goes home in 3 days. We've got a fire District Leader who let us run it up. Elder Koo's dad brought him about 20 pounds of brisket, so naturally, we ate that for every single meal of the exchange. Best meat I've had in Korea for sure. 

I met my MTC comps trainer! That was kinda fun. Shoutout Elder Park!

At church on Sunday last week we went to the Pyeongtaek building for Ward conference and there was a musical number with a violin and a traditional Korean instrument that's basically just a glorified kazoo. The violin did the first 2 minutes of the song alone, and it was beautiful, and then kazoo bro came in with so much force it sounded like a squeaky chicken dog toy  I have never locked in so hard in my life to not laugh, I knew that if I did, I would lose all respect of the members. Thank goodness I avoided Elder McBrides gaze, that would have been game.

We're in our work out clothes right now and a lady missionary from a different church just tried to preach at me cause I dont look like a missionary right now. Hit her with the suprise couter-strike haha. She walked away with a restoration pamphlet.

A lady who works at a convenience store locked the whole district in the big freezer because we looked too hot, she genuinely saved our lives haha. 

Spiritual Thought:  "Elder Marion D. Hanks of the Seventy told of a man and his small son who “stopped at an isolated cornfield on a remote country road” and eyed the delicious corn beyond the fence. The father, after looking in front of him, behind him, to the left of him, and to the right of him, “started to climb the fence” to take some ears of corn. His son looked at him and said reproachfully, “Dad, you forgot to look up.”

I've been focusing a lot more on integrity recently. It really changes your perspective on life when you stop cutting corners because it's "just a small thing" and stop selling your soul for pennies. There's a lot of corn out there, but it's not about the corn. 

Edge of Death 5/18/2026

So remember how our new member fell off the face of the earth after being baptised?  And how I said we should have the police do a welfare check but the members told us not to? Well, turns out, he was in fact on the other side of that door, and had accidentally almost overdosed (not on purpose, and also not in an addiction way, just really fumbled the dosage) He was unconscious for, as far as we can tell, 2 or 3 days before waking up and crawling to the neighbors house for help. He got sent to a hospital, where he was in a coma for a long while, hence the no contact... 

I need to be a little more bold following promptings. I would have felt pretty terrible if he had died. 

If you remember last week's story about the Booty-Punisher 4000, I used that as an excuse to never ride the bikes around again, even if we did have helmets. Still not walking quite right. Unfortunately, and this probably shouldn't even be a suprise at this point, but a second freaking bike showed up in the mail a day later. "No" is not an answer in these parts, apparently. 

This area has been super slow and we have been doing at least 5 hours of finding on the daily without finding anyone who's really progressing at all. We said a fervent prayer and then went out again and were able to make 4 new teaching friends.  One of them is a guy named Jimmy. He runs a dumpling shop and we started talking to him, and he is a super devout Christian. He is such a cool guy but works 16 hours a day so we've just been teaching him at the dumpling shop haha. I'm excited to keep meeting with him. Prayer works baybeeeee

Had an awesome picnic with the Pyeongtaek ward and ran up some serious spikeball.

Had a zone pday today so if I didn't respond to you, that's why.

My phone's about to die, so sorry if there's some serious grammar flaws in this jawn, I don't have time to fix em. 

Current Weight: 189.024

Spiritual Wanderings 5/10/2026

 My companions parents figured out how to use the korean equivalent of Amazon and have sent him a billionnnn packages, one of which was a bicycle. This is unfortunate because it instilled a burning passion for bicycles in compy's bosom. No seriously, like, set-his-phone-background-as-a-bicycle level passion. A member gave us a piece of crap second bike for me to ride because he was gonna move to America, and I was not boutta be caught riding that junk while my comp is over there riding a freaking Nimbus 2000 nah mean. I got away with not riding it for a while, because 1: there is absolutely no need for bicycles in this mission, and 2: I didn't have a helmet, necessary per missionary standards ofc. I'm pretty sure he texted his parents outside of P-day though, because we got another helmet in the mail about a day later. I was straight out of excuses. Just to let the guy have his ride, I allowed one ride to a restaurant way out yonder Glen. It didn't take 15 seconds before I realized the mistake I made. That piece of junks' front disk brake was warped so bad the brake was engaged eternally, basically just a stationary workout bike, and the seat that was already at max hight was built for a 7 yr old, and let me tell ya, it had about as much surface area as a tent-spike ifyaknowwhatimean. The derailer kept exploding and I had to put the chain back on probably 20 times until I ultimately ended up WWE slammin that joint into the ground. I made compy switch halfway and neither of us have been able to sit down for a week.

A cat kept following me and absolutely loved my pets. Named it Sir Licksalot. 

Went to my second area for president interviews and gave a pretty solid Role play about the word of wisdom without practicing at all beforehand. (we had literally an entire months heads-up)

The work is maddd slow right now. We've had so much finding time do we tried "Spiritual Wandering," which is where you go explore and just try to talk to people while you go. It actually worked, weird enough, and I got some numbers in some pretty cool places. One of them turned out to be the monk who works at the Buddhist temple we were exploring, but hey, he's gonna get his chance at Jesus dangit. 

Zone conference was also this week, which means that in total we had two days this week completely wasted in travel.

Spiritual Thought:    The Book of Mormon really makes it clear that having faith and being a disciple does NOT mean you will be spared from trials. (shoutout Abinadi) Sometimes it can be tempting to give up on God when life gets hard, but when I read the stories in the BoM, like Nephi tied up for 3 days or Alma and Amulek watching the believers burn to death, I learn that from the beginning, God has been trying to teach us the importance of an eternal perspective, patience, and faith. Yeah, it sucked, but they had faith that the Atonement of Christ will make everything well and just in the end.

Current Weight: 189.2