Erm 혹시 8/2/2026

 Not gonna lie we haven't really had any success here in Nonsan really at all. We've been walking 3+ hours a day in 105° heat with 85% humidity with little to no success whatesoever. At district council I was talking to my dawg Elder Coder and made a joke about how seemingly every time I have been about to quit missionary work because there's "no use," that that's precisely when God sends someone on the street who says, "Hey, can you guys summarize your beliefs to me in 2 minutes? "  To which Elder Coder agreed saying he's had a ton of those experiences as well. My comp and I took the hour bus ride back to our area from DC and about two minutes after we got off the bus a man came up to us and said, "Hey, can you guys summarize your beliefs to me in 2 minutes? "  A verbatim quote of what I had just said to Elder Coder an hour earlier. I had to try not to laugh as I taught him the first lesson right then and there. Since then, we've met with him twice and he is reading the Book of Mormon and taking the lessons. That same day we also got a member referral and a different gospel referral. Absolutely miracle packed day and gave us the boost we desperately needed.

We went with some members yesterday to take the sacrament to an old member who can't make it to church anymore. They brought a guitar out and asked me to play some hymns and we all sang some songs together. It was pretty fun and the spirit could be felt. 

We stopped at a restaurant to eat and the woman working in the kitchen ran out to give us both sodas saying, "You guys work so hard!" Before running back into the kitchen. I felt a lot of love from that lady and even though she's not a member and probably doesn't want to hear our message, she still showed us so much love. It was very appreciate. We were dying. Sometimes when we try to talk to someone on the street, they'll yell at us, "I already believe in Jesus!! " Which if true, has always confused me why they're mad at us. If you really believe in Him, wouldn't you be chill with people trying to do His commandment to "teach and baptise all nations"??? 

Spiritual Thought:  My brother and his wife had a new baby a few days ago and, not to brag, they named him after me  (They actually named him after the guy I'm named after, but please just go along with it for my sake.) Anyways, he's adorable, and the first photo I saw of him made me have kind of a moment fr. I thought, "dang he's like 100% pure and untainted, ain't even seen one Instagram reel yet." I'm just kinda yapping rn and don't know where I'm going with this but... I guess just remember that we are to become like little children. Not pooping our pants little children, but humble, submissive, and pure. Make sure that anything you're putting into your brain is for your benefit, and remember that repentance makes us clean without even leaving a scar.  Love you all!

Current Weight (I just ate a masssssive kebab btw): 188.9

Suiiii ⚽️ 7/26/2026

 My face got sunburned like a tomato in a 15 minute walk to the church the other day. We can't even hold our Book of Mormons some days because we sweat so bad it destroys them haha. 

I did an exchange in my old area Sejong and got to teach their friend. He's definitely gonna be baptized, bro had some awesome questions. Unfortunately, we also played soccer with him and the member who was there was crashingggg out on him, as well as anybody else who wasn't playing at Olympic level. Not that he was either. He's just impressively narcissistic haha. It was good to see some of those members again though.

We went finding, which if you remember, Sejong is famously bad for finding. Nobody was giving a singular crap until one man I stopped as he was walking by let me introduce our beliefs and the Book of Mormon... until he revealed that he was actually a member from Seoul haha. Soo glad I didn't let him walk past me cause members gotta see the missionaries are actually trying. 

Crashed out on a cicada the other day and knocked him dead out of the top of a tree with a rock first try. Why didn't I do baseball in high school? That was such a dime.

Spiritual Thought: Just like that me with that cicada, we have all sorts of noises around us that are trying to drive us insane or distract us. God's guiding, comforting voice is there too. It is God's hope that we will identify which voice is His and listen to it, as well as identify which voices are damaging us spiritually so that we can chuck a rock at them.

Current Weight: 186.6 

Bus 7/19/2026

We had DLTM last week in Suji, which because I'm in Nonsan and traveling from here suckkks I was out of my area for almost 36 hours for one meeting so that kinda sucked. However, my dawg Elder Wolfert got re-drafted as tech Elder so we got to eat lunch with him. I was not expecting to see him again before he went home so that was a blessing for real. He's on an english fast though so the whole meal we only spoke in korean but it was suprisingly just a fun as english, lowkey the only Elder who makes SYL fun. 

We got to our apartment from DLTM at about 9:30pm and when I set my pros bag down on the couch realized that I had left my backpack full of all of my important jawn on the bus in the overhead thangymobob. After a very fervent prayer and a long sprint back to the bus terminal we miraculously found the driver before he went home and he unlocked the bus so I could get my stuff. Some clutch gameplay, shoutout to the 전능하신 하나님 for the assist. 

The lady we taught at the library with a ton of interest called us and said she doesn't want to learn anymore.

Spiritual Thought:  I absolutely flew though the last 20 chapters of Alma this week and it's because Captain Moroni is my absolute dawg. Absolutely love that guy. Moral of the story, one person, when working with God, can change the lives of countless people, sometimes a whole country. Everybody has this ability and I hope all of you are doing your part to bring a little bit of beauty into the universe. Also, I hope you don't have to do it in the same way as Moroni.

Current Weight: 186.5

Get Me Out of Here! 7/13/2026

 Quick shoutout to all of my MTC sisters (and Elder Kofoed and Kayden Parsons my absolute dawgs) who finished their missions last week! 수고하셨습니다 and I hope you all made it home safely.

Y'all timed going home extremelyyy well. Korea was absolutely pummeled by rain for the first part of the week and then the last few days have felt like an absolute furnace. Everybody has been seeking shelter from the heat inside and there's almost nobody out anymore. If you try to talk to anybody they just tell you they ain't stopping till they get inside, so... finding has been a bit hard this week.

Elder Auguste got transferred and it turns out that he actually has MORE luggage than he did in Iksan. Most missionaries sacrifice a portion of their previous lives while on their mission, but he made sure to pack just about everything, piano included. On transfer day, I dragged one of his 100 pound suitcases (which had broken wheels) and a box full of stuff. Between the distance we had to travel and the zipper of his piano case exploding open, throwing all of the random trinkets and fruits he had shoved in it onto the street (this happened twice), our journey to the train station took over an hour. We were sweating like dogs. The symbolism was beautiful though, it was like our own Via Dolorosa, walking through the people and everything. Good to know I still got that endure to the end DAWG in me though, that was a nonstop grind! I just hope that President makes him transfer by himself someday because I told him he's gotta get rid of at least two suitcases when we lived in iksan but bro didn't listen. He's gonna be absolutely cooked if he ever goes by himself. He keeps lucking out somehow. RIP to all of his future comps on transfer day lol. 

My new comp is Elder Galligao and he's from the Philippines. He's pretty awesome and we've done a lot of laughing already. Pretty good at Korean too, so we've been able to use a lot more korean in the house. Poor guy came from Namwon (banishment) straight to Nonsan (banishment). Have MERCY on my boy.

I told him that finding is pretty hard in Nonsan, but that we'll still see miracles. So we went outside and the first person I talked with took a Book of Mormon. Then we went and talked to some students and while we were talking somebody in a car drove passed and yelled, "느냥 가!" at the students, which means "just go!" Lowkey was hard not to crash out at that guy, especially when he got stopped in a traffic jam down the road and I had to fight deamonnnns not to jump through his window lol. Jesus told me to love everybody  Elder Galligao asked me, with fear in his voice, "does that happen often?" 

We got two new friends to ping pong night and one new friend to English class. We also did a lesson with one of them, but he's from Russia so sometimes the language barrier was kind of difficult to get through. Awesome guy though. I did NOT expect to have so many interactions with foreigners in Korea but it's unironically like 40% of what we do haha. I wish I had started studying Russian in the MTC. 

Spiritual Thought:  "If the church weren't true, the missionary program would have destroyed it a long time ago." 

Not gonna lie, my testimony of this quote is almost as strong as any other testimony I have. We are so insufficient for what we're doing out here and so many dumb decisions are made, but the work keeps going and God enables the weak.  

Love you all! Have a good week. 

US-KR-US-KR-US-KR 7/4/2026

 I did an exchange with my boy Elder Ko this week. I'm on an absolute generational run of bad luck in the 4-man + serving with a Korean department, so that was pretty fun to serve with a Korean for a whole 18-ish hours. If you've ever had a native comp, count your many blessings—I learned so much in one day. 

We set some pretty high goals and were able to hit all of them. We did a lot of teaching on the street and set up return appointments with 2 people. We were doing our daily planning and I paused to talk to a guy walking past us and now he's a teaching friend haha. Green dot before we even finished daily planning.

The spiders are back. They're everywhere and seem much more bound to ambush humans this year than last. In the church while teaching an English class over Zoom, a spider dropped right next to my comp's face and he about died. Not 20 minutes later while sitting in the clerk's office it happened again. A different spider dropped even closer to his head this time and my comp used his phone, which we were using to call a teaching friend at that very moment, to bat the little demon directly at me. As Elder Kearon said in his most recent talk, those offices are small. I was pinned against the wall and the demon's web was somehow attached to my chest, and he was flying down that line straight for me. Clutched up and he got curb-stomped though, so we're good.

We met some Canadians in the bus terminal, and I'm not sure if I've become a Korean or if they truly were just crazy loud, but I was lowkey getting embarrassed with how loud they were talking with us. Both of them were chomping on about 5 sticks of gum apiece too, and to top it all off, one guy was talking about how the Jews are all taking over the planet and that "the painter" (Hitler) was right. He was an absolute yapper—he almost made us miss our bus despite me telling him 10 times we had to leave.

Absolutely tragic that I'm not in the U.S. for the 250th, but hopefully I can fight off the Moser cancer-gene long enough to make it to the big 300th. Truly the most goated country in the world—go look at a list of the 100 most influential inventions and take note of where 95% of them were made (we also have a flag on the moon and a helicopter on Mars) What a privilege it was to grow up there, in the best state of the union nonetheless.

Ether 2:12

"Behold, this is a choice land, and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall be free from bondage, and from captivity, and from all other nations under heaven, if they will but serve the God of the land, who is Jesus Christ, who hath been manifested by the things which we have written."

The greatness of America comes from God, make no mistake about it. And if anyone tries to tell you that the Constitution and laws of the land aren't inspired or Christian in nature, yeah, go ahead and ignore that joint.  Anyways, make sure not to rebel against God because there are a lot of verses in the BoM that explain what would happen there too.

Happy 4th! 

Brain Rot 6/28/26

Not gonna lie, my biggest complaint about koreans is that they are cooooooked out of their brains. You thought your 7 year old cousin was bad??? Nah! In church yesterday I joined the youth class to try to get them a little more engaged in the discussions. The branch pres asked a question, which I was the first to answer, and then he went down the line of the youth and had to either wake them up or tap their shoulders to get them to look up from their phone, and had to repeat the question for every single one of them. Later, he was having two of the youth take turns reading, and the second they finished reading it mumbling as fast as they could, they would immediately start scrolling again. He had to ask them to lock in on a 5 second basis for the entire hour, it was so exhausting just watching it. People don't even look up from their phones to cross the street here.

I'm 10-0 in ping pong for the last 2 weeks. five of those are my companion, who unfortunately for him, was playing sting pong with me. He's got some welts haha. 

I was complaining about how rare it is that we get to teach an actual lesson to my comp while we were walking to the library the other day, and not 10 minutes into my language study a random woman tapped on my shoulder and asked if we had time to go outside and introduce our beliefs to her. Talk about an assist from God holy. 

Every transfer we do a teaching role play with our mission mom. This transfer, we were supposed to do the restoration with her, so when this lady asked us if we could "share a quick introduction of our church, how the church was formed, and what your basic beliefs are,"  I was thinking, "let's go! We are so practiced up right now." I thought my comp and I were about to take this perfect opportunity to give the most baller, perfectly structured 1st Lesson ever seen. Thinking we were on the same page, I looked over at my comp and gave him a "take it away " nod, and bro immediately started with "in 1820..." Which is basically the very end of the role play that we had practiced, so the whole concise and smooth thing immediately went out the window.

I got a shoutout in church from one of the members. She started quoting me in her talk from a video I had filmed for the mission Facebook a longgg time ago. I was confused cause I didn't know it was posted, but she told me after that the add had popped up randomly on YouTube haha. 

I went on an exchange with my boy Elder Curtis and unfortunately every single person in Nonsan was super grumpy that night so it was kind of a lame exchange. Not a single person even let us finish saying hi before yelling at us lol. Finding in Korea. This guy was struggling to move a massive couch so we asked him if we could move it for him and he hit us with a "하지 마라  가  가!!" which is about the equivalent of "Oh piss off" in an English accent. Dunno who pooped his party.

And then to top it all off, one of the guys who blocked us after he asked for MY number... after approaching ME a few weeks ago was at the library.... I didn't see him until he was right in front of me, but all I did was say hi, give him a handshake, and then say have a good day before I walked away. About 6 hours later he texted me, for the first time ever, and said, "I don't have any interest in your religion. Do not approach me ever again." What part of my handshake put you in the waters of baptism brutha? Calm down, dangggg.

That being said, God has helped me get used to rejection so much. Back in the ol' Iksan days I used to absolutely crashhhhh out but now we just giggle and skip away when people overreact because it ain't us missing out on the good news. 

Did some awesome member work this week and finally feel like the members are getting tight with us.

A grandpa on a roof played a few k-pop songs for us haha. Is that apostate if we are trying to teach him? Idk. We eventually were able to teach him a bit and get his number, super nice guy. 

Spiritual Thought:   Romans 1:16

"For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek."  Don't be ashamed to share the gospel! 

Current Weight: 188.3

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 

US VS Korea 5/4/26

 You know, I always make jokes when we're about to knock the door of a sketcky house like, "I wouldn't do this in a million years in America," cause that's the kind of place where you go to get a shotgun slug to the chest through the door. I mostly thought I was kidding until we went finding near the military base last week. I asked this guy walking by me if he wanted some free lemonade and he said, "I got a gun, man. Don't talk to me, I got a gun." So, if you look at the ratio for Koreans vs. Americans conversed with that have given me a death threat, were looking at something like

  16,536 - 1  12 - 1

Pretty inpressive ratio. If I was petty enough, we coulda got that guy kicked out of the military for saying that, especially where we were, but we'll let him catch up to his immaturity later haha. 

We were in a super country little village this week and I heard a song start playing behind us while we were walking toward the bus stop. This guy dressed up like Edna came out and started singing and dancing his heart out for everybody to see, and I thought I had accidentally walked into a movie set for a second. I didn't, he was just crazy. The music had Wicked vibes, and it very well could have been cause I've never seen wicked... But bro was BAT crazy though holy. 

We met with a good amount of people this week actually. One of our appointments was with these two old guys who want to study English, and they took us to the absolute promised land of a restaurant 9,000원 김치찌개 that fed all of us until we were full, and it was gasssss. That's literally less than $2 a person. Compy and I are headed back today.

We've been knocking doors a lot this week, something I really haven't done my whole mission, but when you don't have travel reimbursements, you gotta do what you gotta do to find, nah mean? It isn't very successful, but it's pretty cool the places that I've been able to go this week. I've knocked on several houses that have to be over a 100 years old, I haven't felt more like I'm in Korea my whole mission than right now haha. Kung foo panda irl.

Spiritual Thought: 

I heard a quote once that God won't let us find undeniable proof for the Book of Mormon that would take away the necessity of faith, but that He would also allow enough to be found to prevent the critics from having a hay day. This week my comp and I watched an hour and thirty minute long video over the course of several companionship studies about the archeology behind the book of mormon, and we were genuinely laughing our butts off at certain parts because of how ridiculous it was. That quote couldn't be more accurate. Every single anachronism the critics found they would say, with absolute certainty, "We got Joseph this time. What an idiot, he really thought Alma was a "male name" unbelievable." and then God just has some archeologist unearth a pot that says "Alma, Son of...." like a week later. (Happened with the name Sariah too btw) They ironically validate him tenfold every time because of their absolute certainty of it not being true. The Book of Mormon is ridiculously complex and has only become more likely and validated as it faces scrutiny and study. Point being, don't wait until we find a city with "Zarahemla" etched into it to gain a testimony, God's expecting some spiritual work from each of us. 

Love y'all! 

Current Weight: 186.36

"We Have to Bury a Body" 4/27/26 & Job Finished 4/20/26

 Now you might be thinking, "I wonder what that might mean?" but to quote Elder McBride... "I'm not kidding." A young man in his twenties passed away in the Pyeongtaek ward and was so immensely heavy that they had to recruit dang near every elder in our district to move the man around. When I got there I thought I was in the morgue, but it turns out, korean funeral homes are just super ugly. They were doing a viewing and this man was up on a metal table, no casket, and I'm pretty sure he was wearing the clothes he had on when he died, a T-shirt and shorts. And BOY almighty, the legends were true. Buddy was absolutely massive. Anyways, we left the room while they got the guy into a box (he was too big for a coffin) and then they called us back into the room for the big lift. The funeral director said "굉장히 무겁거든요" Before we picked him up, which almost made me laugh. Thankfully I recovered. Super weird experience....

We've got a super senile teaching friend that I decided to drop because he doesn't even remember korean anymore, so communication is dang near impossible. Unfortunately, we had already set up a dinner appointment with him, so we had to meet up at least one more time. This guy's kind of an NPC who roams around the church, so when we were on our way to the church a couple of hours before the appointment we made a game plan to just keep walking if we saw him, cause we had work to do and couldn't get wrapped up in allat. Sure nuf, my comp saw him down the street to our right about a 100 ft away. We were unsure at first until we heard "HEY. HEY. HEY. HEY. HEY. HEY." He was out of view and forgot our names and titles so we felt justified in marching onward. Now at the church there's a chair outside that he uses to wait for us occasionally. I turned to my comp and said, "as surely as the Lord liveth, that man is on his way." Estimating his pace to give us about 15 minutes before he got there we hid the chair behind the church in a bush so that when he gets there, there's not a comfy place to sit for 6 hours and he would have to leave. We hid it and then went inside, shut off all the lights, locked the door, and then started working. 

As predicted, right on time we hear *BANG BANG BANG* on the door outside for a terrifying 2 minutes, before complete silence, interrupted only by the unmistakable sound of a chair getting drug from behind the church to the front, exactly where it was before. Now this put us in quite the pickle, cause we were already committed to the whole "not at the church* gig, and now he was in a very strategic position to be in view of every single exit. As time passed and got closer to our 5:30 appointment, I tried everything to get him to leave the church, like calling and asking him to meet us at 7/11 instead, but the stubborn man was not gonna move.

This forced us to use the chappel window to climb out the back of the church, over the brick wall, and into the alley between the church and the next building. Now unfortunately, from there the only way out to the street is to hop a gate, a gate very much in his view, so this was gonna have to be done very, very quietly. I went first and immediately destroyed the brick wall, and like a video game the resulting noise perked his attention, but didn't get us caught. We tried again and got over the fence successfully. We could finally go through the main gate and greet the man as if we were in fact not at the church the whole time, which, as we all know, we absolutely were. 

The rest of the story is gonna be in my photos, but he is super curious about english, even though he doesn't know any, and he was asking us what everything is in english on the way to the restaurant and it was hilarious haha. He's adorable. 

Got an inactive to church by working on his farm, he was probably just impressed with how fast I dug that trench (he doesn't know I used to be a Subterranean Hydrous Reserves Dihydrogen Monoxide Transfer and Conduit Installation Technician) It took a whole day to get to his house in the middle of nowhere, and he had random naked lady statues and a Spaniard guy too. Long story short, he applied olive oil to a rice cake he was feeding me with a BRUSH he pulled from the depths of his dishes filled sink, without washing it. Prayers work, I'm still alive. 

Spiritual Thought: 

We visited our friend Paul,  who's gonna get baptised soon, and his living situation is pretty... not great. Despite this, he couldn't stop telling me about how grateful he is for God and all of his blessings. I couldn't believe how grateful he was, every time he spoke I would write something he said down, he was dropping some absolute bars on discipleship. How grateful are you? 

JOB FINISHED?  4/20/26

Well, my birthday was last week, and as luck would have it, I spent it in the same place I spent the first. That's right, I'm back in Anseong baby.  Absolutely wild being back here, the nostalgia is crazyyyy. Not to mention the weather is exactly the same, so it's basically just a re-run of my first transfer, with some differences of course. The first difference actually ain't bad, and that's that I can actually now understand the members here, so that's a welcomed change. The members were telling me stories as if I already knew them, but I did nottt know anything about these people the first time I was here. I love these members though, they're awesome. I'm glad I can actually talk with them a bit this time around. 

Second is that this isn't a 4 man anymore. I have been cursed with 2 mans my last 8 transfers, and it's way worse knowing what it COULD be right now because I've actually experienced it before. Wolfert get yur butt up here하라

Next is our friend Artemis, and this is the worst change of them all. Now for those of you who remember, Artemis was a girl my father Lockhart and I taught and put on date my first transfer but couldn't get baptised because her mom is an absolute lo.... difficult human being. We just had to tell her to live the gospel like a member until she turns 18 and can be baptised. When I left Anseong she was thriving in the gospel, and we was buds fr. We lowkey had an absolute gaggle of middle and high schoolers who we were tight with during those glory days... 

Anyways, I got transfered, but I was praying that she'd make it, and she would occasionally post videos with the Elders or Jesus videos on her story so I was thinking she was locked hunnid nah mean. Every zone conference I would ask about her to the Anseong elders and they had good news... until about 2 months ago. She's been difficult n such, so I was hyped when we got transfer calls and I figured I could come back here and help her out since I'm an OG. 

We got to the apartment and after a 2 minute nostalgia seizure I shoved my luggage in the door and we left for the church. Walking over I was wondering how long it would be until I saw some of my old teaching friends, when outta nowhere, I realized the girl about to walk past us was Artemis.. with 2 sketchy guys though. My comp and I were shocked but yelled out hi, and she made the slightest facial expression at me before walking directly past me, ignoring us completely. So basically me and 안예은 are beefing now cause what the heck was that junk fr. She texted me later and said, "sorry I couldn't say hi properly I was sooo busy." Yeah right buddy, who ain't got time to say. "Oh hi! So sorry busy right now." Nah, not a single peep. Some peoples kids amirite

The redeeming factor of this all is that I finally have my beloved Tony's Burgers back, and Tony of course. My first words to him were, "you ain't baptised yet?" Which got me cussed out. Turns out, he remembers me pretty well. Tony quotes are so back, here's one for you.

"There were times I had to shoot my *redacted* up my toes, thats how small my veins got" 

Yeah, we're working on him. 

The new comp is 3rd transfer Elder Osmond, and he's my first comp from Idaho. Also my first comp who likes guns, played rugby, loves fishing, their cousin, and camping. Kidding on the cousin one but it is crazy how Idahoans just be legends like that. This guy's got the Mr. Incredible build too, so there's not been as many arguments from my lips cause he could lowkey snap me, "like a toothpick." 

Before leaving Singal the members threw a little going away party for Sister Anderson and I, and what better time than that to eat copious amounts of eel.  Not bad honestly, but it ain't KFC. 

Spiritual Thought:  From what I heard during conference, we need to do better to help and love those around us, so I'm just gonna let this music do the talking for me today. I love this song, it sounds like the halls of the Celestial Kingdom--Brightly Beams Our Father’s Mercy.