Tuesday, June 23, 2026

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

 πŸ‡°πŸ‡· 16,536 - 1 πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡² 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 κΉ€μΉ˜μ°Œκ°œ 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

Sunday, May 3, 2026

"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 "ꡉμž₯히 λ¬΄κ²κ±°λ“ μš”" 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 hereν•˜λΌ

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 μ•ˆμ˜ˆμ€ 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.



Muffin Man pt. 2 4/12/26

 Yeah that's right. He's back.  In case you didn't know, muffin man is extremely fond of basketball, a grind I can respect. Unfortunately, due to his frisky behavior around the sister missionaries, and extremely unsanitary explorative hands, we don't invite him to basketball anymore. That doesn't stop him from inviting himself though, even when we do not have any basketball activities. My conversation over text saturday went something like this: 

Him: I am on my way to the basketball activity. 
Me: There's actually no activity today! Sorry! 
Him: My tummy hurts, we have to do basketball activity. 
Me: There isn't one, please don't come to the church today!! 
Him: ꡐ회둜 μΆœλ°œν•©λ‹ˆλ‹€ (I have departed for the church) 

We hoped he wouldn't show up but we got word from the sisters a couple hours later that the "muffin red dot" was on the fourth floor balling up. Together with the tech elders we girded up our loins and took the elevator to the 4th floor. When the door opened, it was pitch black up there, straight up a horror movie. We knew he was in the darkness somewhere. We ended up finding him and coaxed him into the elevator where he started tickling me.  Last time I'm ever getting boxed like a fish like that. Molested counter: 2 (People, not times)

Our recently baptised member fell off the face of the earth after his confirmation. I don't know if Satan attacked the man or if he died, but no phones reach him and he doesn't answer his door, if he is even in his house at all. When we taught him there were no problems at all, if he had a concern he was really good about asking us about it and not hiding or asking apostates on reddit nah mean. Pretty confusing. 

One of my favorite friends is a guy named κΉ€μš± who reffered himself for english about a month ago now. He's like 50 and ever since his 2nd english class has pulled up wearing the most drippy suits I've ever seen because he wants to "match the elders." He absolutely loves fishing so we've been bonding over that of course, and this week we were able to have a really good member lesson with him. He's reading the Book of Mormon now.

Spiritual Thought:   I happen to be a member of the exclusive "Coombski Mission Drive," and my boy Elder Coombs has put some fire talks on there. One of my favorites is "Get an Attitude" and in it he said a heart that says "how bad can I be?" Is filthy. The talk was mostly geared to chastity, but what an important principle for every aspect of discipleship. It helped me realize I need to stop fence sitting and try to not only have "clean hands," but also a "clean heart." The scriptures always use that in a chain because both are necessary for true spiritual power. How valiant can I be? 

Love you all! Current Weight: 186.318  


Blossoms 4/6/26

 


Hello everyone! I hope you've had a good week. Guess who has less than 100 days left of their mission? The sisters I came out with.

This week was pretty good. We had interviews with President, which went pretty well. At one point, though, he said a word and asked if I knew what it meant in English, and I swear to you, I knew the word but could not remember what it was in English.  He watched me struggle for 10 seconds before deciding that I was probably just lying and told me the word. That moment has been haunting me these past couple of days. 

The cherry blossoms are back. The city I'm in right now did not go light on the blossom tree budget, so the whole city is plastered with these thangs, and it is absolutely beautiful. These blossoms were here when I got here, so I'm having nostalgic moments every now and again about Korea. It's super weird to have nostalgic moments for Korea instead of only the U.S. now.

Those of you who said you would “kill the male cold” for me… where you at? It got way worse, and I've been dying the last week, haha. My voice dropped an octave Saturday and Sunday, which had me singing “Your Man” by Josh Turner—probably not the most appropriate thing for a missionary to be singing, but when life gives you lemons nah mean

Johannes Kim received the Holy Ghost in sacrament meeting last week, and Elder Keate and I were able to stand in the circle. That was a pretty awesome experience. I went on a baller exchange with my beloved Elder Kofoed, who gave me some really good advice. It was the best weather, too.

We were walking through the train station, and there was a lady standing right in the middle of the path, offering very little room to get past her on either side. Elder Kofoed asked her to move, but she just looked at us and did the sassiest “ughhhhh” I have ever seen. She didn’t move an inch for us, so we just had to kinda plow behind her to get past. I was so confused why she had all that attitude for no reason at all. So strange.

Spiritual Thought: I haven’t been able to listen to much conference yet, but from what I’ve heard so far, there’s a big focus on helping others and ministering. I listened to a President Monson talk a while ago where he said the sweetest news you’ll ever hear is to have someone tell you that your loving words made an impact and helped their life. We get to be God’s hands in the work of answering prayers when we’re listening for our assignments.

Current Weight: 187.83 

Reinforcements 3/30/2026

 Every week we set a goal as a district at district council to focus on something throughout the next week. This week we decided to focus on finding and they wanted to "find two people a day" per companionship, which I was against because last time we did that goal we did horribly. I tried to convince them to do 1 person and they said I ain't had no faith, but I'm a big believer of setting goals that are accurate and achievable cause I hate it when we only hit 20% of our goals. Anyways, long story short, me and my comp popped off and have found 15 people so far, out of the 21 that the district has found. At least we're on track... Shoutout to the office elders for having found almost all the other ones even though they're in the office almost the whole day, no excuses for the rest though fr. 


We didn't do any official finding time, all we did was find on the way to appointments. On the train ride to the church my comp and I were in separate cars. I looked through the glass doors separating the two train cars and could see him about 40 feet to my right, and then I looked to my left to try to see if there was someone I could talk to. I don't know how my comp did this but he somehow got into my car and silently closed that 40 foot gap in like 3 seconds to wisper in my ear, "erm.. ν˜Ήμ‹œ KakaoTalk μžˆμ–΄μš”?" In this stupid stupid voice and I bout died laughing haha. 

Some bozo in the mission has been pocketing tithing money from our travel reimbursements so now we don't get them anymore. I go through 100,000 won every two weeks in travel, so now we have to choose between getting to appointments or getting food. Pray for a miracle please. 

We went with some other elders to do some basketball finding and we were lowkey getting whooped in a USA vs. Korea basketball match until like 6 Chinook and Blackhawk helicopters flew super low over us and hyped us up hard. We came back and won after that haha. Have a good week.

Spiritual Thought: The Book of Mormon is real and baller. 
Current weight: dunno 

Erm ν˜Ήμ‹œ 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 ...