Little Miracles, Unique Places

So much can happen in such a little time.  More and more I realize there are no coincidences in this work.  Just as Alma met Amulek as he reentered the city after being chased away, the Lord puts people in places to have an impact on lives.

A few weeks ago we had a young Philippine missionary that had to come to Korea at a different time than other missionaries from the MTC because her visa would expire if she waited the extra days.  When she arrived in Korea, airport immigration reviewed her visa and somehow it had been cancelled.  The poor young lady was not able to see us nor we to see her.  She called on the phone in tears anxious to be with us, but was locked in an isolation room until the next day to fly to somewhere else.  Later it was determined she would go back to Manila to await the new visa.  That is all the story we knew at that time except to add that as she called in tears wondering what to do I counseled her, "Sister, you are a missionary, act like a missionary.  Things will work out."

Well, this past week, young Sister Canete arrived at the airport again with a new visa.  We waited all evening, but found she didn't come out the gate we expected her.  We finally had her paged and were united.  It truly was a joyful reunion.  At that point we learned the rest of the story.

This tiny little soul had been placed in an isolation room with many, many other individuals not being allowed into the country.  There were many people in tears.  Sister Canete speaks several languages of the Philippines, English and a little Korean.  Unfortunately, the room was filled with individuals from many other Asian countries, not including the Philippines.  She could not communicate well with any of them.  Most were women.  There were many in tears.  Sister Canete's companion at the MTC had given her a gift of chocolate as she departed for Korea.  As she sat in the isolation room and considered her options, she said she remembered my words to act like a missionary.  She stopped her crying and started sharing her chocolate and started talking to many others.  One woman from Thailand spoke no Korean and a little English.  They talked about religion and about God. The woman was raised Buddhist but was willing to listen to our little missionary.  By the time she left the next day she had acquired contact information and a desire to meet the missionaries in Bangkok.  In the end, this young lady had eased the panic, fear and unhappiness of many individuals.  She is a ball of energy and anxious to work with her new companion, Sister Capener.

This was a week of training for our mission leadership council.  During the month of October they will focus on certain things as Terri and I feel impressed to share across the mission.  This group of 24 takes the information to the remainder of the missionaries in zone training meetings and then on to district meetings.  This is a great group.

The sun was so bright outside, we decided to take the picture inside.  Here's fun picture. We had in this meeting the tallest missionary and the shortest missionary.  My Terri is just under 5'2" tall which should give you some perspective on the height of these two powerful missionaries.  We truly love Elder Eads and Sister Diano.  Height doesn't measure their capacity and their influence!

From a cultural standpoint, during a recent visit into the city we had the opportunity to quickly stop by two famous statues.  The first is the statue of King Saejong, the founder of the Korean language nearly 700 years ago.  Formerly based more on Chinese, this king created a phonetic language based on letters and not picture characters as was the Chinese custom.  Terri wants to have a chat with him when she gets to heaven and ask him "what where you thinking!" he created a very difficult language.  The children here don't seem to think so, only the missionaries and other foreigners.  October 9 was the day set aside to celebrate the creation of the Korean language.  On the side of his statue podium are the characters he created.

The other statue is of Admiral Yi Sun Shin. He was the commander of a fleet of what were called Turtle Boats.  You can find a little more about him here: Admiral Yi Sun Shin.

Since we travel so much we always have an interesting treat for you.  Check out the little wrecker used to haul away vehicles from accident sites.  It's hardly bigger than the cars they haul.  I've only seen one in action and the camera was not easily found at the time.  They do get the job done!

Here's a place we didn't check out, but the name was interesting.  Anyone know what bubbletea is?  The waffles I can go for, don't drink coffee, but the bubble tea was intriguing...

We found this interesting little toy box every child would love to have in their room... Maybe grandpa can be creative in a few years.

We had a wonderful dinner at the home of a local church leader.  Very unusual for Korea, he has nine children.  Three or four are grown and moved out, but he has the saint of a wife who cooked for a group of leaders and invited us.  All but two of us ate on the floor which is pretty traditional.  There was not enough room for us on the floor so they set us up at a table.  My knees were grateful, but my pride was hit when I looked at this picture which seems to represent us as the leaders of the kingdom.  The food was wonderful and the fellowship phenomenal.  These parents have a neat little sign on their piano that says in Korean, "We will serve a mission as a couple in 2029, let's prepare".  Their youngest is about 12.  In 13 years they believe they will be in a position to be missionaries like us. They are a wonderful family.

 

Once again, we are overwhelmed with the kindness, welcome, and love shown to Terri and I. We are embraced by our missionaries wherever we go for which we are very grateful.  They definitely feel like family and treat us like loving parents.  It's fun for us.  We have 18 more new ones coming in four weeks. With that, more than half the mission is training new missionaries or have just finished training new missionaries.  The language is exceptionally difficult, but they soldier on with faith and hope that the gift of tongues will be theirs.  Here's a link to a site that says to native English speakers is one of the most difficult to master: Difficult Languages.  They get frustrated at times, but all of them work hard to master the language.  What a happy bunch!