A water house on my tongue

Oct 22 2018

A beautiful village

Hello!!

So it hasn't been a super eventful week, but sometimes that's just how the weeks go. it's still missionary work though, so it's always exciting!

This week started with a lot of tracting around the city and trying to just talk to everyone. Lot's of the Koreans are just content with the church or belief they have though. But we did a lot of walking, we ended up walking around a mountain literally, haha. Even though it isn't like a Utah mountain, it was still pretty big. We found a sweet little korean village in the valley too, so we got to talk to some people there. We also got one of the people we're teaching, ............., to come to church, and the members here are so great and welcomed him so warmly! I feel bad because I literally have no idea what he says when he talks to me, haha. So we have been relying on members to help teach him, haha.

Fun church name I saw this week: we saw some other missionaries from a church called the "Good Fruit Church". So you can tell there are all sorts of churches here, haha. Unfortunately they weren't giving our fruit samples though.

one of the many churches here

Kind of funny story: So first off, in korean culture, they don't really drink during the meal. I don't know why, but they just don't. Also when they eat, they usually have a soup as part of the meal, that tends to be very hot. So we went to a members home for a meal one night, and they brought the food out, and I even knew it was hot! haha, I could see the steam coming off the soup. But being the guy who built his house upon the sand, I ate a mouthful of very hot soup and other stuff in it. haha, so I tried to compose myself, especially since there was no water to give me relief, and just ended up pushing the food to the top of my mouth while some silent tears came out of my eyes, haha. It finally cooled enough just for me to quickly swallow it, and luckily no one saw my little tears, haha. But I guess that the food was so hot I burned the inside of my mouth, and ended up getting a 물집, or a blister in my mouth. In korean, blister literally just translates to "Water House". So it was a very interesting and not very pleasant experience, but I think it's funny now, so hopefully one of you finds it enjoyable.

That was my week! The gospel is true! the works move forward! I encourage all of you to continue to go through this past general conference's talks and receive even further revelation from our prophets!

Much Love,

Elder Hanks

I am from Tuesday

Oct 15 2018 

Hello everyone!!!

We only have like 45 minutes to email today, so I'll try to get the majority of what happened, and again if I can't get to a personal email today, I'm sorry! I'll try next week!

But the mission is amazing!! Every day continues to be another day full up uplifting and enlightening experiences. We experience a lot of rejection because many Koreans seem to be content with their life, and frankly there are a lot of churches here, so it's hard to get the truth out there when so many people think they have already found it. Like honestly I've never seen so many different churches before in my life. One church was called the Grape Tree Church. So there's a variety.

Last P-day we went to a board game cafe, it was oddly entertaining, haha. and today we went to a Buddhist temple up in the mountains, so that was a cool experience. I also decided to join the Mission Choir and today we did a practice for like 3 hours, not including the travel to the mission office, so that takes up a lot of time, but it is a lot of fun. We get to travel throughout the mission and do performances for stakes and stuff. 

We were also able to watch general conference this week, and that was s great. All those messages are so inspired for each and every one of us, and the church as a whole. The Apostles of the Lord receive constant revelation for this church, for which I am so grateful for. 

The korean is still a little hard, understanding the Busan accent is difficult, and understanding the language is difficult too, haha. One member asked me where I was from, and I responded with "last tuesday"... so I still got some progressing to do.

Last thing, which I think is funny. The topic of my email comes from a conversation I had with my companion, Elder Gailey. I love elder Gailey, and he is very smart and thinks very deep about a lot of stuff. So one day while we were doing street contacting, he started talking about Mars. And then it led to how he wasn't sure how the church would work if people start living on Mars. I thought this conversation was great, because it was just so out of the blue and I had no idea why, but I was very grateful because it was entertaining. 

So there's my update, still adjusting, and always loving. From general conference I found that the common theme and answer to every issue or problem is Love. If you have Charity, the pure love of Christ, nothing can go wrong. "charity never faileth" So i hope we can all strive to have charity. :)

Much Love,

Elder Hanks

Also I guess we are a facebook mission, so if you want to hear some scriptures and other updates throughout the week, my name is just Max Hanks. :)

I have arrived!

Oct 7 2018

Our Travel group at the SLC airport

So I'm in Korea!!!

So it's been two weeks, the last week of the MTC was great! We got our non-member TRC person to commit to baptism, so that was great. And now that I'm out here in korea, I really miss the all you can eat food at the MTC, cause it's just not the same here haha. So the MTC was great! The flight here was very long. As we were pulling into Busan, the plane braked rather abruptly, and one of my book of mormons flew off my chair and traveled a few isles up the plane. When we were allowed to get up, I saw someone pick it up, and I never saw it again! So I was okay with that! haha

Korea has been great though! My companion is Elder Gailey from Midway, Utah. He has been super helpful getting me situated here. The members here are wonderful, my current area is 금정 (km jeong? - Geumjeong) and it has probably the nicest lds church is korea, so that's great. There are a lot of members, and they are all awesome! I can't understand like anyone, so that's something I'm trying to work on. Busan is known for having like an accent compared to the rest of Korea, so I gotta try and adjust to it.

Interesting Fact story time thing: So one of the first interesting things I learned when I got to korea was Garbage. So apparently they are very organized with their trash. You can only through paper

away together, plastics together, metals, glass, and then stuff that can just be burned (and for that stuff you have to buy a special bag to put the stuff away in). So it is very confusing, but the place we are staying at, the last elders left a huge pile of garbage there, like a huge pile. So we spent 4 hours just trying to organize and get rid of some of it. Then the next day a typhoon hit, so we had to stay inside that day too. So I've had to stay inside a lot of my time here, but it's all good! because God has a plan, and there are no such things as coincidences, so everything is happening how it is supposed to!

Our Kitchen

My companion studying

It's so great! I love the work! I'm adjusting to some of the food, the language, but everything else is great! We can't view emails throughout the week, and don't have very long on P-Days to email back, so if i don't get back to some of you each week, i apologize in advance, haha.

our study / office 

unpacking

Much Love,

Elder Hanks 행크스 장로

Airport phone call

Oct 1 2018

Max called us from the airport this morning around 6:30am and we were able to talk for about 40 minutes before he needed to grab breakfast before they left at 8.
He was up at 2:15 to get ready and to leave the MTC by around 4am. His companion was lucky enough to get a direct SLC- Seoul Delta flight with another Elder, while Max's group of around 8 flew SLC to Dallas, Dallas to Tokyo (13.5 hrs), Tokyo to Busan, so it will be a long travel day for them!

He really enjoyed his MTC experience and is nervous but excited to finally get to Korea. He knows that the Korean language will not come easily or quickly without the help of the Lord and the Spirit and also knows that it will be months before he will be able to converse freely on the street with people outside of a church/lesson conversation. He knows this mission will be the hardest thing he has ever done but is also grateful and excited to be serving!

His highlight while in the MTC was having the nonmember they were teaching from the Resource center commit to being baptized in the future.  It will be a week or so before we get word where Max will be serving and who his companion is, so lots of prayers for him this week would be great as he learns where the location of his first 12 weeks will be and who his companion is.

Last Days at the MTC...

Last MTC email !

Sept 24th 2018

Well this is the last email coming from the MTC! Yes, I'm still here, many people have asked me how korea is, and I wish I could tell ya! so I'll let you know in 2 weeks! We can't email next week because that's when we are traveling.

But what a week! ah man I love the MTC! But we had Elder Anderson come and speak at the MTC, and he just brought the sweetest spirit into the room! it was so great, he went and shook hands with a lot of the international missionaries, and for some of them it was their first time seeing an apostle in person, so there were many people who were just stunned and in tears, it really was just such a sweet spirit.

Hosting Highlight: We got to host this past week, about time we were able to. All it really is though is just greeting the new missionaries as they get dropped off from their families, and them getting them settled and showing them to their classes to get started, but it was still great!

Singing Second: so a few elders in our transfer (the 2 districts who came and are leaving together) and I have just been practicing a song in case we wanted to perform it sometime. So the song was a medley of "if you could hie to kolob and come thou fount of every blessing" and we just decided to send it and audition the song. So they liked us, and we ended up singing yesterday for all the departing missionaries, a few hundred of them. and it's funny because there were 5 of us, and I was the only one singing the bass part, which meant I had a few solo parts, and I can't sing! so I don't even know why I was there! haha, but it ended up being so great, we all recognized the spirit there, and we were super grateful we did it. 

Miracle Moment: So if you haven't seen on the news or anything that informs you of current events, I think it's over by Spanish Fork, there have been some major fires on the mountain, like big fires. The smoke would come into provo and it just looked like a really foggy morning, for multiple mornings. So it was a big fire, and the homes near the fire were at risk of catching fire (BTW we just heard all this in a devotional, I haven't been watching KSL or anything). So the firefighters got together and made a plan to stand at one place, fight the fire, and if it got too close and they couldn't stop it, then they would just run for safety. But here's the miracle: the local stake president asked for the members of the stake to pray that the winds would cease so it would be easier to put the fire out, and their homes would not be at risk. When the firefighters got there, they found that not only had the wind changed, but that it was now blowing in a way that was holding the fires back! there's the first miracle. Here's the second, now that the fires were starting to be held back and reducing, the land was dry, and still at risk. So the stake president again asked for the members to pray that there would be rain to come down. So yesterday, when there was 0% chance of rain, one of the MTC Relief Society presidency received a message that it was just pouring rain over there, with 0% chance! So if that's not a miracle to protect the town that was almost certainly at risk of being destroyed, I don't know what is! Just a little fun miracle story :)

                          (These guys stood here like this for like 20 minutes for some reason!)

                    

                    

Fun Fact: We learned that in the story of  David and Goliath, Goliath would have been somewhere between 9'9" and 10'9", so a pretty tall dude you could say. And David would have still been in his youth as we know, and as President Hinckley once suggested, maybe about the age of a 12 year old. So you if you want to see the difference, go find a deacon and put him underneath a basketball hoop or something, and it's incredible to see how by "small and simple things, great things are brought to pass"

Anyway, won't be able to email for a while, so I love you all! If you want to send anything while I have one more week here, it is always appreciated! 

Shoutout to Grandma B. for sending some Sasparilla! :)  And then a bee feel into my drink so we are trying to save my drink! 

                    

Much Love,

Elder Hanks

Leaving the MTC....for a day

Sept 17 2018

Yobosaeyo!

So we started our non member TRC's (Training Resource Center appointments)  this past week, so we have 3 lessons a week with a non-member, and we basically are just teaching her just like we're in the field. We are teaching a woman named S..... and it is a great experience! I mean it's kind of nerving because there's like a lot riding on our teaching! we're teaching about Joseph Smith right now though, so we really just got to get her to believe in Him, and hopefully everything that follows will become a little easier.

Getting out of the MTC! 

Story Time: So we got to leave the MTC!! It wasn't actually that big of a deal though, and of course it was allowed, but it was off of the campus. The solo sister in our district needed to go get prescriptions from the BYU Health Center, and her "companions" were busy (it's just another companionship assigned to be with her basically whenever possible) so we got to take her outside to the Health Clinic. It was weird, they were playing "Living on a Prayer" in the foyer and we were like "ahh, get back satan!" Haha, just kidding we didn't actually say that, but we were a little uncomfortable, cause how do you just stop hearing when you're talking to your companion? so that was a fun highlight of the week. We saw the rest of our district in our classroom and waved to them from across the street, so that was pretty fun.

We were just released as Zone Leaders yesterday! So that was nice! It was great and I was glad to be able to get to know the elders better. We also had new missionaries come in this past week! there are 6 going to Busan, and the other 3 are going to Daejeun. So we got to do another missionary orientation for them, which was great! There are like 5 of them from the Philippines, so there are a lot of Philippinos here, and they are one of a kind! they are just so humble and unlike any of the other missionaries here! The sister in our district had her birthday last week, and it went great! we decorated our classroom and a lot of people got her little gifts and stuff, so it was great! Also, the Phillipinos in our zone got to go to Temple Square today, which means that my companion left me... So I have to go with another companionship for the majority of today, which should be great!

Celebrating Birthdays! 

Not much else has really happened, but we just keep having class every day, the korean is getting there, I know it won't get "there" by the time I get to Korea, but I'm just gonna use everything that I can! So we'll see where that gets me, haha. But we got 2 weeks from today now, it's so weird being so close! It's so exciting though! But I'm pretty sure we miss singing in General Conference by a week, but we aren't actually allowed to know for sure. Brother Eggett, the choir director, just says that they are practicing for a special opportunity on the weekend of the 7th of October, so it's not official, but it's kind of official. But it'll be okay cause I'll be in KOREA!!! So who really cares about singing in a choir when I can go serve in Korea!!

Anyway that's about it, the work is good, the gospel is true, and there's nothing better!

Much Love,

Elder Hanks

The Korean Zone! 

A random cat we found- with Elder Guthrie!