Elder Hanks' Knocking in Korea: Never thought I'd be writing this from home

So I'm sure many or all of you know now, but I'm now home now! Because of that Kung Flu guy, all the foreign missionaries have been sent home for a 2 week Quarantine. So here I am writing this email from my home computer, kind of crazy.

But let's go through the week, right?? We actually got to go outside last week during the quarantine!! And it was just to throw away trash so our apartment didn't reek, haha. But somehow I have been able to make a friend with a 65 year old guy who calls himself "stone" and he doesn't even live on Jeju, he lives in Busan. But we would always call and talk for like 20-30 minutes about random stuff, haha. He was a fun guy.

I continued to share Olan Rogers/Brian Regan stories with the other Elders in my zone, and they were very appreciative of that. Said that was one of the bets parts of the day.

AND then there was that one day! We were studying in the morning when we got a call saying to pack all our bags as soon as we could, and we would be going to Busan that day. Then we got a text just a few minutes later telling us that all Foreigner missionaries would be returning home within the next 3 days... So that was one of the weirdest moments of my life. But we just hard to start getting everything together, we had to get rid of all our food, and try to leave the area in a way that would make it easy for the next people to pick it up when they came.

So that was last friday, and we spent Saturday at the mission headquarters. There were just about 55 missionaries that left at this time. So we just watched as groups of missionaries got sent off to the airport, super sad. We still had to eat though, and an Elder and I got put in charge of cooking for what was first just 13 Elders, but ended up being about 30 or so missionaries, haha. So we spent 3 hours cooking a bunch of random food for all these missionaries.

Then Sunday came around, my group was the last group to leave. so we got to watch everyone else leave, then we left sunday morning. Before we left, we got to have a little testimony meeting with President, the other returning missionaries, and all the Koreans (through a phone call). It was super sad, I may have cried, can't quite remember. But we had about 20 hours of traveling, and now i'm back home!

I would have never thought something like this could happen, but God's hand is in this. He is guiding and taking care of all of us missionaries.

Thankfully I don't have to be released, so will just be serving here until my 2 weeks is up and I go out to serve in the Oklahoma City, Oklahoma mission.

I loved Korea so much. I can never forget that wonderful country. I learned countless wonderful life lessons there.