More Glorious and Bright: Beautiful coastal Donghae...

Beautiful Donghae on the Sea of Japan

It has been quite a week in Donghae! Basically I never want to leave. In Seoul you can actually see the air because it is so tainted. Here everything smells wonderful (except for the sketchy grandma we sat next to...more on that later…)

First off, my companion is SO darling. Sister Murdock

Sister Murdock with a bap burger

from Bountiful, Utah. She has an amazing sense of humor and a really strong dedication to missionary work. Donghae is a hard place to serve because not a lot of people accept the gospel here. Even the elders are having kind of a rough go. But we've already seen a lot of miracles. Donghae is crazytown when it comes to miracles. (Also it's just kind of crazy town.)

Monday: We had family home evening. Only one person came....but he definitely was enough. His name is Kim Young Min and he is crazy in the best way. Put it this way...when you go knee to knee with an old Korean man who is half Mormon, half Buddhist, a former monk with Word of Wisdom problems, and has a mysterious tumor on the back of his neck he can't explain, you know you're headed for an adventure. He's an amateur art therapist so he had me draw a volcano, a house, and a tree. From that he discerned that I like mysterious men, cloudy days, and suffer from an overactive imagination and possibly hallucinations, and that I have a great deal of inner wrath. (He told the humblest elder I know that he's a megalomaniac so I don't know how accurate it is.)

Tuesday: Probably the highlight was meeting this one girl. We're not sure what her name is but she has our number and calls ALL the time. Like 5 am. She keeps telling me I look like Anne of Green Gables. Then she tells me I look like a supermodel. (But she told my companion she was more wonderful than me. Talk about mixed signals.) She keeps asking us to vacation to Japan with her. She also has tried to give us a lot of gifts: pens, papers, receipts, and enough medication to kill a full grown bull elephant. We're not sure what it treats but I don't think she's taking it.

Wednesday: We were all settled in to have our favorite meal for lunch...but then we got this prompting to go to Samcheok. We didn't really want to go, but we did. We ended up meeting these awesome people on a bus, including a grandma that literally proselyted for us and gave us candy. She told everyone who we were and what we were doing and that they should listen to us. Bless her.

Sister Sonksen

Thursday: We met our new mission presidents!!!!!! They are super cool. President and Sister Sonksen are from Ohio and are SO awesome.

Sister Sonksen is working really hard to learn Korean. They gave us a really good training. One of the things he said that I liked was 'Carry the love of the Savior in your eyes'. I just thought that was really beautifully phrased.

Friday: We met a lot of grandmas that told us we were pretty then got on us for being single, and tried to set us up with their sons.

Saturday: Our BIG miracle! We set up a TON of appointments this week. SO many. But every single one fell through. I haven't met any of our investigators yet. We've been proselyting like crazy and have gotten a lot of numbers and given a lot of Books of Mormon out, but no dice. But Saturday we were proselyting and we were like...okay, one more person. So we talked to this nice high school student. It turns out she has already met the missionaries and really likes them! We asked when she had time and she was like "Right now". So we taught the whole Restoration on the street! It was a much needed miracle.

Sunday: we cried in the kitchen when we heard President Packer died. His talk from general conference gave me a lot of strength and happiness, and I would read all of his Ensign talks over and over in personal study. He really was an amazing man. He will be missed :(

We also met this lady who runs a 'massage shop'. Yes, we're concerned too. But she is SO nice! She was abused by her husband and the missionaries visited her every other day in the hospital. She still remembers the cookies they made her. She referred her daughter to us too and gave us earrings and a lot of food. Then she got in a strange car with a strange man and zoomed off. Yes. We are a little concerned. She REALLY needs the gospel.

It's been a fantastic week, and after email we're going to something called a 'meat party' and there is no way that could be bad so I'm super excited.

Love you all!

xoxo

Bell Chamae

Romans 15:13