April 14, 2013

Everything is going well here in Suwon, the weather has been kind of
crazy but other than that all is well. We are still in the process of
finding new investigators at this point, but the ones we have are
doing well. One is named Jang Deok Hwan and he is really really really
smart. He's a psychologist and majored in religious studies so he's
really knowledgable on the different religions in the world so it's
always fun to meet with him. His conversion process will most likely
be a pain, but he's reading the book of mormon so that's a good start.
He has really cool theories about religion that are really fun to
hear. One that he told us was about the background of the buddhism and
Christianity, essentially how they came about. His belief right now is
that religion was created as a way for us to live better lives and to
guide us, I'm not entirely sure if he actually believes there is a God
or not though....he says he does, but his ideas sometimes conflict.
Anyways, he was saying if you look at an agricultural society, in
order to thrive they need to work together and share things because it
is a society in which you don't really move around. You grow your
plants and pretty much stay there, so it is good to have a big group
of people gathered together working together in order to thrive. But
in a desert society, you have to move around and hunt for your food,
so it's usually better to be in small groups or go around individually
because resources are so scarce and it doesn't make sense to provide
for a big group of people. He compared this to Buddhism and
Christianity. In India, it was largely an agricultural society where
they shared things so when you look at there religion, most likely it
would be based off of sharing and non violence. There are many Gods
who "share" their godhood and they work together non violently. But if
you look at Jerusalem (a desert society) they had to thrive
individually so their God would most likely be individual and in turn
that's why we are only allowed to worship 1 God. Anyways, 
his ideas were pretty cool, I bet I sound pretty retarded trying to
type them all out here, but it sounded cool when he told us. Anyways,
aside from hearing his theories every week, everything is pretty much
the same, we had General Conference this weekend (my last one as a
missionary) and it was really good. It was kind of sad because about
1/5 of our members actually came out and saw it, but those that did I
hope were at least uplifted in some way. Last week was pretty cool
also because while we were visiting our members and giving them
message cards we got invited in by one of our members who's husband is
a non member and she fed us. It was so cool, we had a great
opportunity to talk with him and get to know him a little bit. He
really likes golf so that's all I talked about with him which was
really cool. Before I left he gave me a sleeve of nice golf balls as
well so I'm excited to use them in a couple months when I get home! I
have 3 1/2 months left which is pretty crazy to think about, time is
moving so fast so I have to make sure I get the most out of my
remaining time here in Korea!