Late for Church and Planting Seeds

Adam here again.  On Sunday, we decided to go to church in a small branch in the northern outskirts of Seoul named Keum Cheon in Paju city.  In fact, this is the closest church building to North Korea.  In the time that I’d been gone, this city had boomed!  There were bustling streets and buildings where there had only been fields before.  We took a long bus ride for about 1 hour to get there.  It got us close, but we still had a pretty good walk.  I recognized some streets, but couldn’t find some of the landmarks I expected.  So, we got a little bit lost.  We tried asking some of the locals, but they were less than helpful (some deliberately so, little stinkers).  So, I told Sarah and the kids to play in this playground while I figured it out.

Eventually, we were able to find it, but we came a bit late.  We missed the first 2 hours, but made it for Sacrament meeting.  The tiny branch was now a ward! As we walked in, I saw someone I though I recognized, but couldn’t put my finger on who it was.  I got up and bore my testimony (which was a bit of a chore in Korean!).  As I sat down, I greeted the old branch president, who didn’t recognize me at first.  After church, we chatted and he said he had really enjoyed working with me and even had a picture of us still on his fridge!  I asked him about an investigator from a part-member family named Kim, Gwan Man.  He said he was baptized a few years earlier and had been at church that day!  I realized it was the guy I recognized earlier, but we were both much skinnier back then!  I called him up and asked if we could meet.  He said his mother wasn’t doing well and he was going to visit her in the hospital.  He said he would come to the church after the hospital and see if we were still around.  He gave each of the kids a chocolate, which Ady promptly mad a mess of!

We decided to meet him again for dinner when we came back to Seoul the following week after our trip to Jeju Island.  It was so incredible to see these members still stalwart in the gospel and to see that there were some seeds planted while I was here that came to fruition.  What a cool experience!

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