The main reason I suck at blogging lately is because I do non-stop studying! Yeah I totally planned on getting out of college and not studying much if ever again. But now I am studying because I actually want to! I really want to learn how to speak Korean but my skills are so basic still that the only thing I can do is look in books until I can get a handle of basic sayings. The progress is really really slow and sometimes rather disappointing because learning Korean is super hard but at least now I have really good motivation which I am about to tell you about.
So I have been looking for a church in Korea for quite some time and I thought finding a church here would be easy because there are so many people here that go to church and there are a pretty decent amount of churches here. I was very wrong. Finding a church is not easy at all because based on a Korean friend advice, many of the churches here are closer to cults and since I cant speak Korean I can't really tell the difference. And more than that, I cant read anything to find out when the service times are or where to go / what to do. It is all really confusing and really hard. Also another thing is, you never know if a church here would be accepting of a foreigner.
So now that you understand the struggle you should also understand how awesome it was when my friend Calvin who you can see in the last blog post invited me to go to his traditional Korean church with him. This was a huge undertaking for him because everything is in Korean at the church and he took it on himself to translate everything for me so I felt comfortable. He is really involved in the church so we went to all the services and he translated for them all and for most of the time inbetween. So he basically translated for me for over 5 hours. Yeah the guy is amazing.
The music was really good. Of course it was all in Korean but every other song I could recognize and I knew the English words to. For the Korean songs I can read Hanguel but I read too slow to follow along so I am really trying to study that this week. There was a few Korean songs that were beautiful and they really made want to speak Korean so I could sing too. Fortunately I had Calvin with me to tell me the meaning of the song. I would just hum along.
The people of the church were so accepting of me! I totally didnt expect people to be hospitable to a foreigner who cant speak their language and is invading their church. But everyone took the time to say hello to which I tried to say hello in Korean back and give them respect. Everyone gave me their names which I remember about 1% of because Korean names are still very new sounds to me; it is always very very hard to remember sounds youre not used to. Infact I must admit out of the 50+ people I met I only remember Calvin's Korean name and one other persons :( Yeah, I need to work on that. But everyone was really friendly and they wanted to speak with me if they could or speak through Calvin.
So to welcome me to the church they had me come up front at the end of the young adult service and they gave me a gift. It was a nice little bound booklet so I can write down any Korean I want to learn. They had me come to the front of the service and stand infront of everyone and they all prayed for blessing for me. It was sweet.
So at the end we had a small groups Bible study which Calvin also translated for me so I was able to stay very involved. It was really nice and it was based of the Purpose Driven Life. The people in the group were very kind and helpful. Infact I even met someone my age in the group! The first 22 year old I have met in Korea. I really really really really wish I could speak their langauge because I want to speak with them directly.
We are 22!!!!
I pray in time God will help me make that happen.
After church we went out for some really tastey food that the area is famous for and no, I have no clue of what the food's name is. Anyways check it out! Calvin took this picture secretly while I was eating.
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