Missionary Letters--Daejeon Korea

Well this is my last email as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day saints....ha I just wanted to say that because I realized I have never got a chance to say it in English before...It's really weird. Actually I have no idea what to think. I was just thinking this morning that faith and reality are kinda the same thing....it's whatever you chose to believe. If you chose to believe that people will accept the gospel then they do....even when they don't. If you chose to believe you are a good missionary you are....even if you feel like you aren't. The only reality is what you chose to believe, or force yourself to think. Everything in this life is about our agency and whether we chose to believe, contrary to human experience, or senses that there is an eternity. Everything in this life ends. But we are asked to live a gospel that operates on the fact that there is no end. That is faith...a hope in things not seen, because somethings are only known by experience. A blind man can explain what he "sees" with his cane, but you can never understand until you cannot see. Even a week blindfolded cannot yield the necessary paradigm to understand the blind...only submission to the darkness yields that kind of knowledge. And so we come here blind...The only danger is to forget that we are blind. This week I have been thinking about something a lot...we have never actually "seen" anything. The images that our minds process are merely light reflections, our minds process those things to comprehend what is around us....But we are still as the blind man with his cane. We can never see truth with our natural eyes, nor can we function correctly relying on our human experience because just when we think we have with our own knowledge comprehended something then eternities open, miracles happen and we "see" that we must confess that we do not comprehend God's ways. A word to your rainy friend about miracles....we ask for miracles in our lives, yet for some reason in the rain we fail to see that only through the trial does the growth necessary to qualify an experience as a miracle come. No miracle comes with out a fight and a struggle...because the simple reality that it would cease to be a miracle. I used to think that missions were all about other people. My mission president (President Nemrow) once said that a mission is about you...I really hated it when he said that. I think I understand now. If we weren't here, God's work would not cease. If i wasn't in Korea then someone else would have brought the gospel to my investigators, in reality God himself could appear to them and they would know. He uses me for me, He lets me meet them so I can know God better, so I can be blessed. If I don't proselyte then they don't miss out on the gospel...I miss out on meeting them, on loving them, on seeing the miracle. That's why there are missions...because God loves me.