Suwon was my first area to serve after leaving the MTC in seoul.
I do remember you. I believe we were in the same district or zone.
I also remember the bishop, Chi & his family. It was very sad how he got killed in the car accident.

do you remember the baptizm which we had to break the ice on the lake and how we had to run to a neighboring house or something to borrow the hammer (?)!

J.D.–thanks very much for the compliment…but you’re still not helping me figure out who you are!

Abe–it’s always a delight to find out you’re reading T&S. Thanks for that kind memory; I seem to recall that Melissa and I went to the MTC that morning, hoping to see you off, but you’d already left for the airport, and so we quickly drove up to Salt Lake, hoping to catch you. I’m glad we did, and I’m glad the stuff I gave you (including this essay) was of some help to you. Really, I was just “paying it forward”….a lot of the stuff I gave you had been given to me, six years before, when I left on my mission, by our cousin Bobby Church. He just showed up there on the sidewalk in front the of the MTC, as we were waiting to get on the bus to SLC, and thrust a packet of material into my hands with a hug and “Good luck!” I’ve lost most of what he gave me, and which I copied to give to you, but I think I might still have a couple of essays and sermons from that moment 20 years ago still kicking around somewhere.

Then, Russell…… you and Melissa arrived. THANK YOU!!!! We hugged and you handed me a packet of several church talks and essays. I still have that packet. The two items contained within that I read more times, many more times than any of the others was a typed out prayer given by then (when he gave the prayer) Elder George P. Lee and your essay “Last Night in Suwon”. “Last Night” meant a great deal to me on my mission. Not only did I find comfort in it because it was written by my brother, but I really loved and needed the messages it communicated to me.

Thank you, Russell, for both of your “missionary” posts here. And thank you for being there for me at the airport…………..see, Elder (whatever-his-name-was) I have people too………..

I wish my last days in Korea could have been as reflective as yours. At some point during my mission, I had lost my passport, and didn’t realize it until I was doing my final packing. Those days I thought I would visit old friends in previous areas were instead spent trying to work through the red tape at the US Embassy. I still can’t imagine that it had been stolen–there were as many blond-haired, blue-eyed Koreans as there were tall pale redheaded ones.

Nate, reading your experience reminds me of a companion I had who was also a tall redhead. When we got on the buses, he would stick his head up the air vents in the roof of the bus, and the cha-jang would be laughing so hard she would’t take our tokens as we got off the bus. I never made it out of Seoul, but also never really got to the country. My mission was spent in the suburbs. From the comments above, I see I just missed mjp, since I arrived in April of ’78. The world of Korean missionaries is small, but not that small.

I finally got a bit of a chance to enjoy Korea when I went back as a serviceman with the Air Force. My wife and I lived on the economy, and the only reason we got the apartment we did was that I was willing to drink the landlord’s water and eat his kimchi. He had signed a contract with another couple, but broke it for the novelty of having a Korean-speaking tenant (he even lowered the rent for us, too).

It’s in the course of doing something other than pure socializing (frequently doing something that helps them, and not because we’re friends), that I grow to love them, like them, or otherwise place some value on the relationship. A lot of the time these relationships are very one-sided, limited, or not brought about by choice, and still they’re just as they should be. For that reason I can’t see much difference between the relationships I had with my comps and investigators and the ones I have with just about everyone else.

I can understand the point you’re making here, and in essence I agree with it. Of course, any relationship that exists in any context other that of some purely consecrated, very humble and uncomplicated community (and perhaps even within those) is going to have some instrumental aspect to it. People have goals, and those goals involve other people; it is goals and aims and ideals and intentions that bring us into interactive relationships with others so often in the first place. Thus, I can allow that the presence of intentions needn’t necessarily undermine a non-instrumental appreciation of others; I can even imagine that instrumentality can be a school to help one reach the level of charity in our relationships that Jesus calls us to. Still, all that being said, there are still the material, bureaucratic, procedural aspects of missionary work, all the stuff which goes beyond the conceptual and into the temporal and the technological. If, in spite of all that crap, you can still honestly say that you feel your relationships with others as a missionary and your relationships with others today aren’t all that different, than either A) you were a truly excellent and spiritual missionary, in a truly excellent and spiritual good mission environment (in which case, I’m happy for you), or B) we’re defining our terms very differently here (this is the most probable explanation), or C) you were super lucky.

You are using the term “instrumentalism” in a very creative and layered way–picking up strands of (i) being an instrument in God’s hand; (ii) being unconstrained or excused from by certain ethical norms or social relationships; and (iii) focusing on ends rather than means.

I would love to see you develop those ideas further.

You might be interested in the text accompanying fn 15 in the recent article article about professionalism and legal ethics in the Buffalo Law Review by Christopher Whelan.

I’m not sure it’s true that in ordinary relationships we meet others only or primarily as agents unto ourselves, any more than we do as missionaries. I meet my colleagues, students, even relatives and children in the context of something other than pure friendship-for-myself. It’s in the course of doing something other than pure socializing (frequently doing something that helps them, and not because we’re friends), that I grow to love them, like them, or otherwise place some value on the relationship. A lot of the time these relationships are very one-sided, limited, or not brought about by choice, and still they’re just as they should be. For that reason I can’t see much difference between the relationships I had with my comps and investigators and the ones I have with just about everyone else.