Life is Good: May 5th Facebook Post

Days 7,8,9, and 10 of the life is good challenge:

I started this challenge and dropped it after day six. I need closure! I'm cheating but that's OK. 

Today I would like to express my gratitude for my fellow missionaries all over the world. And I especially want to thank my district for being awesome. I love these Elders and Sisters. They are all awesome! 

I challenge you guys to a modified version of this challenge. Just post one thing your thankful for. This challenge goes to anyone who is reading this post and especially my district. Love you guys! Read your scriptures!

Another Episode of Missionary with Missionary [week 22]

Well hello you lovely lot. welcome to another episode of missionary with missionary. Episode 42: the answer to life the universe and everything. So since we have last corresponded, many things have corresponded. My companion and I got ourselves a nice man to commit to being baptized on march 26th of 2022. What a cool guy he is. His name is 병춘 Byung Choon He is in his fifties and speaks fluent English. He lived in the states for 20 years. He has been binge-listening to the Book of Mormon and is through Second Nephi after only one week of reading. What a cool guy. 

There is an election going on in Korea right now. There is a red side and a blue side. There are cars with huge megaphones on top, driving around screaming to "Vote for the blue guy" or "No vote for the red guy!" And there was a cool rally type of deal on the way to the grocery store there were tons of people lined up on the sidewalk dancing to a political song written about their politician. There were two of them one block apart. One was red and kind of hyped-up angry sounding, and the other was blue and chill out sounding. It was neat. I want to say who I want to win, but I haven't read so much as a news paper or Wikipedia article about Korean politics, so I'm going to not vote. President Nelson seems to be a solid guy. I'll listen to what he has to say. 

Oh! Guess what? We got transfer calls yesterday. I'm going to be leaving Nonsan, and moving to Boondong! My new companion's name is Elder Carter. Seems like a nice guy from what I can tell by his picture. He is the Zone leader for the Gyonggi zone. That means I'll get to go on some sweet exchanges every once in a while. 

I had a lot of pizza this week. Let me tell you about that. This is interesting. 

• SO! The first stuff we had was grocery store pizza. It was frozen, so we had to unfreeze it by putting it in a microwave oven. And THEN we ate the pizza. It was a couple clicks under ok. Like if I was very hungry and everything tastes better, then it would be like a 5/10. 
• Then we got free dominos pizza the same day from a friend of the last missionaries that served here. It was DELICIOUS. I wish I was more hungry. It was more of the shepherd's-pie-type pizza. It has more cheese and less potatoes than shepherds pie, and it has pizza crust and is served in flat triangles instead of thick squares. 
• AND THEN! The next day we met with some other elders after district council and went and got some pizza. It was gross. The normal pizza was lacking in all three basic ingredients: being bread, cheese, and tomato sauce. And the crazy Korean pizza was like one centimeter of bread and an inch and a half of cheese. It tasted good as I was eating it, but then one elder said it was like Play-oh, and I realized he was right. Play-Doh Pizza. AND THEN!!! We had pizza the next day as well. It was a solid 6/10, oh and we also had more another day when we brought a teaching friend some food. So like five times in one week. It was a culinary adventure to be sure. I like the shepherds pie pizza and the marinated beef pizza the best. The normal American pizza isn't good here. They make their own stuff better. Holy smokes let's talk about something else.

I am super excited we got someone on date for baptism. There is also a teaching friend that seems to like me more than my companion, so I'm going to be like "I'm leaving which is so sad. I'll never see you again... unless you invite me to your baptism." It simply won't fail. It's mathematically impossible for that to not work. I have the spirit on my side, my rugged good looks, and my charming Korean baby- level speech proficiency. I speak like a toddler, but that's actually pretty good. I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to communicate anything, but I can.  So it's all good in the hood. 

I love seeing how happy the church is making these people that I am teaching. It makes me happy too. Hmokay, I love you guys. Have yourselves a splendid week. 

Truly Truman

PICTURES!

The black and white circles on the brown square is a board game called GO. It is the second oldest board game in the world (with the same rules as those at the time of its creation) To backgammon. Sennet is the Oldest Board game in the world which is an Egyptian board game, but no one knows how it was played. The picture was taken at the end of the game and lots of the stones were taken off the board to help with scoring. It is one of my favorite board games ever! I love two player strategy games. pretty awesome and nerdy huh? I can't choose between GO, chess, and Shogi. then there is also Korean chess 장기. nerdy stuff, but I love it. I gave my companion a 20 point head start, and I haven't counted up the stones yet, but I'm pretty sure I won. The game is played by taking turns placing stones on the board and trying to surround your opponents stones with your own and capturing them. It's so fun. 

There is a picture of two 3D printed Kirby's. They were in a Baptist church that me and elder Titensor went to. It turned into a jolly fun bible bash. I don't know why we went in the first place, besides to say hi to the pastor, but it was still a weird idea. 

There is a picture of me with my new DRIP! For those of you not in the know, drip is a stupid word all the kids are saying these days to mean bling, or fashionable stuff. Anyways. There is me with my new Hello Kitty phone case and a super-duper cheep watch that looks expensive from a distance. There is tons of unauthentic stuff you can buy here. Like supreme T-shirts and Adidas and such. It's all made by some cool third party or something. 

There are some false Idols. Very cool. Really pretty. I would be more respectful of the religious statues, except they put gift shops in all of the Buddhist temples, so they seem to be on the same page as me anyway. 

There is a picture of a sign that prohibits being mean. I love the signs here in Korea. I can never tell how serious the signs are. I think the graphic designers just had a good sense of humor or didn't take themselves too seriously. 

The group picture is of my district. Those studs. 

There aren't many physical keys here. It's all electronic, but these keys are physical as you can see. And if you look closely...they are crazy keys. They just look wild. I wonder how the locks work if there needs to be pins pointing in every direction? Hmmm interesting. 

Arrived in Korea! [week 10]

From Elder Renfroe's Mom:

After an EIGHTEEN HOUR flight, Elder Renfroe landed in Korea on December 3, 2021 (His great-Grandma Mollie's birthday!)  He is always in the back row for photos, so we know how to find him easily 😁.  

Front row: Elder Hwang Jeha, The Cannons, Sister Sandra Jackson Haglund, Sister Grace Sunhong Min, Elder Staley Binks and Elder Lee SeongHo Back row: President HwangGwangbom, Elders Jared Harden, Caden Greene, Phoenix Fisher, Mason Prock, Gavin Dickey, Truman Renfroe

And this video made Elder Renfroe's mom SO HAPPY!

I had to laugh when Truman finally called us, not to tell us about his flight, or Korea, or what happens next . . . but to ask us to watch out for confirmation codes so he could set his phone up.  

DO NOT anger the haircut lady [Week Eight]

Hello, everybody! How are you all doing on this fine day? 

I am doing pretty alright. It's been a good week. Made some new friends whose names I cannot recall at this time. And I learned some Korean words, and I got a haircut.  For those of you about to come to the MTC (*cough cough* Caleb), DO NOT anger the haircut lady. She is a scary lady! She got to the salon and started angry-talking us where to sit. Some idiot elder told her that he "was supposed to get a haircut yesterday at 2:30 and you guys weren't there." And she was like, "Yes, we were. We got done early and waited for a half hour till 2:45, and you guys didn't show up!" She was talking smack about that elder (and her husband) when she wasn't yelling at us to rotate seats.

So yeah, don't mess with her or she'll talk some serious smack on you and give you a bad haircut. 

I showed Elder Prock how to play Janggi (Korean chess) this week, and he beat me the first game, (because I was going easy on him) and the second game (because he isn't terrible) and I'm about to beat him in an ongoing game. Fun times. 

I brought the Janngi pieces, but we had
to make a Janngi board out of cardboard

I'm leaving in a weekish. Either next Monday or Tuesday. I don't have my flight plans yet, but I do have my visa. (HUZZAH for visa!) We had an early departure meeting because this coming week is Thanksgiving. And what we learned at that meeting was that we should follow the instructions given on our itinerary.  Really useful info from that hour-long meeting. Just incredible what you can learn in one hour. Actually, it was uplifting and they psyched us up to get into the field, so that was good I guess. 

OH! Brother George Clooney (the choir director. I found out his real name but he will always be George Clooney, Jr. to me) told us if there was one week to show up to choir it would be this coming week, and he dropped some subtle hint-bombs that there would be an apostle or one of the presidency coming next week for Thanksgiving. Exciting!🤪 

PICTURES!

OK I'll tell you their names in the order their faces appear, but I'll tell you in the order as If their faces are Korean characters. So left to right in conglomerates of 2, 3, or 4. Going either 12 / 34 / 1 / 2 / 3 / 12 / 3 / 12...

Just kidding, I'll just tell you their names. The girl that's wearing a blue dress and a green coat in two pictures, and a blue vest in the others, is Sister Rich. She's cool. Southern accent. She's going to Canada ; Japanese speaking.

The fellow with glowing eyes and throwing up gang signs is Elder Belt. He is Native American and Japanese speaking. He has some cool rings. Super cool guy.

The guy standing next to Elder Belt and Sister Rich with the huge smile and yellow tie is Elder Binks. I love this guy! He is super cool and we are going to the same mission. I hope we are companions after we both know the language because he is a nice dude.

Elder Binks, Elder Belt, Sister Rich, Elder Prock in background

Elder Fisher is the guy with the super short tie, glasses, and a dark plaid jacket. He is so chill and funny. We are going to the same mission as well.

The three sisters on the left of the two dark blurry pictures are sister Johnston (top) fenberg (right) and Peterson (left) they are all super nice. They are all going to Korea Seoul. Sister Hong is not in any of these pictures, but she is in this group as well. 

Everyone else in these pictures are irrelevant swine whose names I don't know. (Except for Elder Prock my companion who is in all the pictures)

Sisters Johnston (top) Fenberg (right) and Peterson (left)
Elder Fisher in plaid jacket, 

The picture of the temple is the temple.

The picture of me is ME! 

Korea vs Japan [Week Four]

Annyeonghaseyo! 

It's me, Elder RENFROE! The MTC has been a jolly fun time. I have  been playing volleyball almost every morning for my daily exercise. I'm alright because I played every year at family reunions. The Korean districts played the Japanese districts. The Japanese Elders got to the MTC last Wednesday. Almost all of them were reassigned already because Japan is not open to foreigners yet because of COVID-19. Korea is still open and ready to get PREACHED! My district has been looking forward to having a feud with the Japanese missionaries, so when they got to the gym to play volleyball it was really competitive on the Korean side, but the Japanese were just trying and failing fun because we destroyed them three times in a row. There were some cool Japanese elders and sisters, I met this elder named Elder Shisui. I don't know how to spell his name, but he was awesome! He was wearing a Naruto shirt, so you know he's one of the real ones. 

The KSSM MTC district! Elders Del Priore, Livingston, Griswold,
Prock, Renfroe, Dickey, Harden, Fallon, and Greene

Me and my companion went to the temple again today. That was a good experience of course. 

My district is doing good at Korean, we just learned about "glue" which is how you can make things past tense or make sentences in middle form of speech. There are three levels of speech in Korean. As missionaries we will mostly be using middle form and a little high form. Low form is for best friends and your spouse, so not for the missionaries. 

Elder Harden keeps winning at chess...that makes me mad. 

I just found out that the devotional with Elder Holland was moved to like two weeks after we leave instead of being on the last week we are here, so that is a bummer. We get great devotionals every Sunday and Tuesday from good speakers, so it's still a good time. 

There is a group of dudes in my building that sing their sweet little hearts out every night. They used to sing while in the showers, but someone told them to stop (because it's weird to sing with dudes in the showers maybe? IDK) So now they sing in the stairwell so the entire building can hear them instead of just one floor, so that's neat. 

I got a package from my mom that had a couple things I forgot, some DELICIOUS cookies, and printed memes with nice notes from my family on the back. OH! and my Grandma Patsy sends really nice and beautiful letters to me every week. I'll attach a picture later tonight. They look so cool. 

I really love being in my Korean classes. The instructors are all so good at teaching because the Holy Ghost is helping them out. I learn about what being a good missionary is all about in Brother Waggner's class, and my faith in the gift of tongues is always strengthened in Brother Harley's class. Sister Cho is the best at teaching Korean, and Sister Kim can invite the spirit better than any of them (if the district is ready to receive it). Then Brother WoolWine is really smart about Korean, and good at teaching us a lot in not that much time.

I can't wait to get in the mission field and get to know the people, and maybe help them out in life with the gospel of Jesus Christ. That's the goal. I love you guys! Pray for me to receive the gift of tongues.

Truly Truman 

Elder Renfroe