F. Ray Hawkins
Northern Far East Mission
October 1957 to May 1960


When the eight of us in my group arrived in Tokyo to start our missions President Paul C. Andrus told us that he was going to send two of us to Korea. He told us that living conditions there were difficult but that the Lord would more than make up for that by blessing the missionaries in spiritual ways. I will be eternally grateful that I was one of the two selected by President Andrus to go to “The Land of the Morning Calm.” 

As Elder L. Edward Brown and I walked down the stairs onto the tarmac and were met by Elder Gail Carr we had no idea how prophetic the promise of President Andrus would be. The following story is one of many that could be told as an example of the fulfillment of the promise to us by our mission president. During the early period of the work in Pusan the missionaries would occasionally go to the Pusan Park for street meetings on Sunday afternoons. They would open the meeting with a hymn in English which would draw a sizable crowd. As one missionary spoke and another translated the other two missionaries would roam among the crowd and invite people to church. Each interested person would be given a handout which contained both a map of the location of the church (suwonji yo’pae) and a brief introduction to the church.

On this particular Sunday a young woman got one of these handouts and determined that she would attend the Wednesday night meeting. As she was about the leave her humble home in the Songdo area of Pusan her older brother, who, because of the health of her parents, was the head of the household, asked her where she was going. She told him that she was going to a church meeting and he told her that he would not allow it because the family had always been Buddhist and they would not be changing. She told him she was going anyway, he picked up a walking stick and swung it at her as she ducked out the gate. The next morning the older brother entered her room to talk with her and apologize for his behavior. As they talked he noticed a card on a small table and asked her what it was. It was an articles of faith card with a colored picture of the Idaho Falls temple on it which had been given to her by one of the missionaries. The brother gazed at the picture of the temple and told her that she should continue to go to that church. He further explained that he had seen the temple in a dream he had the previous night. At the time, however, he did not know what it was. 

Chang Kyung-ja continued to attend church and was baptized. Her older sister Chang Hae-ja and one of her brothers began to attend also. This brother, Chang Young-bo, currently lives in Tahiti. These two were baptized leaving only the older brother among the siblings who had not joined the church. My companion and I studied with him and challenged him to be baptized. He expressed reservations because of the position he held in his extended family which had been Buddhists for many years. We challenged him to pray about his feelings and that we would fast and pray for him and talk about it next time we studied together. At our next appointment we prayerfully asked him how he felt about being baptized. He smiled and said that he had had a dream the previous evening in which he saw himself being baptized in the ocean at Songdo and he knew what the Lord wanted him to do. 

The Lord fulfilled in many ways the promise of the mission president that the missionaries would have spiritual experiences that would offset any physical hardships that they would encounter. He also blessed the humble people so that the foundation of the church could be laid in that wonderful land.