Dear Sweetheart

 8/24/2025 3 things that I was grateful for today: 1. Seeing the Hi-C kids and the adults in our church today, I love how friendly and welcome they make me feel every Sunday  2. Being able to see  아빠  in a good mood for his birthday dinner + really good food prepared by 엄마! 3. Being able to call w Mina and play games together! I'm grateful for the effort that she puts in to wanting to understand me better. Our Overcooked chemistry was insane today!

For all of my undergrad, I was the proud, self-proclaimed president of the "happily single, not ready to mingle" club. And going into my first gap year, I didn't really expect things to change. I mean, I'd be back home and seeing even less people in my age range, so I thought that the next opportunity for me to meet someone would be in professional school. So, as per my life motto, I had learned to lower expectations so that the results could overdeliver. Fastforward to the time I was preparing to lead a GMMA mission trip to Honduras for my first time and as a baby RC I had learned pretty early on that for most of the responsibilities that were expected of you, you had to figure out for yourself. And often, the best way to do that is by asking a whole bunch of experienced people what they had done before. So when I asked Dr Chung Sr who I should ask for guidance with the VBS schedule, I was intrigued when he told me to seek out a third year undergrad missions coordin...

He was funny looking. Funny. Really funny. There were weekly zoom meetings on Saturday mornings for our January mission trip, and he would be just waking up. Somehow, just looking at him made me laugh. I was on zoom with a friend, Anita, who was also going on this trip, and she laughed along, probably because of how silly I looked.  The meetings themselves weren't too interesting. After all, by the third time, it was the same repertoire, and I knew them. But what I didn't know, or who I didn't know, was this guy who kept yawning in the corner of the screen. With the spontaneous energy that Saturday mornings give, especially when accompanied by a close friend, I sent this man Zoom DMs. And the funny thing is, he replied.  If you know anything about Zoom, it's easy to DM the wrong person. I did that a couple of times, which made this much funnier. It was all fun and games. MBTI. Yawning. 3rd RC. I ensured it all stayed in the Zoom DMs, where it was light, friendly, not we...

At noon of April 21, 2023, I received a text from an unsaved number.  "Hi Mina! My name is John Choi and I'm Canada's GMMA RC! ... So I was just wondering if it was possible to maybe have a Zoom call to figure out the curriculum planning?"  I was in a period of my life when I felt very productive. I replied minutes later,  "Hi! Yes, definitely!" *** That day, I entered the Zoom call on the third floor of my church 30 minutes before praise practice. It felt weird because I had never been asked for help from others like this, especially not from an RC and not someone from Canada. It was also refreshing and crazy to have someone who wanted to hear what I had to say even though they had never met me before—even though I was just a student! I left the meeting feeling like I globbered on and on about random things, but one thing was for sure: he left an impression on me that day. Wow. What a humble guy.   *** The next time I met him was at the Leadership/Officer R...