Angyonghasaeo all.  Hello and greetings from Korea,

It has been another amazing day here.  We began our morning by attending service at the oldest Presbyterian church in Korea.  This is the church where SongAe's mother was a pastor when she was a little girl.  I am always overwhelmed by the familiarity and comfort of a church even when it is in a foreign language.  A Christian can travel anywhere in the world and instantly have a rapport with fellow believers.  When God is placed in the center of people's lives they always speak the same language - even when they don't!

Following the service we were driven to a local orphanage that the church helps to support.  They have about 65 children there of all ages.  We met with the director for a couple hours prior to our tour and were fascinated by the openness of his responses.

What amazed SongAe and I the most was Caitlin's specific fascination with the discussion.  She was remarkably attentive the entire time and must have asked at least 10 or 15 questions of her own.  I told her that I was very impressed with her interest and she responded, "Of course I'm interested dad.  I'm the only one that lived in an orphanage most of my life."  Silly me......

After leaving the orphanage and saying goodbye to some truly adorable children we met up with another four relatives that were not in the original 27 we met the first night we got here.  For those of you that missed the facebook post on that one, here is a picture of that gathering below.

With 10 of us together we visited a Korean cultural center.  Here we got to experience various aspects of Korean culture.  To makes things even more fun, we wore the traditional Han-bok outfits during the entire tour.

Luke has been an incredible trooper throughout and traveled several miles on his crutches today.  He had several breaks while riding on both Matthew and daddy's backs but we have all been extremely impressed with his perseverance and desire to participate in spite of the surgery and pain.  For those of you that missed it, Luke badly broke his ankle before we left and had to have surgery to install a plate in his foot less than 24 hours before we left.  The good news is that we found a place to rent a wheel chair for the rest of the week and that should make things much easier.

After saying goodbye to our family briefly stopped by our hotel rooms.  Y'all would get a kick out of the available space here.  We wanted to stay in downtown Seoul in the thick of the street venders but to do so we had to get extremely small rooms.  Each room has 3 single beds and only enough floor space for the suitcases if we stack them.  It really is a hilarious setup.  Fortunately we don't spend much time there.  For diner tonight we walked around and purchased a wide assortment of foods from no less than 12 different street vendors.  It was a fantastic experience.  All three girls were in seventh heaven and the boys surprised me with their culinary adventurousness as well.

Now, finally we are back in our rooms and things are winding down.  Prayers for us tomorrow please.  We are headed to the social services offices where Luke and Rachel were adopted from.  We are going to allow them to see their actual files and will learn all the information they have about their biological parents.  We know that emotions will be raw as they deal with a potentially difficult past and ask that the Holy Spirit grant them peace as they assimilate this information.  They both already told us at diner that they know who their real parents are ......... as they pointed  across the table at SongAe and myself.  These children never cease to amaze me.  How could we possibly have been given the opportunity to raise such remarkable individuals?  Only by the grace of God!

We thank you for your continued prayers and continued support.  Our fervent desire is for each of you to draw closer to the Lord, in some small way, through our story.

By His grace,

Team Armstrong