10 October 2006 – Tuesday

I woke at 5 AM to study Indonesian. I really would have rather gone back to sleep but it seems that the only time that my mind works well enough to absorb things is in the morning. I keep working on building up my vocabulary and also trying to memorize my testimony and a prayer.

I pretty much kept studying until it was time to get ready to go to a devotional at BYU that featured the Minister of Foreign Affairs for Indonesia. We met Sister Tippets there because we were to have our tutoring session right after the devotional. The devotional is part of a conference at BYU to promote inter-faith cooperation at bringing peace to the world. It turns out that over the last few years the minister and Elder Packer have become good friends. I am sure that this is helping the missionary effort in Indonesia.

The talk was about all people needing to work together, and was quite good. Unfortunately it did not add much to our knowledge of what our mission would be like. However after the devotional we got to meet and talk to a Muslim couple who are going to the Y. The husband did not speak English very well but the wife did. It turns out that she is from the part of Java Solo – where we might be sent to so we exchanged e-mail addresses and perhaps we will visit her family when we are there.

Then by pure chance four returned Indonesian missionaries walked pass. One of them has just been back a short time and had served in the Solo area and told us that it had the most active members of the mission. It has never had senior missionaries. My guess is that a number of couples will be sent there to help train church leaders to prepare them to become a stake.

After all the other folks left we had our language lesson. Mainly we worked on some questions we had about how to ask and answer questions. There is about 30 pages in the grammar book devoted to just that subject. By the time we were finished with the lesson it was about 1 PM. So the first half of the day was devoted to our mission.

For me the second half of the day was spent serving in the temple. That is always a wonderful experience and today’s service was made even more special because I got help a young couple prepare for their soon to be sealing. After all the years of working in the temple it was the first time I had this experience. Earlier, for about an hour, I got to work at the reception desk. It is a pleasure to greet the members as they come to the temple to participate in its special ordinances. I try hard to get each of them to smile and feel welcome.

Mary’s afternoon and evening was different from mine. She went to Out N Back to help Kristen learn how to balance the checkbook but Kristen was not ready for that experience. But Mary did work with her on other things. She also worked on her Extraction calling and studied some Indonesian. She is getting quite a few calls from those working on extraction and indexing. I am sure as the number of those working at this increases, so will her phone calls.

By the time I got home I was quite tired — and Mary felt the same way – so after we watched NCIS together and then headed off to bed. I think we are much busier now then when we went to work each day.