21 June 2007 – Thursday
It was another of those strange mornings when I woke at 3:30 and thought I had not gone back to sleep because I was thinking of so many things. However the next time I looked at the clock it was almost 5:30. It seems that my dreams have become part of my life (I have tried to rephrase that a number of times to make it sound right but nothing does.) A seamless movement from sleep to being awake.
We read from the Kitab Mormon – today was easy because most of it was about preparing for wars and fighting. There is so much of that in the book that we have become quite good at translating the words.
While we were reading brother Page from the English branch called to confirm that the class was coming to their house for P-day evening. I think the next time we hold this class we will get a lot more help from the English branch. This will be good if we layout a good lesson plan so everyone is on the same page and building on what others have done. Mary said that the Lord provided when he had the branch presidency changed in the English branch – that president Smith had really jumped in and made arrangements for FHE and P-day evenings.
We had an easy morning – at least I did. Mary taught for an hour and then gave them the last practice reading test. That took another hour and then we broke into groups for the last hour and worked on vocabulary. Since it is P-day when we were through with the morning classes we were through for the day so we could head out and do some of our errands.
We stopped for lunch at KFC – Sam and Mary deserved a good lunch. The place – which in a higher income area – was packed. Not with bulais but with Indonesians who worked somewhere nearby. Since a meal costs about $2.50 – what a laborer will make for 8 – 10 hours of work – not many average Indonesians could afford to eat there.
From there we went to the mission office to pick up mail and invite Elder Subandriyo to our graduation exercises on Tuesday evening. Mary is making certificates to give out and hopefully Elder Subandriyo will give a little talk. We had a nice talk with Sister Jensen – she is deep cleaning the residence so the new president and his wife will have a nice clean home to move into. She said that they have not really started everything ready to go – they did ship off their container at the start of the month – but felt they wold move into high gear next week.
Our last stop was SoGo where we hit gold. A new shipment of Oscar Meyer franks had come in – we bought 5 packages and never even looked at what they cost. We also got some more hotdog buns so we can have hotdogs on Friday night and pizza on Saturday night. We of course wiped out BreadTalk – I would be 10 pounds lighter if we had not found that place.
When we got home Mary remembered that we needed the air-conditioning cleaned. I forgot to mention earlier that when we woke up this morning there was a puddle of water under the bedroom unit. So we called and less then an hour later the crew showed up and for the last 90 minutes they have been busy as bees servicing the units. I am afraid to think about the bill – it would be $250 in the US – hopefully here it will be more like $45. But since we have never had this done before, we do not know. When they leave we will go back to watching Pirates of the Caribbean 3. They put English sub-titles on the DVD – who ever does the translation is terrible and we have to really work hard not to watch them because they are very distracting.
Well I was certainly wrong about the cost of getting the air conditioners fixed – it cost $30. That is for 3 men for almost 2 hours and includes recharging one of the units with Freon – yes they still use that here. After they left we went back to Pirates 3 but it was so slow and uninteresting that we decided it was not worth three hours of our lives and turned it off.
Instead I read the Church News while Mary worked on some English lessons. The Church News had some good articles – including one about the area around the Finger Lake area and Palmyra. Some of the conversion stories were really good. I also felt that President Monson’s talk to the Argentinian saints was excellent. There was a lot of good counsel that I could use. I think the reason we need to read the scriptures, gospel lessons, church magazines, etc. each day is so we can fortify our spirit against the worldly things that we will face each day – no matter who we are, where we are or what our calling. I really do need to put on the full amour of God – because anything I leave off provides a weakness in my defenses where the world and worldly values can creep in.
How often in the D&C does the Lord remind Joseph that he is not doing all that he can, that he has allowed the world to interfere with the work he was called to do. If a prophet can allow that to happen than how much easier is it for me to allow it?
We read the Kitab Mormon for an hour – we had to look up lots of words and struggled with some of the grammar – sound like our students. Now we are preparing to call it a day and head for bed.