Dad’s garden – for some reason the bougainvillia is not blooming. That is not quite true – it has one flower. The picture of us and the Van Dongans was taken on June 26 at the mission home. The occasion was the farewell dinner with the Jensen’s.
1 July 2007 – Sunday

I slept in until almost 6 – a rare thing indeed and Mary was already up. I finished reading the D&C and then we read 3 pages from the Kitab Mormon. ‘Great are the words of Isaiah’ – so great that it takes three times as long to read a chapter of his writings than any other chapter. But we did somewhat better this time.

The only thing that was different at Jakarta Raya is that I was asked to give a talk in two weeks on the apostasy and restoration. We continue to hear a little more each week but we are still far from understanding most of the words and almost none of context.

We caught a cab back to the apartment. We took the first nice looking one that came along. It was not a BlueBird but it was a nice cab and got us there quickly for $4 including tip.

The rest of the day just went by. About the only thing worth writing about was that we read from the Kitab Mormon and are now well under 100 pages from the end. We should be finished by the 15th at the latest.

I started to study Indonesian again – that is to read and to learn vocabulary that is not in the Kitab Mormon. I am reading the June message from President Hinckley. I had to kind of chuckle when I came across ‘perang’ so often. It is a very popular word in the Kitab Mormon because it means ‘War’ and that is something that seems to be on every other page. It is not a word that comes up very often in talks by the general authorities of the church and certainly not as often as it is in this talk.

I decided to make flash cards of some of the new words – something I told the students of our English class they should do. As I have mentioned, Mary had been making a list of words we do not know in the Kitab Mormon – it is now up to going on 4 pages and there are about 60 words per page. I am thankful that the Lord is giving me this opportunity to study a new language. Something I never thought I would do again in this life. I feel that it is as much a test of my willingness to ‘obey exactly’ as it is to be able to read, speak and hopefully understand Indonesian. However I am sure that if we can learn to communicate with the people our usefulness to the Lord’s work will greatly increase. So that as the scriptures say, we can ‘be tools in the hands of the Lord.’ Isn’t that a great goal to set for oneself – to in someway help the Lord in His work to bring to pass the Immortality and Eternal Life of His children. And of course while doing this we hopefully receive the same blessing.