29 August 2007 – Wednesday

I had a strange night. Soon after we came back to the apartment, I became so tired that I decided I had to lie down for awhile. It was much too early to think about going to bed, but I just could not keep my eyes open. When I woke up it was after midnight – I had slept for over 6 hours. I did not go back to sleep until after 3 and slept until just after 6 a.m. So I had slept about 9 out of 12 hours. Earlier yesterday I thought I might be coming down with a cold but maybe my body was just telling me that it was very tired. Hopefully today will be not be a repeat of the pattern.

We got to hear from Tom and his family. Both by e-mail and by Skype. William is not quite ready to talk to us but he gave it a good try. After breakfast we read from the Kitab Mormon. Abinadi during his second round of preaching and being brought before King Noah. His comment that once he finished delivering the Lord’s message it did not really matter what happened to him is quite striking. I wonder how many could face such an uncertain future at the hands of their enemies and not worry?

Somehow I made a real mistake a week ago when I had Sam order copies of what I thought was the Self-employment Workshop workbook. What I ended up with was copies of the Career Workshop workbook. I did not realize this until yesterday when I went to get some SEW books for Lukito to use in Bangdung and found that I did not have any. So I had to send Sam to the copy shop to have some made which we picked up this morning on our way to Carrefore.

The traffic was terrible and so it took us almost 2 hours to get everything done – most of that time was spent in the car creeping along the street. I think they should only assign couples to Jakarta who are called for 23 months. Since they will spend 40% of their time in a car that will leave them 15 months to actually do missionary work.

The traffic was so bad that Lukito and Agus were about an hour late in getting to our apartment for our ERS meeting. We went down to our apartment complex restaurant and had a luncheon meeting – Agus’ wife came along. The meeting went well and the food was fine. I will not do this in the future but once in awhile it may be a good thing.

In the afternoon I went down to the gym and did a light workout for about a half an hour. I still have not figured out how to stop being bored while working out. I did take a talk by Elder Ballard about this being a chosen generation of missionaries, but it did not take very long to read. Perhaps I need to put a movie on my PDA and see if that would work. The problem with the TV’s are that they are too far away to hear what is going on.

The rest of our P-day was spent doing laundry, reading, watching a movie about William Wilberforce, and reading from the Kitab Mormon. We read something over 10 pages in 3 hours which made up for some of the days when we only read once. I think we will do this on each P-day. We are on track to finish in 4 months. The movie about Wilberforce was quite interesting. I had never heard of him and I was surprised that he was the main force behind the stopping of the British slave trade and finally the emancipation of all slaves. He also was one of the founders of British Humane Society and worked for many other moral causes.