30 October 2007 – Tuesday

I got up and went to the gym before anyone else was up. By the time I got back Mary was up and dressed. I quickly showed and dressed before the Kanes got moving. We read from the Kitab Mormon for a short time before Mary had breakfast with the Kanes. Earlier I had my usual orange juice and banana breakfast. We got a nice letter from McKay and I answered it. She seems to be quite busy at school. She is in a choir and is going out for a play. I wrote her an answer.

We head off for the zone conference and when we get there I figure out I left the office keys back at the apartment so Sam and I have to go back. He does a great job of getting us there and back just before 8:30. When I get into the office something smells wrong but I am a little late in getting up to the meeting that – I found out later – was supposed to start with a half hour of meditation to get spiritually prepared for the conference. Without knowing it, that is what I do by reading from PMG – some of the time in Indonesian. Mary played for the conference including a half hour of prelude music.

Elder Hallstrom asked all the missionaries to come up and shake hands. To the young missionaries he gave a piece of counsel. President and sister Marchant also greeted us. As I shook hands with them, I received more testimony that they were called of God to lead this mission at this time.

The five hours of meetings went rather fast. I enjoyed the lessons taught by Elder Hallstrom and wrote lots of notes in my ledger. I was very impressed with sister Hallstrom’s talks – she gave one in the first half and one in the second. In both of them she used the scriptures to make her point. Now many speakers read the scriptures when giving a talk but she wove the scriptures into hers like a true artist would weave material. She used Jeremiah 20:7-9 and Alma 48:7-9 for her second talk. My favorite thought from her was “Do you have fire in your bones” for your mission.

Elder Hallstrom did more training than teaching. I got two great quotes from him that take a lot of thought. “Are we messengers worthy of our message.” “We mistake activity in the church as being the same as activity in the gospel.”  When he spoke about ‘vain repetitions.” He pointed out that this does not mean we can not ask the same thing in each of our prayers if we are sincere. What makes repetitions vain is that they are just words without any real meaning.

The real high point for me was near the end when some of the missionaries went up and bore their testimony. Elder Hallstrom said that he was in a meeting where 12 prophets and seers gave their testimonies in a total of 12 minutes. So the testimonies that were given were short and powerful. Elder Whitmore started it and it just kept going – about 2/3 of them touched me deeply. What power there is in personal testimonies – especially those of serving missionaries. I was sorry to have them stopped so Elder Hallstrom could share his testimony.

While the conference was going on some other interesting things were happening that had impact on Mary and I. The main one was that there seems to have been a power surge in the building that fried a number of our pieces of equipment. We lost our last printer, one computer and a monitor. Luckily for us it seems that happened was that anything that was on with a power supply or a converter was zapped. So all that we should need is to replace the converters on printer and the monitor and they will be OK. Hopefully when they replace the power supply in the computer it also will work fine. Personally all I really care about is that we do not lose all the info on the hard drive. We have not backed it up – something we will do very quickly. But until they are fixed we have only one computer and no printer at our office. Surprisingly after the first shock, I did not become excited about the problem. I guess I am learning a little more about patience. I guess it helped that the conference was on and I really had to attend so I left it to Ari to get the damaged piece to Hendra at the office.

After the conference we came back to the apartment and we have spent the evening finishing the Kitab Mormon – we made it in 100 days which is 20 less than we had set for our goal. The time is not what is important – what is important is that we were able to become closer to the book and also that we continue to improve our ability to read Indonesian. At least the Indonesian used in the Kitab Mormon.

I spent much of the rest of the time we had catching up this journal and reviewing my conference notes. I also downloaded, titled, and edited the pictures from the last two days. I will read more from PMG before finally turning off the lights.