12 November 2007 – Monday
It is interesting that 4:00 to 4:30 seems to be the time I am going to wake up. It is like the Lord is telling me that spiritual exercise comes before physical. I continued to read in PMG – I am now in ‘Sifat-sifat seperti Kristus’ and I can move through it fairly quickly. I enjoyed my trip to the gym – I seem to be sweating less and doing more reps. I am also happy to see that my weight seems to be going down once more – perhaps I have broken a plateau. As I wrote that I thought about how there are times when I seem to be stuck on a spiritual plateau and I only start going up when I make some change in my routine. Often it does not need to be a major change but it has to be something that is different and possibly not at first comfortable to do.
The rest of the morning was fairly normal, except a call from Elder Bennett that took some time but was very informative and necessary. There are some things we need to do and perhaps some fences that need mending. Indonesia is a small country when it comes to the Church. The ripple from waves travel far and fast – especially with cell phones and SMS. Anyway that interrupted out Kitab Mormon reading for a while but we ended up getting the better part of 4 pages. The reading was challenging but enjoyable. We are getting good at the lists of things that come up so often in the writings.
We went to the mission home to deliver the Michigan tests that our students took last week, talk to president Sujud, speak with the Walkers about home teaching tomorrow night, and just saying hello to others – as well as goodbye to elder Whitmore who is heading home tomorrow. I thought we had missed saying goodbye in person to elder Tuxworth but I just called him and he does not leave until midnight tomorrow so we will see him at the office when we go for Mary to teach her class.
Then we went to SoGo for assorted things. While we were there I went to the ATM to get some cash and came across a modern art display. There were some nice pieces but they wanted too much for them. I think we will go to the gallery sometime and see if we can do some bargaining. The young ladies who were running the exhibit did not seem to care one way or the other.
We then went out to make one of our home teaching visits. Brother Salim has a nice little in house business that has allowed him to send his two children to good schools – including one to BYUH – and to have a nice Indonesian home. His son is in Taiwan learning some graphics so he can work for his uncle’s international business.
It takes about an hour to 90 minutes each way – and that is if there is no real traffic jam. So the round trip including the visit took 3 hours. I figured out it would take me about the same time to home teach a family in Salt Lake or Bountiful. No wonder they have a very low home teaching percentage.