Jakarta has thousands of fast food restaurants. Besides KFC and A&W almost anywhere you look there are rows of small restaurants and food carts where you can stop and get a quick meal. The first picture is a very typical one where the motorcycle rider just pulled up and had a quick lunch. The second picture speaks for itself. Those are 100 kilo sacks of rice – about 220 pounds each – and notice the woman is riding sidesaddle so if the rice shifts she is going to disappear off the back of the bike.

20 March 2008 – Thursday

Studied a little Indonesian and then had a really good workout. The gym was very quiet – probably because it is Muslim holiday and people are either sleeping in or are away.

We read from the Kitab Mormon before heading off to the office so Mary could correct Elder Subandriyo’s revised talk. While she was doing that I worked on some English activities and answered e-mail. It was very quiet because everyone was gone and there was little we could do.

Mary was just finishing her corrections when Elder Subandriyo came to the office to pick up a copy so he could review it before sending it to Elder Packer for his thoughts. We figure if Elder Packer Oks it, whoever is supposed to read it to make sure it is doctrinally correct should find it OK also. While we were talking to him Elder S. told us about his wife Steffie who was visiting in Salt Lake and was freezing to death at her sister’s apartment. We told him that our daughter lived just a couple of blocks away and we would e-mail her and see if she had an extra portable heater that she could loan Sis Steffie while she was there.

After we were finished we came back to the apartment until it was time to leave for Tangerang and their District Meeting. For some reason we were both very tired so we managed to get a short nap in before Sam and Anne came back to pick us up. We then ran by the mission home to pick up any mail for us and the Tangerang elders. Since it was a holiday, the traffic was really light so we had time to drop by the office supply store in the mall before going to the chapel.

We had a really good District Meeting with elders Worwood, Cheney, Prause and Manullang. They have a few good investigators and are hoping to baptize at least two of them early on April 6th. We told them about our visit to the Manurung family and they told us that the father had come to church on Sunday – the first time in months. We felt very good about that and we will visit them again soon to re-enforce our visit. Elder Manullang taught a short lesson on preparing investigators for the baptism interview. I do not think we have studied this part of Preach My Gospel before because it is not something we have had to think about.

I shared my thought about President’s Eyring talk on prayer and how it caused me to change the what I pray for. I suggested that as missionaries we may need to concentrate on our investigators and inactives and not ourselves.

Since there was no English class and the traffic was light, we were back in the apartment before 7:00 – the earliest we have been home on a Thursday night for quite a while. It gave us plenty of time to have dinner – yummy leftover meatloaf sandwiches – read from the Kitab Mormon, and do some other things before it was time for bed. I read from the Liahona before turning off the light.

One of the things I did was to write to a sister who’s son has received his call to the Indonesian mission and will report to the MTC in July. I told her a little about the mission and said I would be happy to answer any questions she might have. Hopefully we have a lot of missionaries coming in the next few months including more couples and sisters.

As I look back through the day it reminds me that often we do not have any outstanding happen but that each day there is something that reminds us that we are engaged is a very special work and we are able to touch lives in ways that seem small at the time, but often grows into something we did not expect.