Mary and sister Utami – her husband is the tailor who makes all of Mary’s clothes and my ties. Sister Stephie and her fellow Family History worker sister in the FH Center. They do a mighty work in helping anyone who comes in with their genealogy.

29 April 2008 – Tuesday

We started in reading Ajaran dan Perjanjian – from now on A&P. We found that we knew most of the words and usually came close to what was being said. We are not worrying if we use the exact words but are trying to get the meaning of the verses.

Today the net allowed me to post pictures to the blog so I got busy and caught up most of those I wanted to post. We were happy to get an e-mail from Cindy saying they made it back safely from France and the first of our packages showed up.

Listening to Elder Holland’s talk on member missionary work. A senior sign in the MTC  “Let’s lengthen our suffle!” It is strange how I happen to go to the April 2001 conference talks where a number of the speakers spoke on missionary work and Elder Hales spoke directly for the need for couple missionaries. After listening to the talks I printed them so I could review them later.

Sam and Anny showed up at the door right on time so we were at the office by 10:00. We spent 2 productive hours – I worked on vocabulary exercises and Mary worked on Elder Subandriyo’s article and English. But at about noon the internet stopped working so we decided to do our shopping before going to the mission office.

When we got to the mission office we visited with a number of people before Mary started her class. I gave president Sujud the pictures of the choir, talked to Elder Subandriyo about a couple of things. He thanked Mary for her review of his article.

While I was talking to President Marchant I brought up my challenge to the Tangerang 1 missionaries to get to know the people in their neighborhood. He asked me to take some time in Zone Conference to talk about it and perhaps do some role playing. That will teach me to open my mouth. But truly I think it is a good missionary tool and a chance to ‘let our light shine.’ I also will take the time to talk a little about studying English.

Another experience of our visit was being able to help Elder Thiemann with a phone number. He need to call a young man who just that day had been called to serve his mission. Luckily I had put our branch lists in Mary’s bag and the number there was current. Another tender mercy from the Lord.

Hendra told me that he had the computer for Elder Barnard packed up and it would go out tomorrow. He had promised me and I had promised Elder B that it would go by the 30th. This is our old computer and will be used in the Family History Resource Center in Solo. One more thing I can cross off the list of things to do.

When we got back to our apartment, we read once more from the A&P – but this time we had some struggle. The translation does not seem to be as good as the one for the Kitab Mormon – which is not all that good – so it does not translate back into English very well. I would guess as we get use to the different style and word use, we will be able to do better. At least it is a change for us and that is probably good.
For some reason I have been thinking about what I wanted to say in my report of our mission. I don’t want to preach, I want to tell stories about people and the gospel in their lives. I want to tell about senior couples who have made a difference. I want to tell them that it is hard to consider our mission a sacrifice.

I just spent about 30 minutes going back and reading from this journal. It is strange to read things I had forgotten – like the VanDongens have been gone for 10 months and yet it seems like they just left. But that means the Davises have been here close to 10 months and it seems like they just got here. Time really flies when you are on a mission. However it also seems like we have been here for years – that is we are so comfortable here that it does not seem possible we have only been here about 16 months.