Training and a few more contacts

May 28, 2010 Friday

Today we met the Nielsens who are the new office missionaries. They lived just east of Layton Hills Mall. He was a civil servant at Hill AFB for 41 years. She taught at the school for the blind in Ogden. What nice people! They have a 30 year old son living in their house while they are gone and 4 other children living along the Wasatch front. We went to the Mission Office to teach her how to do referrals. It’s such a mind boggling thing the first little while. I had typed up a 3 page paper about the process. Also Orson has worked on the list of cities (small suburbs) in the proselyting areas. It really helps you get the referrals to the right elders. Sister Nielsen and I spent 2 ½ hours getting her able to enter new referrals into Referral Manager (a program used worldwide developed at the MTC). Then I had her print the reports of the newly entered reports so she could learn that process and what to do with them. She had several more new referrals to work on this afternoon. She only called me once with a question; either she’s very good or I’m a great teacher ;o)
This afternoon we went out to the Hamilton Hill area of the ward to contact inactives. Most of the folks weren’t home, so we wrote them a note saying we had dropped by. At one house a man yelled through the door, “What do you want?” We replied we were looking for Kristy somebody. He opened the door, took one look at us, said, “Oh no, no!” and shut the door. We didn’t even get a chance to ask him if she lived there or not. Just before dark, we stopped at a house on the list. A fellow came to the door and said he’d been renting there for 5 months and he didn’t know who the person was that we were looking for. So we explained we were from the church and would like to visit with him and tell him about it. He said he was Roman Catholic, so we explained that there had been changes in Christ’s church through the past 2000 years and that our church is like the one Christ organized. He stood there a minute with his head down, and both of us thought he would tell us he wasn’t interested. Instead, he opened the door and said, “Come in!” So we went in and he called his wife, Sylvia, to come in. His name was Max. They have 3 children. We started again talking about the need for a restoration. There was a knock on the door and it was a friend of theirs, Noel. They explained that they were studying to pass the English test so they could get citizenship in Australia and that Noel came over every night to study with them. They are from the Philippines. Max explained a little bit to Noel about what we were telling them. He asked what the name of the church was. When we said it again, Noel exclaimed, “Oh, the Mormons. They are in the Philippines. They have lots of churches and young missionaries there.” Then Max realized we were Mormons and then wanted to know why we have that nickname. So we were able to talk about the Book of Mormon and how it’s a 2nd witness for Christ. They were so cute and so friendly. It was fun to be there. We asked if we could come back and bring them a Book of Mormon and teach them. They said we could but that it would have to be after June. So we made an appointment for July 4 (a Sunday) at 3:30. We just loved them—it’s too bad we won’t be able to follow up with them. But what a thrill it was to find them. It made our day.
On the way home, the moon came up. It was one of those huge, beautiful full moons that look so neat. By the way, it gets dark by 6 pm and is still dark in the morning until 6:30 or so. The daylight hours seem awfully short! I haven’t heard anything about daylight savings down here.