MUSLIMS

January 16, 2011 Sunday

This morning was great—Yingping came to church and stayed for all three meetings. The two talks in Sacrament Meeting were really good. Orson had left with one of the elders to meet a contact who said we could only come this morning. I asked her if she had any questions, and she hadn’t understood why Christ wasn’t supposed to have talked to the Samaritan woman at the well. Sunday School’s lesson was on eternal families. The teacher talked a lot about how important all her siblings were to her. And there sat our poor investigator who is the only child in her family. When asked what is the most important thing to her, she answered, “My achievements.” What a different culture she is from! Relief Society was about sacrifice and she even made a comment. After church she commented that it was easier to understand when we teach her alone. But when you consider all the doctrine she heard at church today that we haven’t had time to teach her, it’s easy to understand that comment. We have an appointment to go back on Tuesday to teach her again.
Tonight we went to see Ali. There were 3 guys living together, all from Afghanistan. Can you say, “sleeper cell?” Just kidding! Ali was curious to learn a little more about Jesus Christ. His roommate, Mustaffa spoke really good English and translated for him a lot of the time. Ali could speak some English and understood more, but he needed help. It was a great discussion. We started out talking about that we are both descended from Abraham. Then we were able to explain about Christ being the Son of God and not just another prophet like they believe He is. We told them about the atonement and resurrection. It was good because we were able to go clear back to Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel to talk about the concept of sin and the need for a Savior. They commented that there is a lot the same in the Koran and the Bible. We hit them that there are big differences and brought up that a person could be killed for looking at another religion. Mustaffa said that none of that is in the Koran—that it’s a cultural thing. He said it was okay to for his father to kill their sister if she had an illegitimate child. I wanted to ask how her dad would be judged for doing that, but I didn’t. They do believe that their bodies and souls will be reunited after death before the judgment. We told them we had a book that also testified that Jesus Christ is the son of God; and if they seriously wanted to study with us, we would be happy to return. Ali used his “lack of English” as the reason why they wouldn’t have us back. It was an interesting time. We are glad we were able to do it.