SMALL WORLD

January 18, 2011 Tuesday

Today I read an e-mail from one of my high-school friends who is serving a mission with her husband in Barcelona, Spain. They are CES missionaries there. She said the institute director there has a son serving in the Perth Mission and asked if we’d met him. Sure enough, Elder Rodrigues was working in Karratha with Elder Richards when we went there for a District Conference in November. What a sharp kid and his English is really good too. Lana and Dennis don’t know him; he’d left for Australia before they arrived in Spain.
We had FHE at the mission home with President and Sister Cahoon and the other senior missionaries last night. We each brought something and Sister Cahoon had made BBQ’d meatballs and rice. It turned out really well because Sister Kruger brought two homemade pies and President Cahoon made homemade ice cream to go with it. The lesson was on the love of God.
This morning we went to Yingping. We gave the first lesson finally about the restoration and the Book of Mormon. As soon as we said the “Mormon,” she brightened up and said she’d heard of us. She knew the author of the Twilight series is a Mormon, and she has watched “Big Love” on TV. We told her she might hear negative things about us if she tells people she is studying with us and she said quite adamantly that she doesn’t accept stuff just because people say it, and that she finds out for herself about things. She seemed very interested in the Book of Mormon. We left it with her but asked her to read the Joseph Smith pamphlet and the Restoration pamphlet before we return tomorrow.
“Change,” that’s the name of the game. President Cahoon wants us to move to a different ward to work. There’s a ward that has some problems between some members and some missionaries. He wants us to go in there and see if we can calm things down. Evidently there are some angry members. We feel bad because we really like the Como Ward. He did say we can continue to teach Yingping. The other problem is that we are going to be following a long line of elders into the flat over there. I’m not ready to clean another place, but I can’t stand a dirty place, so we will probably be cleaning some more. We will be in the Thornlie Ward which is the building we met in when we were in the Jandakot Ward at the first of our mission. We think it’s also the stake center. Not sure when the move will take place, probably within a week or two.