FIFI

March 26, 2011 Saturday

We received a referral from the mission office for a girl named Fifi. We were told she had attended church twice in our building, but nobody had talked to her. So Tuesday night she went to the church. Tuesday is when institute is held and she was welcomed. They discovered she wasn’t a member, so they got her information and notified us. When we called her, she was ready to set up a time for us to teach her. She preferred being taught at the church. We found out she lives on a street behind the Thornlie chapel.
So she met us there this afternoon. Talk about a cute girl. She’s from Indonesia and has been in Australia just 3 months. She’s studying to be something like a veterinarian assistant. It’s a 3 year course. She’s living with a friend of a cousin or something like that. But she said she walks past the church everyday on the way to the bus stop and decided she wants to learn about it. Her father is Buddhist and her mother is Catholic. She and her siblings were sent to a Christian school, but she’s not affiliated with any certain church although she does know quite a bit about Christianity. We talked to her about the reason for religion and the differences between Christianity and Buddhism. We talked about prophets and dispensations then started to tell her about Joseph Smith when she said she had been told about him on Tuesday night and had been shown The Restoration DVD. So we started in on the Book of Mormon and she said she’d been given one of those on Tuesday, too. Boy, whoever talked to her didn’t waste any time! She promised to read the Restoration pamphlet and the Joseph Smith pamphlet and to come to church tomorrow. She is delightful to talk to and has the cutest smile. We won’t be at church tomorrow because of Yingping’s baptism at the Como Ward, so we arranged for the ward mission leader, Scott Mortly to meet her and help her feel at home.
While we were tracting this morning, we found a 17 year old girl named Esther who told us she’s been wanting to come to our church. We invited her out tomorrow explaining we won’t be there and then called Scott to tell him to watch out for her also.
Tonight we visited Brother Mark Smith. He’s 87 and lives alone in kind of a retirement village. Talk about a sharp guy. He was baptized 58 years ago and has had “every calling except Relief Society president” to quote him. He and his wife served 3 missions; he’s been a bishop, branch president, seminary teacher and patriarch. He loves to build models, especially airplanes “to keep me off the streets.” We had a great visit with him. It’s members like that who help a missionary want to keep going even when the work is hard and the great results of missionary work seem few and far between.