TATA

March 1, 2011 Tuesday

And it’s not, “Tata for now,” as the British and some Aussies say. Her name is Tata. She’s from the Philippines and that’s her nickname actually. But she says everyone has a nickname over there. She met an Aussie man who is/was a member of the church. So she took the lessons and was baptized. They were married and now live here. They both seem to be in their 40’s. She was baptized 2 years ago and didn’t ever get taught the new member lessons, so they invited us over today. We started out with the first principle, “God is Our Loving Heavenly Father.” We asked her to tell us her concept of God and discovered she didn’t even know He has a body. Her ideas of Him and Christ were more like the Nicene Creed. So we spent the entire hour teaching her about the Mormon beliefs of God and Jesus Christ. Her English seems good, but it’s very basic. Although she’s been attending church now for 2 years, I don’t think much has sunk in. Her husband joined 30 years ago, but his name doesn’t show up on the ward list so we think there must be a problem in his background and maybe he isn’t as strong as he would like everyone to think. It’s an interesting situation, to say the least.
Tonight we had the loudest door slamming incident we’ve had on the mission. We went to an inactive fellow’s home. After we knocked twice, a cute little girl peeked out the window, so we knocked again. The father opened the door, yelled, “No!” and slammed the door. We don’t even know for sure if he’s the member we were looking for because it all happened so fast. As we go through the inactives list, we are finding that a lot have moved and no one even knows they are gone.