MIKE

May 4, 2011 Wednesday

On Sunday, there were 3 baby blessings so the chapel was packed. Somehow Orson noticed a black young man that he didn’t recognize (I figured he was part of the 3 baby blessing parties). Shortly before the end of the meeting, the young man got up and left. Orson followed him out and talked to him. He’s the older brother of a couple of member kids who are inactive. He said he’d felt a need to pray so he’d come to the church. He wasn’t too impressed because he had no clue about testimony meeting and he was sitting in the back where most of the people with little kids sit and it’s anything but reverent. He said we could drop by to talk to him. We went over on Monday, but he’d been called to work. His family is just super nice. They came from Sudan five or six years ago. We tried to get his parents to agree to listen to the lessons with Mike, but they said they were Muslim. We met both Sham and Pieter, his brothers. They wouldn’t give any kind of reason for their inactivity. One is 13 and the other is 17. There are two more little brothers and a little sister in the family. The father is Abdella and the mom is Kuku.
So we went back on Tuesday and Mike was there. It was a good discussion. He flat out told us that he had a hard time making commitments and sticking with them. But he did realize that his life needs some direction. We talked about how Satan wants to keep us from achieving good things. The conversation rolled around to when he would get married and have kids; he said, “I already have a kid, a little girl who turns one this month.” Well, that led us to find out his girl friend is also from the Sudan and in their customs all he has to do is settle on a dowry (about $12,000) that he has to pay her folks and then she can move in with him. He doesn’t live at his folks’ house—he rents a place somewhere else but spends lots of time at home. We explained that he’d need to marry Julia in order to be baptized and challenged him to ask her about having the lessons too. We let him know that membership in the church is a long term commitment and that he would have to work hard to be a member. He expressed that he wanted to do it. It will be interesting to see how this all works out.
We finally got to teach James again after a month. We read Alma 34 with him. His partner he’d separated from has moved back in. She came in and sat down and listened to the last part of it. We aren’t sure that he wants to make a go of it anymore with her even though they have 3 kids together. Who knows what will happen here? Later, at ward council, we found out that James lives in an area that is really in the Belmont Ward. But it’s much closer to our chapel for the folks who live there. So, some of the folks attend Belmont and some attend Thornlie and the missionaries have a “gentlemen’s agreements” to work with whoever comes to their ward. We are finding out there seem to be a lot of gray areas about stuff here in the church in West Australia.