Sunday, January 19, 2014

  Dear Family,

It has been a good week so far.  I'm emailing early today because we're going to visit someone in the hospital early today, and it's kinda twisting up the pday schedule.  maybe I'll just start off from last monday.

Last Monday was one of the highlights of the week (and not just because of what we did for fun).  After emailing, we took a bus to one of the local's favorite beaches.  It has a really big beach so we could all play soccer barefoot.  It was so nice to be by the ocean and feel the nice breeze.  We had all the elders in KK there, as well as a bunch of locals playing soccer with us.  After that, we had scheduled an appointment with a man that we had contacted on friday.  Because we had almost no investigators, we decided to spend a lot of time working with part member families and contacting.  We contacted a man named Razlan, shared with him the Kitab Mormon, and invited him to read from it.  We were a bit shocked when we called him on Sunday night and he said that he had read the chapter we gave him, and wanted us to come to his home.  We got there last monday around 7:00pm, and we started off by asking how his day was going.  He told us that his wife had just given birth that morning to a baby boy.  He was so excited to have another child (he has a two year old daughter) in the family.  As he went on, he also told us of how nervous he is, the concerns that he may not be financially well off enough to give his children everything he wants to give them, or that he will not be able to be as good of a father as he would like to be for his children.  We started talking about how the gospel blesses families, and how we are all given challenges so that we can learn to trust in the Lord and overcome them together.  Razlan was very interested in it, and told us that he would like us to come every monday to share more with him.  He was, as he describes himself, pagan until a few years ago, and said that as he investigated, Christianity felt right with him.    Funny side note: he asked us if we knew any good bible names or Book of Mormon names that would be suitable for his new boy.  We each shared our favorite, and then he said "yeah... but I can only use one that starts with an A" (not sure why...) so we tried Alma, Ammon, Abinadi, Aaron- the works.  We called him the other day and he told us he named his baby after us; Alder. haha ^___^

President Mains and the Assistants came up to KK on Saturday for the Christmas Conference.  Last year, it just so happened that our Zone conference schedule lined up with Christmas.  This year, it didn't, so instead of shipping everyone down to singapore, President Mains decided to come visit everybody.  (ps I got my two packages from you).  We got a call from the assistants earlier last week saying that because our Zone has no sisters in it, there was no need for the traveling sisters to come up, so Elder Johnson and I would have to fill in for them and give talks.  The theme was teh scripture from Isaiah 9:6, where it goes through the Savior's titles, and each one of us (president Mains, sister mains, the assistants, and us) took one title and had to give a ten minute talk on it.  My topic was "everlasting father".  We didn't have any time to stop and write a talk, so I stressed out about it all week.  Finally, on friday morning, I was able to jot down some ideas for it.  It went ok.  The conference itself was realy nice though.  We sang a bunch of christmas songs.  Sister Mains is really into music, so she always makes us do a choir esque thing.  haha always fun to try and get elders to go along with her.  

It's really nice here, the members are so fun and strong.  Our district president/ the district, has been working on an open house that will be this saturday.  It's supposed to be an exhibition of the plan of salvation.  It's set up with murals so that people will walk in and go through the whole plan.  Haha, this is bad of me to say, but it reminds me of a haunted house that you walk through, especially because our District President's favorite part is death on earth, and is planning on having someone in a coffin coming out and giving that part of the presentation.  haha.  The members are all really friendly. There are, however, a quite a few 'offended' members here. We visited one the other day, and it wasn't very pleasant.  The person was very kind to us, and warmly welcomed us in, but the bitterness in this persons tone and outlook towards everyone in the church was disturbing.  I've heard  that there are several people who still believe and love the gospel, but want nothing to do with the church members here.  I don't exactly know how you can love and live the gospel, and be kept from going to church because of animosity towards others... lots of interesting lessons learned.

I don't know the schedule for skyping on christmas yet.  I think we'll be doing it at the senior couple shouse.  I'll let you know next week.

bai
elder robinson

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