Listening and Learning - Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Happy Anniversary to Nate and Melissa

We made it through the night unscathed from the water we drank the night before at the Garcias. We are cautioned never to drink water that does not come from a purifier or from a bottle, and tang was added to water from the kitchen tap at their house. It is uncomfortable to announce that we cannot drink what they are offering, so we sipped on our drinks not consuming all of them. Luckily we did not have any adverse affects.

The mornings are quite chilly as we walk to the office, but by late afternoon it is very pleasant to walk home. We have had a spree of great weather lately and we are enjoying it while it lasts.

Our work was steady today, but not hectic. I had a few medical calls that occupied some of my morning, then I worked on new missionary binders and leaving missionary packets in the afternoon. Elder Kroff wrote some checks and then sent money to missionaries electronically. Elder Peterson worked on getting packets ready for some elders that need to go to Immigrations, and Elder Hales plugged away on his list of landlords that need to be changed to electronic payment of rent.

Since we had the President's car at the office, Sister Argyle dropped him off so he could get it. For a while he worked in his office and then came out to all of us and said that he had some time to share some thoughts from Elder Bednar with us and preferred to do it while we were eating our lunch so as not to interrupt our work. We jumped at the chance to learn from him.

One of the things he talked about is that we, as members, need to prepare ourselves before a meeting to draw out from the speaker those things that we need in our lives. That is why he has the missionaries come early to Zone Conference, or early to Zone Leaders Council to sit reverently and study out of the scriptures to get spiritually prepared for what they are going to hear. He said that his family tries to get to Sacrament Meeting 20 or 30 minutes early in order to do this same thing. Wow! His children are receiving such good training. We were grateful to be his captive audience and for the time he spent with us.

We felt good about our accomplishments today and were able to leave again around the 4:00 hour. I made hamburger soup for dinner which tasted good and Rich left to teach his English class.

These are the stalwarts that want to learn English. The class was larger at the beginning, but when school started, he lost a lot of young people. Some in the picture are from the San Fernando ward, and some from the Virreyes branch. With class only once a week, they don't have a large vocabulary yet, but they know some words and phrases.

When Rich came home, he was not in the door only a couple minutes and our office elders called asking him if he could come over to the church at 8:30 and sit in on a discussion they were having with a single sister. The other adult they had lined up called and couldn't make it. So he sat down for a few minutes, then took off again for the church. It is a blessing to live so close.