Back in Black

So I am back in black (back in Thailand with the standard black name tag). I have moved into a city called Khon Kaen. That looks way weird and I am not sure if it is spelled right. It is ขอนแก่น for all of you out there that can read Thai. It is in the North Eastern part of Thailand. My new companion is Elder Christensen. He has been a missionary for about 11 months or so. One of the biggest things I am excited about is having a church. All of my areas except for Long Beach have not had a church. Sansai was about a 45 minute bike ride. Samutprakaan was a long taxi trip or bus ride to a different area of Bangkok, and we had to move out of the church in Laos about 3 weeks after I got there. So it makes me way happy that I live like 30 meters from the church building. Since I have gotten here we have done a lot of contacting because we really don't have any investigators. We have found and picked up a few people since I have gotten here too. 

One of the people we found came to church yesterday, too. Her name is Sister Ohm. She wasn’t ready yesterday, when we invited her to be baptized, simply because she wants to have a stronger testimony before she commits. So she still wants to keep learning. So we will see were that goes. Another person we picked up this week was actually a former Investigator. I have been working to try to call all the former Investigators saved in our phone. Most of them have moved or are not really interested, but one of the people I called, when I called him, asked if we could meet him at the Church right then. We had no other appointments, so we got to teach him. He is pretty interested. So we will get to continue to teach him.   

New Years has made the work a little bit harder.  A lot of people are out of town so yesterday there were a pretty low number of people at church. I am kind of excited for things to get normal around here. Here in Khon Kaen, in our district, there are four missionaries. Our companionship and also a set of Sister Missionaries.

From all of the members I have met so far. They are all really nice. There is a big university here so a lot of the members are going to university. 

I have missed being in Laos a lot, but it is really nice to be able to teach the gospel and talk to people about Jesus again. I missed that a lot while I was in Laos. 

Funny story: The day after I left Laos, we still had a few days left in the transfer, so Elder Saunders and I went on Exchanges with the Zone Leaders. I was switching off with a native Thai Elder and during companionship study he was saying “I have been reading through the Book of Mormon I almost finished. Today I was reading in Moroni 10.” He goes on and is talking about Moroni 10 then he says “And I only got to like verse 20.” Then I said in Part Thai, Part Lao. “Really, you didn't finish it all the way?” But that Lao part I threw in there made the sentence to him sound like: “What the heck you didn't finish the flipping Book of Mormon?” (the actual translation might have been slightly worse than that.) Then he told me I needed to calm down. It was kind of funny. Then I had to explain my mistake in speaking. 

Well, that is the news for now. Today we are going with some members to a Buddhist Temple here in Con Ken (I have just decided this is the best way to type out the place where I am staying the first part is Con like Comic Con and the second part is like the name Ken.)  

-- Elder Cheney

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