Visiting Members

Well, like usual, so many great things have been happening this week. This week was really focused on the members and we really didn’t have anything else distract us from that. It has been great. I really feel like we are building up the branches right now, even without being able to teach investigators. Things have all calmed down from New Year’s, so it was a pretty normal week in that regard. Some of the memorable visits from this week were as follow:

We were visiting a family a few kilometers outside of the city. The husband’s name is brother Boonthun. He is active and awesome in our discussion with him. He was talking about how great God is, and how, with God, we won’t have bad in our lives we will only have good things. This was quite amazing to hear from him as he testified of how he only has good things in his life now that he has God. I looked around and see he lives in an unfinished house that he has been building as he gets money. He has been building it for about 5 years. He has a lot of things he could complain about, or that he could call bad, but those things don’t matter to him. I thought this was a great example of having God as our number one priority. When He is there, our physical environment is not as important as our spiritual environment.

Another great moment from this week was Sister Bua. She just received a mission call and is assigned to the California, Santa Rosa mission. So, we had to get started on doing her visa work for that. So, Sister Bua grew up on a farm and does not understand technology and doesn’t know any English. When we met with her, we had to show her how to use a computer. It was interesting to see, as we had her use a keyboard and mouse for the first time, she stared at the keyboard for about ten seconds before finding the character she needed and then pressing it with an outstretched pointer finger.

On Saturday, Elder Smith-Driggs and I decided to bike out to some members that live in Naka. Naka is about 36 kilometers from where we live. It was fun. It took us about an hour and a half each way and we were going fast. When we got back, we were very tired and we still had an appointment with a member to bike to. We called the member and had them come and meet us at a park close to our apartment so we didn’t have to ride a bike. Hahahaha.

One of the members we visited in Naka was great. His name is Pa Khamwad he is the second counselor in the Second Branch. He is amazing! He has been learning English his whole life and has started up this classroom in the middle of nowhere where he teaches English to young kids. He does this for free, to help the younger generation. On top of that, he loves to read books written by the church such as gospel principles or one of the Teachings of the Prophet books. As he reads them, he translates these books into Lao at the same time. He just writes the translation underneath the English. Then when he does a whole book he reads through it two or three more times to make sure his translation is good. We got to visit him this week and see his classroom and all the books he has translated. He is such a great, God loving man. 

Things are going well here. Church yesterday was fun. We were able to watch another session of conference and have the Sacrament. A lot of members came too, so that was all good.

Other than that, not much else happened. Things are going well here.

-- Elder Cheney

ฉะนั้น, หากเจ้ามีความปรารถนาจะรับใช้พระผู้เป็นเจ้า เจ้าก็ได้รับเรียกมายังงาน
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