8 December 2011

I forgot how difficult missionary work can be, mostly because of discouragement. Didn’t we learn once that it is Satan’s best tool?


It started a couple of weeks ago with one of the young adults who seemed to have a personal grudge against me. It may have been only in jest, and may have been magnified in my own mind, but I suddenly became the object of ridicule and misjudgment. (That problem has since been taken care of.)


My Sunday-school lesson takes a considerable amount of time to prepare, but after Sacrament Meeting, I can’t get the members of the class to come in and get started ,leaving me with around 20 minutes, which isn’t enough time to develop the purpose of the lesson, giving me the feeling that I have failed.


This week I called one of the members to make an appointment and was yelled at for not listening and for arguing with her about what she had said. Although I don’t believe I really did that, and that rather the reverse was true, I apologized and wished her a Merry Christmas before she hung up. But the sting lingered on for several days. I felt like a small child who has been scolded severely for something.


We have been prayerfully waiting for a chance to teach a family that we found a few weeks ago, but whom we felt we should wait on until the father came home from the mine fields. They have 6 children, but they are all young and wiggly and you know, generally distracting. So we only got through about one principle of the first lesson before we had to leave, and that without much of a feeling of the Spirit. Remember how hard it was to get the Spirit to be in FHE when you kids were young? Now the father will be gone again for several weeks. So how can we progress?


Then one of the members we had been helping to come back to activity was offended by what was said to her at church, and basically told us she wasn’t interested in going back.


Our attempts to talk with our own family have failed week after week, because of poor internet connections and I have to admit, I have been longing for home somewhat. But then even our telephone service quit, so that basically we have had to get into the car and drive to a high point in the landscape in order to make a call, and we can receive no calls coming in. It’s so frustrating!


I haven’t felt the best either, lately, so all of it together has left me feeling pretty vulnerable. When a packet of letters from Angie and her children arrived yesterday, I couldn’t hold back the tears! Thank you, Bevans. What happened to Bryan? Please tell him we missed hearing from him.


Elder Ashby has had his own trials too. He said it seems that everywhere we turn we have been offending people. He has had a few difficulties I haven’t known about in the branch. Then he lost his special diamond ring that John gave him of their dad’s. We looked high and low for a whole day, including the garbage bins and even going downtown to the places we had been over the last couple of days. Maybe it will still turn up, but he was pretty sad.


We started counting our blessings together, and that really helped. I have the most wonderful companion in the whole mission field. He always has his priorities straight. Even with the loss of his beautiful ring, he said it was only a material thing, and we still have all the important things. And as far as the offense we seem to be giving, we should be thinking about our relationship with our Lord, and be humble; then things will work out with other people.


Today we went to a breakfast tea, given to say thank-you to the hundreds of volunteers that help at Mount Lockyer Primary School. One of the nice things about Australia is that many adults volunteer in some way in the community. It begins in school at around the 8th grade, when a few days a year are taken to give students a chance to try some kind of volunteer work to help them find an area they enjoy so that they can help in that way when they become adults.


We have become friends with the school chaplain (the kids call him “Chappy”), who takes time with individual kids who are not fitting into the mold in some way. He has a shop, where he can help boys who have trouble in school academically to do mechanics, or woodwork, for example. It’s wonderful because they find they are suited for other kinds of things, and that they can excel at something, even if it’s not academics. What a nice man! We hope to introduce the Gospel after we get to know him a little better.