Missionary moments from down under

Jun 26, 2008 Dear Family and Friends, Another week rolls by and some interesting  spiritual experiences occurred. We had  a double Zone Conference last Thursday here in Canberra. Usually there are one to three missionaries going home after serving for 2 years. Last Thursday 5 missionaries were going home in the next few weeks. It is a custom to have them bear their testimonies in the Zone before they go. The first was a missionary, Elder Broadbent, who seemed very distant or shy and gave the appearance that he was mentally already home. However, when he bore his testimony it was apparent that that he was very knowledgeable in the gospel and had done well on his mission. We found out that the mission president, when apparently finding out about his intelligence, asked him to learn Samoan on his mission and serve in the Samoan Wards; which he did.   There are almost more Samoan's and Tongans in Australia than there are in their own islands. If you remember in one of our first letters, we went to a 4 stake seminary scripture mastery activity near Sydney and I mentioned that over 90% of the seminary students there were of Polynesian descent.    Another missionary got up to bear his testimony, an Elder Sutton. He was one of the assistants to the mission president. Normally there are 2 Elders that are assistants to the president. This time there were 3 because he was going home in a week and the President had already called his replacement. The AP's usually do some teaching in the zone conference and always accompany President McMasters and his wife when they come to our zone conferences. As he was leaving, his replacement did the teaching and Elder Sutton was assigned to check out the all the missionary cars in the parking lot (called car park in Australia). At each zone conference elders from the mission office go over the missionaries cars looking to see the if elders are keeping up with their car's maintenance and cleaning. There were 14 -  2007 White Toyota Camrays in the lot.   . He collected all the keys from all the missionaries and while we were in the first part of our 4 hour meeting he checked the cars. As he was checking the cars,   a middle age Chinese couple walked through the car park taking a short cut through the lot to get to shopping center (called "the shops" here). The shops are across the street from the chapel. Elder Sutton waved at them and said Hi, but they just looked at him and said nothing. He waved again and said "Hi' again and this time they smiled and waved but said nothing. They continued to the shops and Elder Sutton went back to work on the cars.    About a ½ hour later, back came the Chinese couple with some groceries in bags and this time they stopped and looked at the row of white Camrays,  all looking exactly alike. Elder Sutton looked at them and felt prompted to go up to them and said Hi again, but they said nothing. He then felt prompted to say Hi in Chinese. He knew only a few Chinese phrases which he had learned because the Sydney area has ten's of thousands of Chinese. They smiled and immediately started talking to him in Chinese as though he was a fluent Chinese speaker. He stopped them and then using his hands and a few words, communicated to them that he knew only a few Chinese words. They shook their heads and smiled and walked away. As they walked away Elder Sutton realized that one of the elders inside the chapel spoke Chinese fluently and had in the trunk(called the "Boot" here) of his car a Chinese Book of Mormon and some missionary pamphlets in Chinese. He knew which one of the cars was the Chinese speaking elders', but he had in his pocket 14 sets of keys and had no idea which of the sets was the right set unless he looked at a number list that was in the chapel. Franticly, while saying a quick prayer he grabbed a set of keys out of his pocket and pushed  the trunk opener button. Miraculously, the trunk of car of the Chinese speaking Elder popped open. He ran to the car and fished around in the elders back pack until he found the Book of Mormon and the pamphlets in Chinese and then ran after the couple who were almost a block away by this time. They stopped when they heard him yelling. Elder Sutton, after about 5 minutes of using sign language, was able to convince them to take the missionary materials and to hopefully read them. They smiled at him and apparently thanked him and as Elder Sutton walked away he turned around and saw them looking at the materials. He finished his work and then came in and a few minutes later bore his testimony to us what had just happened and thank the Lord for giving him one more missionary experience. .   In that meeting was a new Sister missionary from Nepal. She had just come from the MTC  in which she had learned English. She is the only member in her family and speaks 5 languages. Her bible is in Hindi( Indian), and  her Book of Mormon is in Nepalese, She also  speaks Japanese, Chinese, and English,.      It is amazing how many times the spirit will prompt you when you are doing the Lord's work. Last Tuesday while preparing a lesson on King David from the Old Testament, I was not feeling good about the way the lesson was coming together.  We don't have an Institute teacher's manual so we use the seminary teachers manual to get ideas on what to teach. However, their manual has 5 lessons of 50 minutes each for  a week and we teach only one lesson of 90 minutes a week from the 5 lesson material. Many times, it is hard to put together a lesson from this. During this prep time I prayed for some inspiration,  and  I got the idea to compare David and his encounter with Bathsheba  to Joseph of Egypt's  encounter with Potapher's  wife, and  listing  of consequences that occurred because of David's bad decision and Joseph's good decisions. It all came to me very quickly, and I wrote them down as fast as I could write. During the lesson it  became a powerful teaching moment and I could feel and see how the spirit was effecting our students, especially as we pointed out to them that similar small decisions we make can have eternal effects on us also. It turned out to be one of our better lessons.   We are now officially in our down time. We only have 1 lesson a week for the next 2 weeks and then 1 week of no lessons, just an Institute opening social. Back to the genealogy and trying to learn  about the New Family Search Program. We went to the Sydney temple today( Sat).   Miss you all, Love Elder Mac