Spencer - Called to Serve: Week 71 - Epistles of the Lord, Friday the 13th, and Here Comes the Rain

Well, it has been another pretty dang good week! I don't know if I mentioned this in my last email but my companion and I had our first skype lesson and are looking forward to more. Basically the church is only in very select places here but we get media referrals from all over Indonesia. Basically any referral that cannot be visited by missionaries, we take. One of them wanted to meet on skype, turns out this person has learned before and was very receptive of the Restoration. Unfortunately, it is a little hard to baptize them because they would be baptized straight into inactivity just because there is no church in most of the areas. We have a couple other skype lessons lined up for this upcoming week and we are excited.

On Wednesday we had a split with the district leader here in Jakarta and it was a great day! We were able to meet with less-actives, taught an investigator, who knows that the Book of Mormon and the church is true, just scared to make the commitment to be baptized. We hope very shortly he will make that decision. We know he will because he already has the testimony. We also met a lot of crazy people together. I was also able to treat him to Chili's and I think he enjoyed that.

Thursday rolled around and both my companion and myself fell by the wayside sick. :( We took care of some office work and just went to bed to get better. Well, my lesson on rest has grown because the next day we were in action. In the past, I have kind of forced myself and suffered for about 2 weeks but this was like insta-heal! The power of rest is powerful. Just a little hiccup in the week and straight back to work!

We have been getting rain off and on. I think soon here we will fully enter into the rainy season where it will rain everyday. Here in Jakarta that means flooding. Friday night we had our English class at the church but it was raining which meant flooding. Well, we walked through the floods. It took us a little over 2 hours to get to the church because of traffic and I'm just gonna throw the little sick hiccup on Friday. Just a typical Friday the 13th. The myth is true.

Yesterday we visited a member who lives pretty far. I'm pretty sure we walked a marathon after the hour bus ride out there. On top of that the humidity after the rain is killer here!! Well, this member is pretty cool. He was baptized probably about 2.5 years ago. He was muslim and actually is the only Christian in his family. We were able to go to his house and sing with him and get to know a few of his family members. The faith of the members in this city is tremendous. Unless you live right across the street from the church, which nobody does, it takes about 1 hour+ give or take to get to church give or take a few.

This past week, in preparation for the upcoming mission tour in December with Elder Wong from the 70, who will be coming, we were given a talk that was given in the mission President seminar by Russell M. Nelson. It is titled "Epistles of the Lord," and I found the talk very inspiring. First I looked up the word Epistle in the Bible Dictionary and besides a letter, I found that it is "in its best sense more than a letter; it is a formal teaching instrument." That is very fitting for a missionary. He then gives the scripture reference in 2 Corinthians 3:2-3 which says,

" 2 Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men:

3 Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with

ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but infleshy tables of the heart."

This really hit me and just let me focus and ask myself if I truly have the countenance of the Lord in my eyes. He explains that just by what we look like and what we may say that the countenance of the Lord can be shown if we have the epistle of the Lord written in our hearts. That is what I strive for and hope to achieve. Hopefully all of us can learn from this.

Sounds like everything is going well, hope it stays that way!

Elder Hayes