Building on last week, I wanted to write a little bit more about how the Book of Mormon was important for us.
It has a lot to do with the Spirit of course, because it brings the Spirit, and helps you learn. We had one investigator in Modesto who studied for a year without really progressing, and then he started reading the Book of Mormon, and things changed. We were teaching three kids together, and it wasn't going anywhere, but we got one to start reading, and she kept at it. Maybe that's why it became our focus.
You see, the problem in the San Joaquin Valley is that the first missionaries who started working with the Lao people, well, I don't know. They definitely had not been trained to speak Laotian, so there was a language barrier. I have heard stories about people getting baptized and giving a list to the branch president of furniture that they needed, so it is possible that the welfare program was abused. I wasn't there back then. I just know that when I did get there, it was like everyone was a member but nobody went.
That is a bit of an exaggeration. There were a lot of people who were not members, but there were a lot who were, and yet we probably only had about ten percent of the members in the branch actually attending.
There was the issue that they had made covenants that they weren't keeping, and how much they understood or had thought about their baptismal covenants was questionable, but still, they were missing out on that. In addition, it made it hard to teach others. If the Mormons are sitting in the card-playing circle smoking and drinking, it is hard to tell others that they should give that up and join.
So, for the last few months of my mission, Sister Metcalfe and I focused on working with members, both the ones who were going and the ones who were not going, and a lot of that was reading the Book of Mormon with them and encouraging them to read it as a family.
The thing is, getting people to church can be hard. A lot of them don't have cars, and you can try arranging rides, but sometimes we would do that and then the person would not be home when their ride came by anyway. There was a lot of room for things to go wrong there.
Getting them to read just felt right. And there were issues with that too. Often there were literacy issues, where maybe not everyone in the family read, or there were language issues, where the parents kind of understood English and the kids kind of understood Lao, but the generations were truly speaking different languages, but this was increasing their fluency in whichever language they ended up using.
Mainly it was something where we knew that they could keep it going after we were gone. Maybe they wouldn't, but they could, and we knew it would help them. We had a lot of good experiences doing that.
You know, it was before social networking. I did have addresses and I wrote some letters, and I got some back. There was one family I especially tried to keep in touch with, and then they moved and there wasn't a forwarding address. But in my mind I still see their faces, and I still feel how my heart felt when we were reading together. I know it's important. There are a lot of reasons why it's important, but I remember it for bringing families together, and rekindling testimonies, and bringing the Spirit.
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