Saturday, October 23, 2004

Today was a strange day. We had a total of four lessons today, more than I’ve ever had before, but I still feel like this was a fairly ineffective day. We tried a new way of finding today where we approached people as they were just sitting around and ask them if they had five minutes that they could listen to a message. We got to teach three lessons this way but I’m really not sure how effective it was. I kept having the thought go through my mind that we shouldn’t cast our pearl’s before swine. These people certainly aren’t “swine” in any way but I just felt weird about it. We also taught a second lesson to the Estoga family. It went okay and I did feel the spirit. I tried to extend a baptismal commitment to them but they didn’t accept it. Actually I got interrupted a couple of times by Bro. Pulido, who was helping us teach, and that made it hard. Maybe that was the spirit’s way of telling me that they weren’t ready yet. Next time I’ll be sure to ask before I just go off doing what my brain tells me to do. I guess I’m just feeling down about how wicked all the people here are. of course there are some really good people but the majority just sit around and are lazy, smoke and drink. Everybody here has something about God either on their trike or on their Jeep or on their house or something but they still don’t want to or are “too busy” to listen to a half-hour of a message about Him. Also the church itself is not well off. For example, the branch president here in Calintaan didn’t want to use the budget money for new Tagalog hymn books. He was saving 1500 pesos for the branch Christmas party. All that they think about here is food, rice, and when they get to drink more alcohol. The culture here is so far from gospel culture that it’s a little bit frustrating to work with people. Well enough of my raving. The church is still true and everybody still needs to have the gospel.