Sunday, October 17, 2004

Church here is a bit different from back in the city. We have church at 9:00 in the morning in a little house that we’re renting. We play the piano on a little electric keyboard. The branch president’s name is President Isla. He’s a different person. He’s actually an Illocano and so his Tagalog is a bit hard to understand. He’s a good leaders but he needs to learn how to run things a bit better. For example, he has trouble knowing how to assign talks. He doesn’t give a topic and doesn’t really give much warning to them. I was the concluding speaker today and I just found out yesterday when we went by President’s It was kind of intimidating because I had to be ready to use up whatever time was left after the others were done. The Tardio sisters were the two first speakers and they left me with almost half an hour to speak. I talked about Lehi’s dream and how we can strengthen our families, walking in the straight and narrow path, through family prayer and family scripture study. It was really hard. My Tagalog skills aren’t good and I’m so used to using “taglish” that it just slips out sometimes. I have to admit that I was a bit upset with Elder Cox earlier. We had a family in front of us who had read and kept the commitments from the first discussion and all we did was read with them! I was all ready to teach a second outline and help them to keep progressing. I need to remember to do that in my later time when I’ll be a senior companion. People need to hear new things after they’ve had a discussion.