Elder Matthew Halpin's Mission Blog: September 22, 2013 – Follow Your Promptings

So basically this week was pretty good.

We finally got Elder Fergusons bike on Tuesday and also went to meet our investigator Stephanie for the last time with the other Matang Elders. Wednesday we went exploring in some of our area that i had not been before. It turned out to be mostly a huge Islamic water kompung (kompung like kompung Kudei but with water under the crappy walkways and sunken boats everywhere) however we did see some Christian houses and plan to go back to look closer. Towards the end of the day we got totally rained out by the beginning of the monsoon. Basically we are moving from the dry season now towards the rainy season again.

Thursday we went with brother Dunggot to Siol Kandis to meet with less active members. It went pretty well. One of the less actives we went to see, his name is Brother Jitun. We thought he was a member, however, it turned out he wasn’t. See, he had come to church with his wife 2 weeks before but because of Singapore we had not been able to see them again. We found out that he had been being taught in 2011 and that his wife and kids were baptized but he was not. We were able to find his old teaching record and it seems the reason he was dropped was because he could not attend church because of work. He has the same problem now, however he has a strong desire. He gets public holidays off and the fact that he chose to come to church on his only off day show that. Now for the good news! He is currently in an "observation period" for his work. It will last until December or so. After that he gets Sunday off. He said that he would like to learn and that he will start coming once he has Sunday off. !!!!!!!

That evening we went contacting in emart and ended up contacting 2 guards, Peter and Michael. They both seemed pretty interested and also Michael can speak pretty good English.

This week I saw 2 scorpions. One right next to my shoes when we came out of someone’s house (from now on I will be shaking out my shoes before I put them on). The other we found out while exploring on Friday. We played with it a bit and got it to sting a stick a couple times.

Friday we also went to the Sentosa sisters baptism. Lately they have been having problems with the font at the KDC. The auto plugger was rosok (broken) so they had to put a boulder over the drain. Also the water from the font was brown so they tried to use the emergency fire hoses. No water, (not much use in an emergency huh). So basically the guy was baptized in brown mystery water with a boulder plugging the drain.

One other thing happened this week. Last Sunday after helping the other Elders locate a former investigator close to their house, we started riding back to our house. We got a little ways when an old guy said hello to us. People saying hello is very normal. Everyone from the guy on the motto passing us to the guy digging a ditch says hello. Not sure why but my bicycle basically turned itself around and I started engaging him in conversation. I found out that his name was Christopher Tuhah and that he had been baptized in 2007 but had never received the priesthood. He is a construction worker and construction workers here live on the jobsite in huts like the ones down by the creek. Thus when the project he was working was finished he moved. After several moves and years he lost contact with the church. We told him that there was a church not a 15 minute walk from the construction site he was working on. As we continued to talk we found out that he only had the BOM in English and we were able to give him one in Malay. We asked if we could come visit him on Saturday and he said yes. We also invited him to church on Sunday and arranged to meet him Sunday morning so we could show him where it was. We were very discouraged Saturday night when he didn’t show where we were supposed to meet. I figured that he had forgot and that was the end of it. The next morning we went to the meeting spot at the arranged time and he was also a no show... We get to the church a couple minutes later and guess what? He was already there! With the info we gave him he located the church on his own and walked there earlier in the morning. He stayed for all 3 hours (something people in Malaysia have a hard time with) and told us that he really enjoyed it. He gave us his number and asked us to visit him later in the week.

Something I have learned so far is that every day there will be someone to talk to or meet with or share the gospel with and that there is also always a purpose for it. If some frustrating delays that had happened earlier the first Sunday had not happened, we would not have met him.

Sincerely Elder Halpin