ghgg

Dear Family,
I am listening to conference right now. Heh heh heh...

I am so grateful for the opportunity to be on a mission. I have felt so happy and learned so many little important lessons that help me and will be a blessing to me for the rest of my life. I feel grateful that our family can receive blessings for my faithful service. I don't fear the future. I feel excited and humbled to do the lord's work.

Our vision for Korat is that we hope to spread the happiness of the gospel to the new converts, the less active members, and especially to the strong active members. We hope to spread the messages taught in the scriptures about giving service and following Christs example. Yesterday we taught one of the recent converts a very short but powerful follow-up lesson. He connected the principals from both lessons and as soon as we felt the spirit strongly we prayed together and left. I know that the spirit had confirmed our testimonies and had been the teacher of that lesson. I could feel it. I could see it in his eyes. I hope that he will apply what was taught.

We had a great opportunity to have family home evening with the Branch President. He is such an important person; has such an important role in the church. We ate together and read certain scriptures that were meaningful to us which spoke about trust in God together. Then we visited a less active member together. I hope of all people that he will feel of our love for him. I hope that our service will lesson his burdens.

Working with Elder Blaughstein has been really fun. Today we carefully planned out a day full of activities. This morning we woke at our usual morning hours and immediately cleaned the house up. Then we changed clothes and set out to play basketball again. We invited our investigator and his friends, our branch mission leader (he's a short Filipino guy), and a few other guys that were around who we invited to play too. It was great fun, and as usual we did very well together. Then we came home, showered, ate some food and set out to "the Mall" with one of the members named Ratana. We ate Ice Cream with him and his Nephew. It was pretty amusing to see him eat his super sweet Ice cream with a smile on his face. Then we invited him over to the "free massaging chairs" in the Mall and we just sat down for about 20 minutes getting a massage. I couldn't help but laugh as the chair started shaking Ratana back and forth. He seemed a bit out of place in such a huge expensive mall. His home is more of a shack with chickens feeding around it.

Speaking of chickens. In Zelda they have really weird looking chickens that have their back tail feathers sticking straight up. I've seen some of those chickens up here. I'm no expert, but I'd venture to say that those are Asian chickens.

To Kara, I found a package and I'm sending you the Guitar. Happy Birthday. And for Mom, I think that it's great that you are receiving a calling in the relief society presidency. I certainly understand much more about the importance of the Relief Society in the ward from my experiences here. The Elder's quorum President is like the Branch President's right hand. But If he want's to get anything done all he needs to do is give the Relief Society President a call. Then there's sure to be action.

Unfortunately this year we didn't have an opportunity to watch conference in English. We were very disappointed as we were all looking forward to conference with excitement, hoping to see it in English. The Thai is okay, but a monotone translation doesn't do justice to the conference talks. Yet even through the language barrier I still felt impressed by the spirit. But then I felt sorry for Elder Blaughstein and Sister Larson as they are both new to the country. My translating the translations back to English did not do any justice to the talks either. As Sunday came around we prepared. We printed out a copy of all of the talks in English. Then we read them together.

I love you all, I have some great experiences I would love to share with you. And We have some good investigators.

Love,
Elder Lilly