Letter Home

Dear Kids,

Mom and I continue in our evolution of faith and commitment.  As you all know, we've been through some rough times lately and find ourselves much less valiant than we expected (often more like Laman and Lemuel than Nephi).  Helping Church leaders to grow here is intensely complicated - more than we could ever have imagined.  We somehow simplistically thought that we'd just breeze in, share leadership skills with a "hungry" and willing group and they'd say: "Oh wow, this is what it's all about.  Now we can be real leaders and help the Church to succeed in Fiji!  Why didn't we know about Handbooks and principles like this before?"

How naive we were.  We couldn't have imagined the deep and implacable stamp of culture on people who know little of organization, cleanliness, planning, interacting, leading, etc.  We couldn't have understood that people can "hear and read words", nod their heads, and not really get it at all.  We couldn't have understood that 6 months after weekly repetition and training that not a single sacrament meeting would yet be fully planned out before Sunday, that interviews (the mainstay of bishopric ministering) haven't started, that leaders would have not implemented almost anything from the handbooks, that almost no one comes to a meeting having given any thought whatever to the agenda, that presidents of organizations would not have presidency meetings or talk to their counselors, etc.  Combine that with the fact that they have no money, no watch, no calendar, no car, no computer, no phone, and yet preside over a ward with 20-30 some villages spread over a 50 kilometer long region.  That they've never seen the Church "work", are a new convert, that there is no Visiting or Home Teaching, that people alienate each other with gossip and criticism so deeply imbedded in cultural habit that even though they read of the Lord condemning such behavior in the scriptures they don't actually understand it applies to them.  And all these factors are just the beginning of woes we encounter.  So 8 months into our "Member and Leader Support" mission we wonder if what we've done actually has had any lasting affect for change on leaders that will remain after we pack up and go home.  Combine those issues with living in a place with screaming Indian music that daily deafens you, dogs that bark and howl and fight day and night outside your open window, food that is completely undesirable, sweat and bugs and dirt and disease, and . . . Well, you get the picture.

So we flail back and forth between despair and disgust, sadness and disappointment. Then we feel condemned for our complaint and lack of faith, hope, and charity. We study our scriptures and see that we must "becometh a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon [us], even as a child doth submit to his father" (Mosiah 3:19); and we think we are just beginning to understand what that might really mean.  We see the Lord ministering to the poor and downtrodden and realize that we have enjoyed living in a world in the states that is so completely foreign to most of the rest of the world that it is embarrassing and that we "really don't understand" either. We're so grateful for the scriptures and Conference talks that help us out of the "pit of despair" and point us in the right direction.  And we have each other to lean on and be strong when the other isn't.

Then we go to some little home, so barren of any possession that it is startling, and we have the sweetest sharing time.  We hear an old woman (Sister Mate), telling how she was inspired by a scripture to pray that she might just make a dollar or two that day at the market so she could afford to go to church - and the Lord answered her prayer.  We hear the Nairoqos telling us that we were their "saviors", and we get a tearful kiss and grateful smile from a little old Indian woman who speaks no English - simply because we visited her and brought a pair of reading glasses from “Dollar Store” in the US (thanks Sara & Birch). We share a lesson on the plan of salvation with a 58 year-old man who lost his wife last year and he says, "I have never heard of these things before, but they sit right with me." And we wonder how we could be so ungrateful as to feel like our mission is largely a waste of time.

So that's something of our world, the back and forth struggle of our spirits as we try to actually learn what the work of the Lord is really like and why He sent us here, and how we can be more faithful and "submit to His will" more gracefully.  We're still figuring this out.  It's mostly a matter of the heart and mind and more complicated than we imagined. We are making progress, and this is not a plea for your pity -- just wanted to share with you that discipleship is a lifelong process and the path is thorny, as you all know. Elder Neil Andersen's wonderful talk, "What Thinks Christ of Me," from the last conference has been sustaining and inspirational.  There are so many reasons to be faithful, and we hope to be that with all of you whom we love so much.  Thank you for your sustaining prayers, letters, and internet visits that make the distance between us feel so much less.

All our love, 

Dad