Elder Perry Came!

This week's biggest event was Elder Perry coming to town. We had to be an hour early to the meeting so that 15 minutes before it started we could be in our seats reading our scriptures or Preach My Gospel. It was held in a church building in the San Jose area so the Pleasanton Sisters picked us up on their way there (it was WAY too far to bike to). Sister Zorn (who came to San Jose with me from Temple Square) is serving in Pleasanton right now so I got to see her and that was fun. We made it to the meeting all in one piece and it turns out there are a lot of missionaries in the California San Jose Mission--about 200. When Elder Perry came in he wanted to shake hands with each missionary so we all went past him in a line to shake his hand and tell him our name, where we're from, and how long we've been serving. It took about a half hour to go through everyone, but now I can say that I shook Elder Perry's hand.

Elder Perry has such great enthusiasm for life and for the future and it was so great to hear him speak. He spoke first about the mormon.org campaign and how that is making people more interested in the church--it sounds very exciting. Then he spoke about how the God-given Priesthood organization in the church makes The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints unique. We can organize ourselves in such an incredible way that almost no other church organization can match. I hadn't thought about that before, but it sounds true. Then he spoke about the ward mission process--the way that missionaries find people to teach through ward councils. It helped me to understand better how things are theoretically supposed to work with missionary work. The best part, though, was feeling the power of his testimony of the Savior. He really is a special witness of Jesus Christ. 

As for the state of the work here in the Central Park Ward, we still don't have any investigators, although we passed on a referral to the Oakland Mission. So we're still working on being diligent and doing all that we can with what we have. 

This week Sister Kim and I went to a birthday party for one-year-old Vihaan. Vihann is the son of our eternal investigators. Since they are from India it was held at an Indian restaurant and it was quite the party with about 40 guests. It was Aladdin themed and the family was decked out in their traditional Indian dress. There was lunch provided and an incredible Aladdin palace cake made special for the day. Oh, there was a magician there too. Vihaan's parents really love him and I hope that someday they can go to the temple and be sealed as a family. That would be the greatest gift they could give to their son.

Sister Kim and I found out this week that you can't even count on church. The power at the church building blew out on Saturday so someone brought their generator to church so that some of the lights were on in the chapel so that we could have an abbreviated sacrament meeting. It was supposed to be ward conference this past Sunday and we were supposed to have ward council, but both of those were cancelled too. It was a little sad, but we got to spend some time visiting members with the Relief Society president so it worked out well.