With Hope We Have Faith

Each week as we prepare for our Institute class we hope that we have at least one show up, but we then pray that Heavenly father will lead many there. Through our hope, we exercise our faith, that the class members will come. Over the last year we have made some dear and close friends of this rising generation here in Cambodia. We never know when the class begins how many will really show up. There are those who can only stay for half the class, but they come for at least that part. And occasionally there is someone who comes with five minutes left of the class, but they made the effort to come and we hope that they were blessed for their effort. Today we had twenty-five come to the class. That is definitely the most that we have seen in a long time and probably the second most that we have ever seen.

We were invited to attend a baptism this evening  for a Young Adult Sister that has been coming to the Chaktomuk Ward. She was introduced to the Church by a member of our Institute class and has been to Church almost every week for the last two months. We were also told tonight that her sister will be baptized in two weeks. Again a Young Single Adult exercised hope that her friend would like to learn about the Church and went forth in faith and invited her to take the missionary discussions.

We were blessed to Skype or FaceTime with all of our daughters and part of their family, with Wendy it was only Bennett, who slept the whole time. He was getting some rest so that he could keep her awake tonight. Our FaceTime and Skype calls are such a joy. It is so wonderful that we live in a day of technology where we can see the faces and here the words of our loved ones on the other side of the world.

This afternoon while Elder Oveson was gone to meetings for about four hours, Sister Oveson wrote our weekly email home and got things ready for tomorrow.