Week 44: Fractal Geometry and a Foot

This week we had zone conference up in Ubon which killed two full working days. We used those two days to set up a ton of appointments for the weekend, and still managed to meet the requirements for a "balanced" companionship, which was awesome.

This week we picked up 4 new investigators. We still don't know a whole lot about them, so I can't predict where things will go. I've never served anywhere else, but I feel like in Thailand we pick up and drop (or more often get dropped by) investigators faster than elsewhere.

Ding Doi is doing really well. She understands and really gets it. She said the other day that the more she learns, the more she wants to learn more. I can see that the fruits of the gospel are "beginning to be delicious" to her, as explained in Alma 32.

We keep working with LAs and investigators. Not much of particular note to report this week.

At zone conference, President Johnson talked about a period in his life that was just chaotic as he tried to balance work, family, church, and other general responsibilities. He said that he felt like things were falling apart, and he didn't know what to do. He began to think about the idea of fractal geometry, where a shape actually takes its form after the smaller components it is made of (He used the idea of a triangle broken down into smaller pieces, and those broken into smaller pieces, etc.). He realized that there were many small things in his life that had become slightly chaotic, and thus made the overall form of his life chaotic. So, he sat down and established his final goal of becoming a perfected, glorified being, and broke his life down into smaller components. He did this until he could identify specific actions to take to bring the small things to order and thus bring his life back into order. I thought that was a very smart way of dealing with the problem, and figured I'd share.

I feel like sometimes we get lost in all the doctrine, auxiliaries, and finer details of the church. I've begun to appreciate that the most important thing we need to focus on is that Jesus Christ lived, and died for our sins. Because of Him, all of mankind has the opportunity to repent and become perfected.

Elder Parish

1. Some watermelons. About 30 baht ($1) per.


2. I ate that.

Riley also wanted this link about a Thai soccer group from a floating village added to his blog.  This video was shared in his conference training this past week.  He had seen it back at home.  But he now can understand almost all that is said without reading the subtitles.