We attended church services today with a Young Single Adult ward that meets in a high-rise building at the southern end of Sydney’s Hyde Park. We had to walk roughly 250 feet from the lobby of our hotel in order to reach sacrament meeting. The sheer toil and epically heroic sacrifice of that journey inescapably made me think of the old Latter-day Saint childrens’ song:
It’s a small ward, substantially though not wholly Chinese — most if not all of them students. Somebody told us that the ward has seen thirty-two convert baptisms during the past year; part of the service today was the confirmation of a young, newly baptized Chinese man.
The first speaker was a young Chinese woman, baptized a year ago, who spoke of her preparations to receive her endowment at the temple. I liked her talk quite a bit. She has been doing baptisms for the dead for a while already. She spoke about clear answers to prayer that she has received in the temple, including a recent one that, she said, was really not the answer she had wanted. She jokingly compared God to a “bossy father,” who tells her what she should do instead of what she wants to do. Having grown up in a badly dysfunctional family, she said, she had wanted babies and a family someday, but no husband. In the temple, though, she has seen loving couples, including elderly couples holding hands, and it has touched and changed her.
The second speaker was a young sister missionary — perhaps ethnically Melanesian, I would guess — who gave a very thoughtful talk on the blessings of the temple and the joy of family sealings. She told about the sealing of her own family a few years back. Afterwards, she said, her parents and siblings literally glowed, and she decided that she wanted to share that with others. That’s why she’s now a missionary.
The third speaker, an older Australian sister who was wearing some sort of missionary name badge, is delighted because this is the week that she’s going to the temple to perform the ordinances on behalf of her relatively recently deceased sister.
You may have sensed that there was a theme. It was a very good sacrament meeting.
Unfortunately, the Sunday school wasn’t nearly as good because, just before sacrament meeting began, a counselor in the stake presidency asked me if I would teach a combined Gospel Doctrine class. I did, and nobody threw anything at me or stomped out in a huff, so I consider it a success.
This evening, I spoke on evidence for the Book of Mormon at a multi-stake Young Single Adults devotional. The chapel of the Baulkham Hills stake center, where I spoke, was very sparsely occupied when the meeting began. The host stake president told me to just wait; these YSA events, he said, always followed the same pattern. And he was right: By the time we had enjoyed a couple of musical numbers and two YSA speakers and it was time for me to stand up, both the chapel and the cultural hall were absolutely packed.
There must have been real concern about me, though, because there were four Area Seventies seated on the stand for my talk.
We drove by the Sydney Australia Temple en route to the fireside and spent a few minutes on the grounds. I was hoping that we would have a chance to do that, and I really appreciated it.
Posted from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
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