Missed Opportunity, Vietnamese. Fri, Apr 20, 2007.

04/20/2007. Missed opportunity. I was going to eat at a Chinese buffet restaurant, but first I walked down the sidewalk of the strip mall to a newspaper vending machine to buy a local newspaper. I walked past a nail salon (which are almost always owned by people from Vietnam), and two Asian men were conversing in front it.

I was carrying my large satchel of Asian language copies of the Book of Mormon, and there was a Vietnamese copy in it. But I was afraid that if I whipped out the Vietnamese book right there, it would be appear to strongly that I was targeting them. It's so much easier for me when meetings are just happenstance. In this case, it really was happenstance, but I let fear and lack of confidence override a perfect opportunity. I chickened out, and didn't say anything to the two men, neither on my trip down to the newspaper box or on the way back.

It didn't occur to me until later that I still could have gone back to my car and retrieved a different Vietnamese Book of Mormon from the car if either of them had been interested in one. I also had at least one Vietnamese Liahona in the car.