Flooding the Earth with the Book of Mormon: Chinese at restaurant. Mon, Jul 30, 2007.

Flooding the Earth with the Book of Mormon

(One drop at a time.) My journal entries about offering copies of the Book of Mormon, the Bible, and other LDS church books, mainly to immigrants in their native language, mainly in Indianapolis, Indiana. With 106 translations, the Book of Mormon (along with the Bible) is a good "Rosetta Stone" for learning English or other languages, in addition to being a missionary tool.

My goals in keeping this blog/journal are: to encourage others to offer people copies of the Book of Mormon and the Bible, to illustrate the incredible number of recent immigrants who are eager for bilingual material, to illustrate the ease of encountering them and offering them material, and to make known the wonderful deeds of the Lord (Ps 105:1, Isa 12:4) in arranging many of these encounters. I realize that the concept of offering foreign language books to strangers is just plain weird to many people, so here are some hints if you are intrigued by this and wish to try it. Respectful comments and constructive criticism are invited.

The goal of the book placement effort is to provide, in a friendly non-threatening way, gospel material to someone who is willing to receive it in their native language and English.

To the recipients of these books who read this: I thank you again for allowing me to be of service to you. I encourage you to read the material, and pray to God that He confirm the truth of it to you. The Bible and the Book of Mormon are both the Word of God. Living according to their teachings brings happiness.

Monday, July 30, 2007

Chinese at restaurant. Mon, Jul 30, 2007.

07/20/2007. 856. I took our ward's two full-time elder missionaries to a Chinese buffet restaurant for their lunch. The mission recently altered the standard missionary schedule so that their "lunch/dinner" hour is 3 pm to 5pm. They are supposed to be out of their apartment from 10 am (or 11am?) to 3 pm, and from 5pm to 9pm. I suppose the reasoning is that they will be able to find more people home during normal meal hours and be able to make more contacts and have more missionary presentations, lessons, etc.

It was a nice buffet, with a decent price for lunch. I chose a table, we got food, sat down, and I put out some material: a simplified script and a traditional script Chinese Book of Mormon, an English Book of Mormon, a Chinese/English bilingual New Testament (from the Int'l Bible Society), a "Finding Happiness" DVD, and a Chinese Liahona magazine.

The waitress didn't say anything about them. She seemed to come by to take away our plates while we were back at the buffet. One of the elders struck up a conversation with her at one of the buffet tables, and they came back to the table.

She said she already had a simplified script Chinese Book of Mormon given to her by other customers. But she didn't have an English. She accepted an English copy for herself, and an additional simplified script Chinese copy for the people in the back. She also accepted the Chinese Liahona magazine, and the Finding Happiness DVD.

I think the elders mentioned it was their first experience in giving out foreign language copies of the Book of Mormon. I also explained to them the difference between the simplified script for mainland Chinese, and the traditional script for those from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Indonesia, and some of the exceptions.

Labels: Chinese, restaurant