Day 194-Fast Sunday 10/08/06

In Herndon, church was early, early in the morning-8:30 am. It was so early that we'd always have meetings after church. In Dahlgren, it's a little different. Church goes from 2:00 to 5:00 and we have meetings before church at 1:00pm.

Brother T. came and took us to church. I must explain something about Dahlgren at this time. Our church services are held on a Navel base. As it turns out, Dahlgren isn't a ward. It's a branch. There are too few members in the area for it to be a ward. I'm serving in Dahlgren; the only English speaking branch in the mission. We don't have a building to meet in, so we go to the multi-purpose chapel on the Navel base.

In addition to us, we share the building with the Catholic church, several protestant churches and a Jewish congregation.

Our church meets from 2-3. Then Elder Crawford and I teach the Gospel Principles class from 3-4. At 4, we go across the street to the schoolhouse on base, which doubles as another church on the weekends and hold the 3rd hour of meetings there.

We arrived at church a little bit before meetings so my companion and I went into the chapel library in the small schoolhouse to make copies of our weekly progress report so that we could give them to the other members in our branch meeting later.

The chapel library. Now that's something else. So many different books. Books for each denomination and each different doctrine. There were lots of Catholic prayer books, lots of books on the Virgin Mary, So many false doctrines; infant baptisms and such. A book on how Mary is the "queen of heaven" and how to pray to her and ask her to ask God to forgive you of your sins. Crazy stuff. The best thing is though, is that next to those are books about the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith. The Catholic church says: "Apostasy? What Apostasy?"

It was a very small church with a cross on the top of the steeple. It was a one-room chapel. When I stepped into the chapel, my companion sprinkled holy water on me. "You're clean," he said. "Ha ha, very funny," I said. There are very few members in this branch. There were less than 50 members at Sacrament meeting today. My companion and I were asked to bless the sacrament today. It was also Fast Sunday, so I was asked to bear my testimony and introduce myself. I went up and said how thankful I was to serve a mission.

CK then got up and bore her testimony. She's so sweet. She said how excited she was to be getting baptized tomorrow. C said that she first heard about the church form a friend. She wanted to know more, so the missionaries came and taught her. C said that she was so thankful for all of the help and support that the members of the branch had been to her. She was thankful for the missionaries, too, and all that they had been able to teach her. (I just got here, so I have not been able to teach her much yet)

I felt kind of bad for Elder W. That was the elder who was here with Elder C. before me. Elder W had been teaching C from the beginning and then got transferred just before her baptism. That has got to be hard.

Happy Thing for Day 194: Being in Dahlgren. It's so different from any other place I've been, but it's pretty fun. I think I'm going to like it here, holy water and all.

Crystal asked me to give the opening prayer at her baptism tomorrow!