FYI: BY AUTUMN AGAR, TIMES-NEWS EDITOR, [email protected] Part II: The Next Chapter ... Discovery in Burma In September 1987, Church President Gordon B. Hinckley traveled to Burma, now known as Myanmar, to dedicate the country for future missionaries. While there, he baptized 70 people in a remote corner of the country. It was to be the beginning of a great movement for the church in Burma. But everything changed less than a year later when riots led to a military crackdown. The country closed to missionaries, and the LDS church lost contact with its 70 new members. Almost two decades later, in 2004, Larry and Sherrel Olsen of Buhl arrived in Myanmar as senior missionaries. They knew the story of President Hinckley baptizing 70 people, and Larry Olsen decided to try to find them. “I didn’t think they would still be active,” he said. He boarded a plane with another missionary and landed in Kalaymyo, near the border of Burma and India. How word spread that they were arriving, Larry Olsen didn’t know. But there they were — a group of people waving and waiting to show off the church they built and sustained without any connection to the outside world. It was a bamboo building, Olsen said, with a hand-painted sign - “The Church of Jesus Christ of Later-day Saints” — the spelling just one letter off. Olsen walked inside and found more than 200 people waiting. They were on the roof, in the rafters and sitting on the windowsill waiting to hear what he had to say.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 20:48:57 +0000
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