Kaylee in Budapest: Boldog Függetlenség Napja

Happy 4th of July to all my fellow Americans. Not going to lie, it has been weird walking around today and people just pretended like today is any other day. Clearly it is one of the greatest days of the year, and they just don't even know it! It has been a fun experience celebrating it over here in Hungary though!

Visiting With Sis Klára

This week was a crazy busy one! We were up in Buda on Wednesday and Thursday for greenie training and then we had the opportunity to go on splits with the Buda sisters, which meant that I was reunited with G-Wheely! It was by far the best splits I have ever been on, I missed that girl! Also get this, we got to go visit a member named Klára. Klára was baptized right before my trainer served in Buda and from the very beginning of my mission I have been hearing of Klára's world famous fruit soup! Well, Klára made us fruit soup on Wednesday and I am glad to say that the world on the street is true! I literally thought I had died and gone to heaven eating that soup! Plus she is just the most adorable little lady I have ever met!

Something that has been on my mind this week is the concept of Agency. When we were on splits we started discussing the concept of agency and how it is the one thing that God promises to never take away from us, yet the one thing that Satan is always trying to rob us of. Therefore, the only truly successful surrender in life is handing our agency over to God and he will make way more out of us than we ever could alone. This seemed pretty cut and dry to me in terms of my own agency, but when you start considering that ever single person has that same agency it becomes a little more complex.

As missionaries, it can sometimes be a little difficult to accept this. We come here to work and help people grow closer to Christ, and we do our best, but sometimes it feels like in the end you didnt really do anything. Thats where the role of agency comes into missionary work. You can work your hardest and put everything you have into your mission and still come home with no baptisms. However, that doesn't determine what kind of missionary you were, because you used your agency wisely and chose to be the best kind of missionary you could be, but that doesn't mean that because of your efforts God is going to take away the agency of those you are teaching and force them to build their relationship with him. Every single person we will run into in this life has agency for themselves, and sometimes we have to accept that things are out of our hands.

This is something that has personally been a little bit of a struggle for me. We are meeting with an investigator right now, and one day she will keep her commitments and be progressing so much, and the next day she just regresses. It seems like it is always 1 step forward, 2 steps back. Who knows maybe I am exaggerating it a little bit, but regardless, I cant help but always ask myself what we are doing wrong? Why cant we seem to help her? On Saturday she promised us that she would come to church with us, so Sunday morning we got on our bikes and rode the 2 miles to her house only to find out that she wasn't home... She had picked up earlier that morning and moved back into her abusive boyfriends home. After talking to her mother we found out that she had also been smoking and drinking and never had even stopped like she told us. As we rode our bikes back the 2 miles to church, I just couldn't help thinking that clearly we must be doing something wrong, that there must be something we can do to help her. But then I realized that we are already doing our part. We were called to preach the gospel and help people come closer to Christ, but if they don't want to, we can't force them to, its their decision. As missionaries, we want everybody we meet to accept the message we have to share and the joy that comes along with it, but we also have to respect their agency and allow them to chose for themselves to either accept or deny the blessings that come from living according to the gospel. It isn't always easy, and sometimes it still frustrates me, but accepting this allows us to be responsible for our own actions and not get ourselves down when the door in the face happens, cause it does. But that's alright!

Last night while walking home it started pouring and today we took a ride out to some sunflower fields (which you can find on any back road of Hungary this time of year) and found a little lake! Enjoy the pics and have a great week!

Sok Szeretettel,

LeBaron Nővér