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Hali ho folks!
This week was another fantastic one! It is hard to believe it, but
yesterday I hit my 18 month mark as a missionary! It seems like just
yesterday my parents were dropping me off at the MTC, now here I am
looking back on it with only 2 and a half short weeks left in Hungary.
It literally makes me heart hurt to think about leaving here and moving
on, but I am so thankful for the time that I have been able to spend
here, the people the met, the companions Ive served with, the
investigators Ive been able to help to come to Christ, President and
Sister Szabadkai with all their constant love and support, and most of
all, the many changes that I have been able to make in my own life and
the growth that I have seen in my personal testimony of and relationship
with my Savior! Nothing will ever have a greater influence on my life
than these past 18 months have, and I will forever be grateful for the
opportunity I have had to serve here in this amazing country that I have
grown to love!
This transfer has been such a good one this far, and I am so
grateful for the opportunity I have to finish out my mission here in
Szombathely with Sister Towne! We have been working super hard and have
been able to see some amazing turn a rounds in the work here! This week
we met with our investigator Mar again, and the lesson went really
well! He read his assigned reading and answered the questions I had
outlined for him, and then wanted more, so he went back to 1st Nephi and
kept reading more! He loves the Book of Mormon and truly feels like he
can find answers to his questions in it as he reads! In-fact he brought a
personal question with him to the lesson and asked us if we could
recommend a certain scripture passage that would help to find the
solution to his problem... How neat is that? He is planning on coming to
our branch Farsang party this weekend and said he would even invite his
fiance from pest to come! We are meeting with him tonight and have
planned to skip ahead and teach about the Gospel of Jesus Christ,
focusing on how it fulfills our purpose as missionaries and talking
about how our goal with him is to help him to practice his faith by
being baptized unto repentance so that he can complete the repentance
process and truly be forgiven and cleansed of all his sins! Our
commitment will be for him to pray about baptism and he has been very
open to the gospel thus far, so I am really optimistic about how the
lesson is going to go!
Our other main investigator right now is Ma, and we met with
her on Wednesday and had a really good teaching! She had started the
Book of Mormon and read from the introduction clear through 1 Nephi 2!
In our last lesson she had also asked about why we do not have crosses
hanging up in our churches. With the help of our member present, we
explained that we believe that Christ suffered and died for us, but that
he also was risen from the dead and lives on, and that because of his
resurrection we too can live again! Well last week she had thought it
was kind of weird, but in our lesson on Wednesday she admitted that she
had been thinking a lot about it all week and that she actually really
likes it and thinks that it makes way more sense, so I feel like that
was a huge step in the right direction! She also said that she really
enjoyed reading Joseph smiths testimony in the beginning of the Book of
Mormon. We watched the Restoration film with her and talked more about
prayer and how we can personally know that the restoration and book of Mormon is true! At the end of the teaching she agreed to say the
prayer! We will be meeting with her as well tonight and are going to
start covering the Plan of Salvation so that she can start to see more
of how the gospel can apply to her personally and we have a member
planning to come with us, who used to know Margit years ago from work,
so I think it is going to go well!
On Tuesday we went to go visit "E", one of our new investigators
from last week, and when we got there she informed us that her husband
had asked her not to meet with us. She told us that she had read from
the Book of Mormon though and really likes it! In-fact, she read clear up
through the end of 1st nephi since our teaching with her last week! She
is a neni and can kind of talk when she wants to, so she went off for
awhile at the doorstep about how Laman and Lemuel need to follow the
example of Nephi and Sam and stop being so wicked! It was so cute to see
how much she had learned from the Book of Mormon in such a short period
and how enthusiastic she was about it! She said that she really wants
to meet with us! She asked us to try back this next week, and that she
will try to convince her husband to let her meet with us! I brought it
up in Branch council yesterday and a member has agreed to try and go
over there with us to talk to her husband and see if we can get his
permission to teach her! Fingers crossed that his heart will be
softened!
This week we went with a brother home teaching to one of the less
active members, Bea. She is still having a really hard time, but our
lesson with her was amazing! When we got to her house she had her hand
over her mouth and was just mumbling and I couldn't figure out what was
wrong. Turns out that morning she had had 3 teeth pulled, and that was
her only day off, so she had invited us over, and said that she was
going to go back to working at her 2 jobs the next day because she couldn't miss out on the money even though she was in so much pain she
literally could barely even talk to us! She also informed us that the
doctors ran another test for her mother, and the cancer has spread even
more and they only gave her 1-2 weeks left to live. Poor Bea we just
felt so bad for her! We had planned to watch a really good conference
talk that we thought would be perfect for her given the circumstances
she is in (with all this on top of her recent divorce and her troubled
teenage son), but the member downloaded the wrong talk so we couldn't
even do what we had planned. Things just seemed to not be going like we
wanted them too, and we couldn't figure out how in the world we could
help Bea. I finally had the impression to ask her if she would like a
priesthood blessing, she said yes, and her home teacher gave her one. As
he finished the blessing, she just started talking completely normal,
explaining that the pain was basically completely gone! It was a
miracle, and amazing to see just how strong her faith is!
This weekend we had the Sopron sisters here in Szombathely. I was
with Sister Manwaring, and we were working on extending strong
commitments. We had a few teachings we went to in which she was able to
practice and she did a really good job! Her language is also coming
along really well, i am super impressed!
Well, my time is coming to a close here, but I still have 17 days
left as a missionary and I am going to make the most of them that I can!
I hope that y'all have a splendid week!
Sok Szeretettel,
LeBaron Nővér