Tuesday, February 21, 2017

~Finishing My Mission With A Fantastic Week~

 What a week to finish off my mission with! This email is gonna be a long one filled with lots of pictures, so get ready! 

I have loved serving here in Szombathely so much! The people here have accepted me with open arms and have truly made me feel so loved and at home! I could never thank them enough! 

For my last real p-day we were able to go hiking in köszeg, a local town that is right on the Austrian border! 
We did a town called Hétforrás and it was amazing! It was so good to hike again! Infact, it is so close to the border that we received this text welcoming us to Austria! We are pretty sure we stayed in Hungary the whole time, but regardless, it was absolutely breath taking! We got up there and they have a little monument for the settlers of the town, it is really cute!
On the way down we got to watch the sun set over the hills of Austria.

 

Donát is just the cutest thing ever! 


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 On Tuesday at 8AM we received a very interesting phone call... Tamás, the man we tracted into last Sunday night called and had a favor to ask. He said that he knew it sounded crazy, but his son, Donát, had his surgery coming up this past weekend in Czech and his friend that was going to go with him canceled last minute, but he had to have someone in the car for the drive to help with Donát. He said that he knew it was a lot to ask, but that he didn't have anyone else to turn to, so he asked me if I could go to Czech with him to help! Unfortunately that isn't allowed, so we tried to talk to the members and even found a few who were willing to drop everything and take a weekend trip to Czech with Tamás! Luckily things ended up working out, so they didn't have to, but I just thought it was so cool that he would trust us enough to be willing to turn to us and ask for help! It definitely was not an accident that we happened to tract into him when we did! Donát had his surgery and as far as I know everything went well! Hopefully the sisters will be able to start meeting with them as soon as they get back to Hungary! Here is a picture of them from a newspaper article that the national news ran about them and their situation following his wife's Passing! Donát is just the cutest thing ever! 

After the phone call, we went and volunteered at the homeless shelter again! This is our new friend, his name is Ricsi, he is super sweet and is a graffiti artist!
 That evening we met with "M"! She is doing really well! We talked more about her experience in church! And read from the Book of Mormon with her about resurrection, because she is fascinated by it!

Wednesday morning we had a lesson with "M" at 8AM! He had to cancel our lesson for the night before, and he was busy every night, but he wanted to meet, so he said he would love to meet at 8AM if we were down! So we went and Netti is a sweetheart and came with us! It was kind of a hard lesson, M wasn't his normal bubbly, happy self when he showed up. I asked him what was up and he informed us that his little brother was in the hospital with a very rare form of cancer and that things weren't looking good. It broke my heart to hear that! He prayed about baptism though, and he honestly has such a desire to learn more about God and His will for him at this point in my life! He is so amazing and I know that God will lift him through these hard times!
On Thursday the weather here was to die for! Like seriously it was so nice! Infact we decided to have district meeting outside! Elder Fucsh got really sick this week and was in the hospital from Tuesday to Friday all by himself, so he wasn't there, but the 5 of us had a good last district meeting and had some delicious pizza for lunch


















Monday, February 6, 2017

~ 18 Months Come and Gone ~

(Error.....So Pictures Coming Soon)
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