The week before last we had zone conferences. (There are two zones, I believe. There is the Moravia and Slovak Republic Zone and the Bohemia Zone.) The Slovačkovi have presented quite a plan for us. First let me tell you a little about zone conferences. They only happen once or twice a transfer (every nine weeks) and they're a way that we keep up morale in the mission. Missionary work is very draining and can be physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausting. I've only been here for almost three months and I can attest to every one of those. So in zone conferences we have training on different aspects of missionary work so that we get a fresh outlook on the work and see different ways we can approach the same problem; we have talks from president and his wife and we have time to talk together! Sometimes just meeting with the other missionaries and talking can be one of the best ways to boost yourselves because we all understand that the work is hard and we can share strange/funny experiences that we've had. Then throughout the transfer, we have district meetings where the separate districts get together in much smaller groups (ours is Zlín and Uherské Hradiště) and we try and keep the spirit and morale that we built during zone conference.
Anyway, upward and onward. At this last conference, President said that the next week (the one we just finished) would be "finding week" and he wanted to find 115 new investigators during the week. Then we'll have "bring people to church week;" he wants us to bring 70 people to church. And then we'll have "baptismal commitment week" and he wants to get 50 baptismal dates from people. That's quite lofty, but we must do it in order to get some baptisms this transfer.
So this last week in Zlín, we had one day where we had the zone leaders from Olomouc come down to the ol' Zlíner and have exchanges. I was lucky enough to be in the two-some. :-)
That day we found many potentials who said that they'd like to sit down and talk about the gospel with us and that they'd have time to talk. So the next couple days we worked hard to get those people into lessons and hopefully get another lesson set up with them so that they'd count toward our investigator goal. Elder Nestman (one of our zone leaders) and I were on exchanges together. We contacted one guy and we sat down for a little while, taught him a lesson, prayed and then got his number. We didn't set up another appointment because he said that he works on call, so he doesn't know what his work schedule will be. So, I'm still trying to set something up with him. Then later we ran into a guy who spoke perfect English and didn't look Czech at all and, as we found out quite readily, is from Armenia. He said that he has an apartment in Armenia that he's been renting to the church for missionaries for about four years, and he's seen that they are people with good standards. He agreed to meet with us some time, but he wants us to meet his Evangelical missionary friends. That should be interesting. He wants to do that sometime this week. Then we tried contacting one lady and she looked at us and would only say, "Běžte. Běžte." (Run! Run! - but more in the rude manner like - get out of my face). Then right after there was this short husky black man who smiled at us and said, "Hello, boys" in English which sparked our attention. We talked to him and he said that he was only saying hi to try and boost our spirits because he doesn't know how we can treated so badly and still smile afterward. We started talking to him and learned that he's from London and he teaches English at the university here. He wants to set up a sports thing here in Zlín to try and keep some of the people from drinking on Saturday night. We already have sports on Saturday night so we might have him join us. That'd be awesome. He said that he's not really interested in our message, but if we get this working out, we may get some referrals from people that come to the sports activity. By the end of the day, we had gotten about four numbers and one or two people who didn't have phones but were very interested, so we gave them a card with our number on it, so they can call us.
So we got many, many meetings set up for the rest of the week and were trying to find the people that would turn into investigators. At one point we had a possible eight new investigators, but we only got three. People would just call and say that they had something else that they had to go to, or that they couldn't make it. It's pretty common. We want two baptisms this transfer so to get that, we need:
- 2 baptisms
- 6 baptismal dates
- 18 progressing investigators
- 54 investigators
- 162 potential investigators
I love you all very much, and I hope that you all can see the little things that God gives to us every day. Breathe deeply and be grateful. :-)
Starší Monk