Dear Family,
Well, this was an interesting week. It seems that I just seem to have interesting week after interesting week. There's never a dull moment in missionary work, I guess. That's good. That way I won't really get all that bored, hopefully. The weather hasn't been completely idealistic this week, so people haven't been completely willing to be outside and while they're outside, they just want to get somewhere. I might say that it's even worse than Christmas-time because then at least they expect to be having cold/bad weather. Now, they just want to have good weather and then get grouchy and unhappy when they don't have it. Makes sense right? Does to me at least.
So this week we took a look at the investigators that we have and realized that we only have three or four. That's a little bit sad but all of them are making progress. We have a few other people that we meet, but they're not really investigators. First off we have Hoang, and he's making progress. He meets with us whenever we ask, as long as it's not during his work or school time. He's also reading from the Book of Mormon every day. If he ever has a good, solid spiritual experience, I'm pretty sure that he'll become golden. We're already looking at giving him a baptismal commitment, but he hasn't been to church yet, so we're waiting for that first. I'll ask him to come to this next Sunday. It should be good. Then we have Alena, and she's just awesome. Two meetings ago, she wanted to have it be her last because the meeting before wasn't completely smooth - she got kind of confused about a few things and thought that we were just another church trying to get money, but we had a member there who explained things and then she started seeing clearly and she really understood. We were extremely happy about that. Also, even though she didn't want to meet us any more, she read what we wanted her to read from the Book of Mormon, and then read two chapters extra! How is it that she's so awesome? Then this last meeting she met with us and told us that she's not afraid of the future; she's realized that from everything bad that happens, good things also happen. She said, for example, she had a boyfriend she had been dating for six years and then she broke up with him, but if she hadn't broken up with him, she wouldn't have met us! She also likes how we don't force her into anything. She's also already started sharing what we've told her about with her mother! That's awesome. Gah, she's so cool. She's still not as cool as Denisa - that's a hard act to follow - but she's pretty awesome.
Anyway, the whole "Mission-Wide Humility?" thing is about this: our entire mission is having a hard time with finding people and keeping them. Everyone's doing good with new investigators, recent converts and lessons, but we don't seem to be finding anyone that's progressing. This transfer "kills off" most of the last experienced missionaries like Elder Hatch, Mittanck, Willams, Boles, Hadzik and a bunch of others. The mission is about to get very young, very fast. One thing that President said is that these missionaries who are dying remember the times when we were only teaching about five to ten lessons a week on average. The new groups coming in, me included, don't know these kinds of things. We have come in teaching like twenty or even twenty-five lessons a week. Last night Elders Mills, Thompson and I talked about this and came to the conclusion that the Lord is humbling us so that we will know that the work is futile without him and that hard times are possible. Also to teach us to persevere through the hard times. I'm having a really hard time working at finding all day and not really finding anyone. It's tough, but I know that the Lord is here with us, and that he's showing it to me in small ways every day - sometimes even big ways.
This work is amazing and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now. I can already see that I'm going to be one of those missionaries who doesn't want to go home at the end of their mission and once he does, he doesn't speak English any more. My English, I can already tell, is going downhill. Get ready everybody! I won't speak English in two years, so you need to reteach me. Haha. That'll be exciting.
Anyway, I'm out of time and I hope that you're all doing well. Love you all muches; I'd like to be home at times, but I know that my time and energy is better spent here in the Czech Republic, even though a lot of the time the people don't seem very interested. Kind of like the story of Soddom and Gomorrah: the Lord would not destroy the cities if even a few righteous people were there. Well... He did destroy those cities, but these are not! The righteous are here and we just have to go out and find them!
Starší Monk