Dear Family,
As you can probably tell from the subject, I've got quite the story to tell you all. We started off the week working really hard and looking forward to some really cool things that were going to happen. Just a glimpse at the beginning of the week: we had three new investigators by the time that Thursday came around and we had only taught five lessons. That's really cool. One of our investigators' name is Saša (Sasha - yes that's a guy's name here) and he's really cool. We found him in the phone so we decided to call him and when he met with us we found out that he had met with the missionaries about a year ago and doesn't know why they stopped meeting with him. I didn't think too much of that other than I needed to find his record and find out what happened. So he said that he'd like to meet with us again and that we could probably do that later in the week, so we were super stoked for that - Someone that wants to meet with us! Sadly, the other two new investigators were dropped because they didn't come to their next meetings. That seems to be the trend right now.
So anyway, back to the subject. Come Wednesday night, we prayed and went to bed like always, however, at about five in the morning (one and a half hours before we were supposed to get up) I woke up and heard a really loud and strange hissing noise in the house. I was really tired so I just lay there in bed listening to it for a moment. (By the way, something really strange has happened here on the mission - from about day one, I've become a pretty light sleeper... I can't say that I particularly like that.) So after about three or four minutes of listening to this noise, I got curious enough to get out of bed, even though I just wanted to sleep. I just followed the noise and realized that it was coming from the bathroom, so I headed in that direction. When I put my foot down into the hallway that leads to the bathroom, however, I didn't find tile first, I found... SNAKES! No, I'm just kidding, it was water. Being still half asleep, I didn't really think much of it other than, "Oh look, there's water on the floor. Is there usually water here?" I kept going and got into the bathroom and found water flying everywhere and then I kind of woke up and thought, "Oh... there's something wrong here." I found out that the water was coming from the direction of the window (and we keep all the windows open at night because it gets hot and stuffy) so I thought that it was raining rediculously hard outside and so I slammed the window shut, but when the water continued just the same as before I shut the window, then I got really confused. (Also, realize that I was still pretty sleepy and stupid at this point even though I was getting sprayed and soaked with water.) So I looked down and realized even closer that the water was coming from the direction of the toilet! So I put my hand over the top of the toilet to see if the water was shooting out of the bowl, but strangely enough it wasn't. This whole situation got more and more confusing by the second. I had no idea really what was going on. Finally, I saw that the little tube running from the wall to the toilet was the source of the water so I immediately tried grabbing it to stop the water, my brain still not working, and then turning the little knob next to the wall to try and shut off the water. That didn't work, so I yelled to Elder Page to get him up. I yelled about two or three times and then he came in really asleep, like, "Hi? Oh, there's water everywhere. Isn't that sumthin?" As soon as he finally found out what was going on, he and I started running around the house trying to find where we could shut the water off. Elder Page found it and we shut it off. By this point, it was about 5:15 and we had around two to three centimeters of water on the floor. Once the water was shut off, we started cleaning up the water. We tried using the dust pan, but that didn't really work well enough and I wanted to get back to bed, so I ended up just using one of my towels and squeezing it out into the tub. We got the whole thing cleaned up in about thirty minutes, and then we looked at the damage to the toilet that caused this whole problem. Turns out that the tube running to the toilet at this time had completely split through and was sitting in two pieces - the one attached to the toilet, and the other to the wall. We took it off and decided that we were going to go and buy the new part later that day, but as for the moment, we went and tried to sleep again, but we were all wet, so it was a little miserable.
Later when I asked Elder Page what he thought when I woke him up, he said that he had two ideas. The first one was that our alarm clocks hadn't gone off and that we'd overslept, so I was yelling to him to wake him up, but then he heard the hissing noise, and assumed that I was making bacon for him! What good ideas. When I woke up, I was just really confused. When we woke up, we realized that we didn't have any water so we we had to go to the other elders' apartment so we could use the bathroom and shower and stuff so we just took everything that we'd need for the morning, including our study materials so we could just stay there and study. Later, we went out and bought that tube and tried installing it, but we didn't have a wrench that was big enough, so we had to hold off on it and we slept at the other elders' apartment that night so we'd have a place to shower in the morning. Sadly, the next day we weren't be able to fix the toilet either, because we had a conference in Brno for all the trainers and their greenies (greenie bootcamp) where we basically had a little talk with president about how we can do this job and also to discuss any problems that we may have with our greenies - communication, working, studies ATD... Also, we had missed our bus to Brno by about one minute, so we ended up being thirty minutes late rather than the forty-five minutes early that we had planned just because of the timing of the buses and other stuff, so we ended up stalling the conference for thirty minutes. Then at the end of conference, we missed our bus home too! So we ended up waiting for the next bus home, which was about two hours later. That was a pain, but it taught us a good lesson: don't be late. =\
Anyway, our toilet is fixed now and we're back in Olomouc so everything is in order and we're doing great! This week is going to be awesome, and we're really going to get Saša moving toward baptism. He's really cool and Elder Page likes him too because he speaks English.
I love you all and know the Lord blesses us when we do our best, even despite our little problems like exploding toilets.
Starší Monk
Monday, July 26, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
Promised you Blessings - We got 'em (Sliboval jsem ti Požehnání - Už to máme)
So last week I couldn't really stop saying that this week was going to be an amazing week and that we were going to see many blessings. Well, I've got news! We did have an amazing week and we did see lots of blessings. However, here's the sad part: there weren't really any amazing stories to share. Perhaps I'll just share one or two finding stories that we had this week. So, compared to last week, we had four lessons and we got one new investigator, but this week we had twelve lessons and got four new investigators! So, the ratio that we've been taught over and over is true! It's about every three to four lessons that you teach, one will become a new investigator. That's really cool to see that it's true! Also, another really cool thing that we did this last week was that we spoke one hundred hours of Czech. We're only awake for sixteen hours a day, so that means that we only have twelve hours through the week in which we can speak English (we can actually speak English when we're talking about grammar or how something would be said, atd... (ATD is the Czech version of ETC and means "a tak dále" which means "and so further.")
So this week we went out and hit it hard and we saw some really cool blessings from that. One of new investigators this week was an Indian guy (from India not Native American) who had been taught by Elder Rigby and Kreitzer and then by Kreitzer and me and even had a baptismal date, but then he went to India for his sister's wedding. Sad to say, we lost contact with him after that and we just barely met with him again this last Monday. He counts as a "new" investigator because we haven't met with him in over three weeks. So that was cool. The meeting with him was really good and I tried to give him his baptismal date back and he refused, so I kept pursuing it. After the second attempt on my part, he kind of accepted, but nothing certain, and I backed off because I could see that he wasn't ready yet. It made me think back to last transfer when we gave him his first date to see if he was really ready then. I don't know, but I do know that we're going to continue meeting with him again, and get him that baptismal date before the end of this transfer.
Probably my favorite contact and new investigator this week was a guy named Jan (Yawn). It was a little towards the end of the week, and we had just finished transfers with the zone leaders, so we were on fire. Exchanges might be one of my favorite things to do right next to zone conferences because they just get you so fired up and ready to work and you come out of them feeling refreshed and ready to take on the Czech Republic again. Anyway, so we finished exchanges and we went out finding for an hour. We spoke to a lot of people but no one wanted to listen. So we came back to the building for a break, sang a hymn, read the scriptures that were attached at the bottom, prayed and went out again. I knew that something cool was going to happen. Anyway, we left the building, went straight to the park and while we were walking up one of the paths we saw a guy sitting on a bench in front of us. He wasn't wearing a shirt but as soon as he saw us, he started putting on the shirt that he had next to him. Once we got up to him, we could see that he was probably homeless and that he had everything he owned with him right there on that bench, which fit inside of a grocery bag. We went up and said who we were, that we were talking to people about happiness and then I asked him what brings him happiness. He told me that work, family and a place to live bring him happiness. I asked him if he had those things and he went in about his life and told me that he used to have those things but that he doesn't any more. When he was 40 he had those, but something happened and he lost it all. I don't know what it was that happened, but I felt that it wasn't my place to pry. So I told him that there was a way to be happy even when we don't have these things and that we can all change. He had us sit down and we started talking. We bore testimony of the Book of Mormon and the Restoration and that because of these we have the opportunity to change with the help of Jesus Christ. He seemed really engaged in everything that I was saying. I pulled out the Book of Mormon at one point and I said, "Right here on the front it says that the Book of Mormon is another testament of..." and before I could finish saying the whole thing, he had read it out loud to himself. We also had him read the promise of the Book of Mormon (Moroni 10:4-5). He read it to himself in his head, but when he got to the part about the Holy Ghost at the end of the fourth verse, he started reading out loud, still to himself, but nonetheless out loud like he was really thinking about what it meant. I was just so amazed to see that someone could be so humbled and ready to see and hear the message that we have. The entire lesson that we had with him, he would answer my questions exactly right and would be concise and then he would stop talking so that I could continue. He was so cool. We gave him a copy of the book, assigned him 3 Nephi 11 to read and then set up a meeting with him the next day at our building. He readily accepted to come and meet us saying that he had nothing else to do. However, unfortunately, he didn't come to his lesson the next day but there is still that homeless man running around the city with a copy of the Book of Mormon, so he's one little bit richer and one step closer to our Heavenly Father.
Even though I didn't really have any fun or particularly impressive stories to share with you, I hope that you can see that the Lord is here and that He is with each one of us even though we cannot see His hand every moment. Just have faith and know that He IS there and that He WILL help you. I've really come to know this this week. Have meaningful prayers. He loves to hear you. Speak with Him often. He loves to hear your complaints. Thank Him often. He loves to hear your gratitude.
I love you all very much and miss you sometimes, but I know that I'm here where I need to be: serving as a servant of the Lord.
Starší Monk
PS - The picture was taken in Přerov which is a town a little ways out of Olomouc. We went there with some members from the branch so that we could have a street display - singing and talking to people. It was quite successful. We four missionaries decided to take a little walk around the town afterward and on some random little náměstí we found this fun little apostate statue/monument thing. On the book that he's holding it says "Česká Bible" which means "Czech Bible". So, that's that. Oh, also, I am not getting shorter. I just look a little shorter in this picture because I buckled the waist strap (which is quite thick) on my backpack right above my belt... so that's why it looks like my pants are up really high.
Monday, July 12, 2010
New President and New Ideas
Dear Family,
There's not a whole lot to say about the area this week, but I can tell you that we are going to see some cool things happen this next week, so you'll have to wait for next week to hear some good stories (I hope). Really, there's not much I can talk about this week, besides zone conference which I'm going to talk about in a second, because we didn't really have any lessons, we don't really have any investigators, and Libor is back on the map, but I already told you that last week. Little sad, but I guess we're all going to have a week or two like this every now and then, huh?
Actually, we did get one new investigator, but we found him like a week ago. We met with him again this week. He's this old guy who's very smart and very atheist. If I had to pick one word for him, I'd say skeptical. In the contact he kept saying that he didn't want to argue but everything that he'd say would come out as if he thought he was being attacked and he kind of made it into an argument. That doesn't make too much sense to me. So I had called him on Saturday, the Saturday before I wrote you this last time, and he said that it was the weekend and that Monday and Tuesday would be holidays, so he still had free time and that he didn't want to think about that kind of stuff so I should call him back on Wednesday. That made me a little afraid of him, that he would be so stubborn and stuck up to say that he can't even think about setting up a meeting when it's holiday or even weekend! So I called him the next Wednesday and got something set up, and he came to the meeting and everything that we'd say would come back in a very skeptical manner and I was very confused on what I had to say. How are you supposed to teach someone who is completely devoid of all faith? This man wasn't atheist, he was denying anything and everything that he couldn't see. He'd probably deny that Prague exists because he couldn't see it right then. Then to make it even stranger, we learned that he's a theoretical physicist. I didn't know where to go with this guy so we watched the restoration video and afterward, he seemed stumped because he could feel the Holy Ghost and couldn't explain it, so he thought for a moment on how he could come back to being skeptical again. I don't know where to go with this guy, but I gave him a Book of Mormon and he said that he'd read it just so he could learn more about us. So that's our new investigator for the week.
So, as of the first of July, we have had a new mission president, President and Sister Irwin. He's a delightful little British man and his wife is also very British. I love them to death already. They served here in the Czech Republic and while they were serving, they were told to go home and to wait for their assignment as mission president and wife. They already knew where they were going to go even though they weren't technically supposed to. President Dieter F. Uchtdorf couldn't really contain his excitement when he was interviewing them. Turns out that he has a really deep gratitude and love for this mission in particular. Perhaps because he was born in this country. Anyway, I had spoken with President Irwin before he came out to be our new president. He "died" as a missionary during my greenie transfer and so I saw him at zone conferences and spoke with him just a few times then. At this most recent zone conference he shared with us a few things that the Brethren are planning on changing as far as missionary work goes, and they're quite different in terms as far as what the president does; our work will stay pretty much the same. I don't know what particularly I can tell you about these changes, so I won't. :P
I can see that the rest of my mission with President Irwin is going to be amazing, and I'm looking forward to it with great anticipation. I'm also looking forward to a much better next week! I can't say that I'd really care if I didn't have another week like this last one ever again.
Not much to say, but I know that as long as we're doing exactly what the Lord wants us to be doing, then we will all be blessed tremendously, and if we're not, then we have some dire emergency to change. I can just say that the times that I was strictly obedient to what the Lord wanted, that is when I saw His hand the most. Life is short and there is lots to do, so without His help, it is completely and utterly impossible to live the way that He wants.
Do your best! I love and miss you all muches,
Starší Monk
There's not a whole lot to say about the area this week, but I can tell you that we are going to see some cool things happen this next week, so you'll have to wait for next week to hear some good stories (I hope). Really, there's not much I can talk about this week, besides zone conference which I'm going to talk about in a second, because we didn't really have any lessons, we don't really have any investigators, and Libor is back on the map, but I already told you that last week. Little sad, but I guess we're all going to have a week or two like this every now and then, huh?
Actually, we did get one new investigator, but we found him like a week ago. We met with him again this week. He's this old guy who's very smart and very atheist. If I had to pick one word for him, I'd say skeptical. In the contact he kept saying that he didn't want to argue but everything that he'd say would come out as if he thought he was being attacked and he kind of made it into an argument. That doesn't make too much sense to me. So I had called him on Saturday, the Saturday before I wrote you this last time, and he said that it was the weekend and that Monday and Tuesday would be holidays, so he still had free time and that he didn't want to think about that kind of stuff so I should call him back on Wednesday. That made me a little afraid of him, that he would be so stubborn and stuck up to say that he can't even think about setting up a meeting when it's holiday or even weekend! So I called him the next Wednesday and got something set up, and he came to the meeting and everything that we'd say would come back in a very skeptical manner and I was very confused on what I had to say. How are you supposed to teach someone who is completely devoid of all faith? This man wasn't atheist, he was denying anything and everything that he couldn't see. He'd probably deny that Prague exists because he couldn't see it right then. Then to make it even stranger, we learned that he's a theoretical physicist. I didn't know where to go with this guy so we watched the restoration video and afterward, he seemed stumped because he could feel the Holy Ghost and couldn't explain it, so he thought for a moment on how he could come back to being skeptical again. I don't know where to go with this guy, but I gave him a Book of Mormon and he said that he'd read it just so he could learn more about us. So that's our new investigator for the week.
So, as of the first of July, we have had a new mission president, President and Sister Irwin. He's a delightful little British man and his wife is also very British. I love them to death already. They served here in the Czech Republic and while they were serving, they were told to go home and to wait for their assignment as mission president and wife. They already knew where they were going to go even though they weren't technically supposed to. President Dieter F. Uchtdorf couldn't really contain his excitement when he was interviewing them. Turns out that he has a really deep gratitude and love for this mission in particular. Perhaps because he was born in this country. Anyway, I had spoken with President Irwin before he came out to be our new president. He "died" as a missionary during my greenie transfer and so I saw him at zone conferences and spoke with him just a few times then. At this most recent zone conference he shared with us a few things that the Brethren are planning on changing as far as missionary work goes, and they're quite different in terms as far as what the president does; our work will stay pretty much the same. I don't know what particularly I can tell you about these changes, so I won't. :P
I can see that the rest of my mission with President Irwin is going to be amazing, and I'm looking forward to it with great anticipation. I'm also looking forward to a much better next week! I can't say that I'd really care if I didn't have another week like this last one ever again.
Not much to say, but I know that as long as we're doing exactly what the Lord wants us to be doing, then we will all be blessed tremendously, and if we're not, then we have some dire emergency to change. I can just say that the times that I was strictly obedient to what the Lord wanted, that is when I saw His hand the most. Life is short and there is lots to do, so without His help, it is completely and utterly impossible to live the way that He wants.
Do your best! I love and miss you all muches,
Starší Monk
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Fourth of July and Drama! (Čtvrtý Červenca a Drama!)
Dear Family,
Well, first off, the reason I'm writing on Wednesday and not on Monday: this Monday was a Czech holiday, and then Tuesday was as well. So it being the Czech Republic, everything closes down on the holidays. Guess that's good, unless you want to speak with your family! I suppose they don't know that though, so I'll let it slide. I can't remember what Monday was, but I think that Tuesday was the day that Jan Hus was burned by the Catholic church for fighting against them in the Hussite wars. Jan Hus was a Czech man, so they love him here, and he has a holiday. I must say, holidays are the worst. Nobody, no... no one is in the towns on holidays. It's even worse than weekends. All the people that we saw on Monday and Tuesday were tourists, and it was rainy. Terrible combination.
In other news, after church on Sunday, the other elders came over to our house and we had a fourth of July celebration! Basically, we got Czech sausages (which kind of resembled hot dogs) and rohliky (kind of the Czech staple of life - basically a long roll of bread) and tried to make hot dogs. It was interesting. We did, however, succeed on one front: we got Coke in cans! That was very exciting. All the soda in this country is in glass bottles, and they're fun, but cans are better. We also tried to make chicken fingers, and they weren't too bad either, except for the fact that we had to clean it up after and fried foods without a deep frier are terrible. So that was the extent of our fourth of July festivities, but what can we do? We're not allowed to buy fireworks.
So, as for the drama part of this week, where can I begin? Let's start with Libor, the guy who was just baptized. We saw him on Monday, and we were supposed to have a meeting with him on Tuesday, and he's never missed a meeting, but this week he did. He didn't come to his Tuesday meeting. Then for the rest of the week, we didn't see him on the street selling his magazines like we always do, so we knew something was up. We thought that perhaps he was on the trip to the temple with the rest of the members, but on Friday (the day after they got back) I called up President Šlezar and asked if Libor had gone with them. He told me that he wasn't there. This only made me more worried about him. We continued about the week, just worrying and wondering what happened to him. A few times, I had the idea that perhaps he died... seriously. He's not that old, he's just 57, but he does live outside, and other such things. Before this week, we'd probably see him about four or five times a day outside of our meetings, so it really worried me as soon as he completely fell off the face of the map. Well, then Sunday rolls around and Wlastik (Vlastik) shows up and says that he saw Libor and that when he saw Wlastic, he turned and walked the other way. That made me really confused. I started getting ideas of him going "anti," or other possibilities. I didn't want to think that it could be true, but I decided that if I saw him on the street, I'd run after him to find out what it was. Luckily, on Monday, Laďa called us up and said that he saw Libor and he stopped to talk with him, and that the both of them were waiting to speak with us, so Elder Page and I ran to the center to meet with them. Turns out that Libor had just gone to Ostrava for the week to see his father and see how he was doing, and that he had forgotten to tell us. Nothing big at all. Turns out that Libor is just as strong as ever, and he's reading three chapters in the Book of Mormon a day, and he started Mosiah a few days ago when we met with him. We've met with him a few times since then (Monday evening and Tuesday) and he's still way solid.
I wish that I could say that this was all the drama that I had this last week, but I can't. So our other drama story for this week is that Laďa, one of the members here, is always having a really hard time with money and he can't seem to find a job, ever. He's also got four kids, and is trying to get a job and a place to live of his own so he can have custody of them. So, he's been going to basically anywhere he can to get money, and he just about always spends it in really dumb ways. Basically he doesn't know how to manage money correctly at all. So on Saturday, I got a call from Laďa asking me about how someone goes about leaving the church and other such stuff. I then called him out and asked him if he was planning on leaving and he basically said that he was planning on it. I was pretty confused, wondering why he would say something like that, because he's been really solid in the church depsite some really dumb mistakes he's made in the past. The thing was, he wouldn't tell me why he was deciding on leaving. He just kept telling me that he had to, but he didn't want to. Very confused, I called the zone leaders and told them and they were very confused as well. They called me back after a little while and asked me to call a few district leaders and ask them to ask their districts to pray for Laďa so he doesn't do something stupid. Another plus that we had, was that it was fast Sunday coming up so we asked them to fast for him as well. When I spoke with Laďa, he said that he didn't think he was going to come to church, other than to just speak with President about leaving. Good thing came about the next day: Lada came to church and stayed for the entire time. Weird thing, however, he bore his testimony in church and told the members that it's been one year to the day since he had been baptized, and that he couldn't stay-- that he had to leave. That was way weird... wish he hadn't done that. Despite that, he stayed for the entire three hours and at the end he had a little talk with Preisdent, and he came out really upset saying things like, "I can't believe I've believed in these fairytales." That was scary and he kept telling me that he was going to leave, that he couldn't stay. I went to President afterward to see what was going on and if everything would be okay. He seemed unsure, but hopeful, as I should have been as well.
So Laďa came to church, but made the decision that he'd leave the church. Later that day, after our fourth of July festivities, I checked my phone and saw that Laďa had called so I called him back and he told me that I needed to call back in five minutes. So I waited and called him after five and he said that he needed another five minutes so I waited again. This time while I was waiting, I got a call from President and he told me that he just finished talking with Laďa and that he called to apologize for being rash and that he was just really afraid of the possibilities that were weighing on him. Then I called Laďa because it had been a little more than five minutes and spoke to him and he basically told me the same thing, so I thought that everything was okay. So that night I followed up with the districts that I had called the day before and told them that our prayers had worked and that we needed to continue praying for him to make sure that he stays solid in his decision and to help him find some comfort in what he's doing.
Then the next day when Laďa called us about Libor, we went to see what was going on. Basically, Libor was completely fine and I used that time to see what was up with Libor. After I found out that everything was fine, I had Elder Page practice Czech with him because he knows a little English and he's really nice and patient. I went in to talk with Laďa, and finally got to the bottom of the problem and found out what was going on. So the story goes like this:
Laďa, because he's always looking for money, borrowed money (3000Kč) from some guy, who turns out to be part of a mob or something and the guy wanted the money back that day and was threatening to kill Laďa or hurt his children if he didn't pay it back. That's a little thing that I don't get, because 3000 Kč is just $150. Is that much money really worth killing over? Anyway, this is where it gets interesting. So, one place that Lada found that he could get the money to pay this guy back is from his old Catholic priest who said he'd give him the money if he'd come back to his kostel (cathedral/church) and deny his affiliation with the church. That's really black tactics if you ask me. So, Laďa not being so smart, saw this as the only way out of this predicament.
So when we went to meet him on Monday, he had a piece fo paper that he had written saying that he can't stay part of the church and basically apologizing. Gah! He was asking me questions like, "Can you come back to the church after you leave it?" I kept telling him that you can, but you have to repent a lot for leaving in the first place. He also kept handing me that piece of paper and then taking it back almost immediately. Finally, he took the paper and ripped it up, quite to my surprise, and he looked relieved. I asked what he was going to do next, and he told me that he didn't know. We left the building for our meeting with Libor later that evening and were walking with Laďa toward our house so we could get changed for work (because it was our P-day and we were still in normal clothes) and Laďa commenced making calls. Basically, the way that I see it, once Laďa made the decision to not leave the church, Heavenly Father blessed him with a way out of this trouble for the time being. He found a cousin who lives far away who is willing to give him the 3000 Kč if he can find a way to come get it. Laďa was very very relieved to find a way to pay the man back and not have to leave the church. As for right now, Lada is trying to find a way that he can get the money to get there, which will cost about 270 Kč ($13).
Something that I've learned from this is to just hope in the Lord Jesus Christ, because when we have hope, we also have faith, and faith is the driving factor of everything around us. Without faith, we have nothing. When I prayed for both of these amazing members, I was very hopeful that something good would result, and so far, both of them are back on track and doing well. I never had a super strong testimony of prayer, but this week has really bolstered its importance in my mind - without prayer, we had no relationship with God, and without some kind of relationship with Him, we are only as powerful as the dust of the earth.
I love you all, and I hope that you can all learn as much from these experiences as I have. Pray in faith and be hopeful.
Starší Monk
Well, first off, the reason I'm writing on Wednesday and not on Monday: this Monday was a Czech holiday, and then Tuesday was as well. So it being the Czech Republic, everything closes down on the holidays. Guess that's good, unless you want to speak with your family! I suppose they don't know that though, so I'll let it slide. I can't remember what Monday was, but I think that Tuesday was the day that Jan Hus was burned by the Catholic church for fighting against them in the Hussite wars. Jan Hus was a Czech man, so they love him here, and he has a holiday. I must say, holidays are the worst. Nobody, no... no one is in the towns on holidays. It's even worse than weekends. All the people that we saw on Monday and Tuesday were tourists, and it was rainy. Terrible combination.
In other news, after church on Sunday, the other elders came over to our house and we had a fourth of July celebration! Basically, we got Czech sausages (which kind of resembled hot dogs) and rohliky (kind of the Czech staple of life - basically a long roll of bread) and tried to make hot dogs. It was interesting. We did, however, succeed on one front: we got Coke in cans! That was very exciting. All the soda in this country is in glass bottles, and they're fun, but cans are better. We also tried to make chicken fingers, and they weren't too bad either, except for the fact that we had to clean it up after and fried foods without a deep frier are terrible. So that was the extent of our fourth of July festivities, but what can we do? We're not allowed to buy fireworks.
So, as for the drama part of this week, where can I begin? Let's start with Libor, the guy who was just baptized. We saw him on Monday, and we were supposed to have a meeting with him on Tuesday, and he's never missed a meeting, but this week he did. He didn't come to his Tuesday meeting. Then for the rest of the week, we didn't see him on the street selling his magazines like we always do, so we knew something was up. We thought that perhaps he was on the trip to the temple with the rest of the members, but on Friday (the day after they got back) I called up President Šlezar and asked if Libor had gone with them. He told me that he wasn't there. This only made me more worried about him. We continued about the week, just worrying and wondering what happened to him. A few times, I had the idea that perhaps he died... seriously. He's not that old, he's just 57, but he does live outside, and other such things. Before this week, we'd probably see him about four or five times a day outside of our meetings, so it really worried me as soon as he completely fell off the face of the map. Well, then Sunday rolls around and Wlastik (Vlastik) shows up and says that he saw Libor and that when he saw Wlastic, he turned and walked the other way. That made me really confused. I started getting ideas of him going "anti," or other possibilities. I didn't want to think that it could be true, but I decided that if I saw him on the street, I'd run after him to find out what it was. Luckily, on Monday, Laďa called us up and said that he saw Libor and he stopped to talk with him, and that the both of them were waiting to speak with us, so Elder Page and I ran to the center to meet with them. Turns out that Libor had just gone to Ostrava for the week to see his father and see how he was doing, and that he had forgotten to tell us. Nothing big at all. Turns out that Libor is just as strong as ever, and he's reading three chapters in the Book of Mormon a day, and he started Mosiah a few days ago when we met with him. We've met with him a few times since then (Monday evening and Tuesday) and he's still way solid.
I wish that I could say that this was all the drama that I had this last week, but I can't. So our other drama story for this week is that Laďa, one of the members here, is always having a really hard time with money and he can't seem to find a job, ever. He's also got four kids, and is trying to get a job and a place to live of his own so he can have custody of them. So, he's been going to basically anywhere he can to get money, and he just about always spends it in really dumb ways. Basically he doesn't know how to manage money correctly at all. So on Saturday, I got a call from Laďa asking me about how someone goes about leaving the church and other such stuff. I then called him out and asked him if he was planning on leaving and he basically said that he was planning on it. I was pretty confused, wondering why he would say something like that, because he's been really solid in the church depsite some really dumb mistakes he's made in the past. The thing was, he wouldn't tell me why he was deciding on leaving. He just kept telling me that he had to, but he didn't want to. Very confused, I called the zone leaders and told them and they were very confused as well. They called me back after a little while and asked me to call a few district leaders and ask them to ask their districts to pray for Laďa so he doesn't do something stupid. Another plus that we had, was that it was fast Sunday coming up so we asked them to fast for him as well. When I spoke with Laďa, he said that he didn't think he was going to come to church, other than to just speak with President about leaving. Good thing came about the next day: Lada came to church and stayed for the entire time. Weird thing, however, he bore his testimony in church and told the members that it's been one year to the day since he had been baptized, and that he couldn't stay-- that he had to leave. That was way weird... wish he hadn't done that. Despite that, he stayed for the entire three hours and at the end he had a little talk with Preisdent, and he came out really upset saying things like, "I can't believe I've believed in these fairytales." That was scary and he kept telling me that he was going to leave, that he couldn't stay. I went to President afterward to see what was going on and if everything would be okay. He seemed unsure, but hopeful, as I should have been as well.
So Laďa came to church, but made the decision that he'd leave the church. Later that day, after our fourth of July festivities, I checked my phone and saw that Laďa had called so I called him back and he told me that I needed to call back in five minutes. So I waited and called him after five and he said that he needed another five minutes so I waited again. This time while I was waiting, I got a call from President and he told me that he just finished talking with Laďa and that he called to apologize for being rash and that he was just really afraid of the possibilities that were weighing on him. Then I called Laďa because it had been a little more than five minutes and spoke to him and he basically told me the same thing, so I thought that everything was okay. So that night I followed up with the districts that I had called the day before and told them that our prayers had worked and that we needed to continue praying for him to make sure that he stays solid in his decision and to help him find some comfort in what he's doing.
Then the next day when Laďa called us about Libor, we went to see what was going on. Basically, Libor was completely fine and I used that time to see what was up with Libor. After I found out that everything was fine, I had Elder Page practice Czech with him because he knows a little English and he's really nice and patient. I went in to talk with Laďa, and finally got to the bottom of the problem and found out what was going on. So the story goes like this:
Laďa, because he's always looking for money, borrowed money (3000Kč) from some guy, who turns out to be part of a mob or something and the guy wanted the money back that day and was threatening to kill Laďa or hurt his children if he didn't pay it back. That's a little thing that I don't get, because 3000 Kč is just $150. Is that much money really worth killing over? Anyway, this is where it gets interesting. So, one place that Lada found that he could get the money to pay this guy back is from his old Catholic priest who said he'd give him the money if he'd come back to his kostel (cathedral/church) and deny his affiliation with the church. That's really black tactics if you ask me. So, Laďa not being so smart, saw this as the only way out of this predicament.
So when we went to meet him on Monday, he had a piece fo paper that he had written saying that he can't stay part of the church and basically apologizing. Gah! He was asking me questions like, "Can you come back to the church after you leave it?" I kept telling him that you can, but you have to repent a lot for leaving in the first place. He also kept handing me that piece of paper and then taking it back almost immediately. Finally, he took the paper and ripped it up, quite to my surprise, and he looked relieved. I asked what he was going to do next, and he told me that he didn't know. We left the building for our meeting with Libor later that evening and were walking with Laďa toward our house so we could get changed for work (because it was our P-day and we were still in normal clothes) and Laďa commenced making calls. Basically, the way that I see it, once Laďa made the decision to not leave the church, Heavenly Father blessed him with a way out of this trouble for the time being. He found a cousin who lives far away who is willing to give him the 3000 Kč if he can find a way to come get it. Laďa was very very relieved to find a way to pay the man back and not have to leave the church. As for right now, Lada is trying to find a way that he can get the money to get there, which will cost about 270 Kč ($13).
Something that I've learned from this is to just hope in the Lord Jesus Christ, because when we have hope, we also have faith, and faith is the driving factor of everything around us. Without faith, we have nothing. When I prayed for both of these amazing members, I was very hopeful that something good would result, and so far, both of them are back on track and doing well. I never had a super strong testimony of prayer, but this week has really bolstered its importance in my mind - without prayer, we had no relationship with God, and without some kind of relationship with Him, we are only as powerful as the dust of the earth.
I love you all, and I hope that you can all learn as much from these experiences as I have. Pray in faith and be hopeful.
Starší Monk
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Pictures from Zlín
Elder Thompson, Elder Monk, Elder Mills
and friends
Eating this, it's no wonder Andy's gained weight
(see previous picture).
Church members are happy people.
Olomouc, Czech Republic
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