Craiova is cool!

So hey! Craiova is cool! Haha I'm still liking it more than Bucharest. We've had quite a few lessons, and we've been getting tons of phone calls for our english classes, so I'm expecting a lot of people to come tomorrow. The church is quite a bit smaller here even than in Buc, but the people here are so prepared and they just don't know it! This week we had a few lessons, and had some people coming to our activities, and I can easily count at least 5 people who I could see baptized this transfer, which would almost triple the active branch membership haha. It's crazy. But the problem is that none of them will/can come to church! I don't know if a single one of them has been to church. But I firmly believe if we can just get them to come to church, then I can see them all getting baptized. They just need to see the importance of it.
 

Other than those lessons/people, the week has been contacting. What we usually do every transfer is that in the first two weeks we contact almost solely for our English classes. So that's what we've been doing. It's probably the easiest form of contacting, and it's a good way to start the contacting juices flowing with a new companion. Then, in the third week, when we actually start teaching English classes, we switch over to normal gospel contacting. So this week will be a lot of that. We've been pushing to have 20 hours of contacting each week. In a mission like ours, especially in an area like this with like 3 members, you contact a lot haha. So we're trying to work harder to have our contacting time be a bell curve this transfer; we'll work up the hours and eventually we'll have too many lessons so our contacting hours will decrease! We've been working a lot harder than I got to last week, so that's good.

So as you know, there are like 2 active members in this branch. And the church in general in Romania has a pretty high inactivity rate right now. It's such a weird thing because the language/culture is so abrasive to many Americans (for example you don't ask for things you just say "give it to me" and it's not rude at all, things like that are very common; you can say pretty much whatever you like as long as you use the right tense) and they'll say all the time that we get offended over little things, but most of the time when people go inactive here it's because of some small offense done to them that they can't get over.

 

It's hard for them to find forgiveness in their hearts. I have found this in myself that I'm trying to work on, and seeing how it all works out it this environment I just have such a strong testimony about forgiveness. We need to forgive others. I've found so far on my mission that there will be things my companion will do that I will, for whatever reason, take offense at. And I've found that it does nothing good at all to harbor feelings of bitterness or to hold a grudge. It just burns in the back of your mind like a cancer and stops the spirit from taking place in your heart. I've had a lot of opportunities to forgive so far on my mission. I haven't always taken them and used those times to forgive as I should have in that moment. But I've learned that when I let things go, I find peace! It sounds so corny but it's true! It does no good to hold grudges. We need to let things go. Even those things that seem too big or too much to forgive, we need to forgive. Looking back, there were lots of times that I've been upset or angry or holding a grudge, and didn't even know it. We need to pray to God to give us the ability to forgive and let things go. Life just goes so much better when we are free from the burden of anger or bitterness of a grudge.

So yeah. My testimony has grown so much since I've been on a mission. I just realized that this week will mark 6 months as a missionary for me. Yeah it still feels like I left the MTC a week ago. This is my companion's last transfer and I already know he's handling it much better than I will when I'm in that position haha. I'll be freaking out the whole time. But we're working hard to make his last transfer his best one yet.

And holy crap these pictures of Zack and Jacob are freaking me out! They look so old!! In the one of both of them after the track meet Zack looks just like Nick! Zack's looking so tall! It's going to be so weird when I get home...

Anyway I love you all and I wish you all happy days and love and sunshine and rainbow puppies and unicorns and to also happy halloween I hope you're all dressing like Dracula because he's the coolest ok bye.

Elder DeGraw

Train station out in the middle of nowhere where we went for a lesson.

The pumpkin I carved for the halloween activity.