We had more Romanians than Americans at church this week!

Hey people that read this!! This week has been pretty good!

We've been doing a lot of contacting as usual, and we've had some really good lessons! And it was amazing at church last week! We actually had more Romanians than Americans! We had the district president (basically the stake president for the branches here) from Bucuresti, as well as our two active members, and three investigators eventually were at church!

The district president is so cool. He has so much faith, and isn't afraid of telling people how it is. Haha the other elders had an investigator there, who knows the bible really well, and has been being pretty stubborn and disagreeable, and the district president was just talking to him and answering many of his problems and just resolving a lot of his concerns. It was... beautiful.

Haha sidenote about the culture here. So you know how in America, if someone's talking, and someone else starts talking louder, eventually someone will give up and let the other one talk. Yeah they don't do that here. Meaning they don't give up. So it seems really rude to us, but they just cut each other off and it's not considered rude! And so they do that in lessons too, so a lot of our lessons are just the investigator talking our ears off.

But so they were talking like that and just the district president was being nice but still saying his point and getting it across, and so the guy actually understood a lot of the stuff that he was just being really standoffish about! So that was really cool.

Then after church, we went with the branch president to meet with a less active to see if she was there, if she still believed in the church, and stuff like that. So we get out there, and after a little bit of confusion, we found her. And it was so bittersweet.

We asked her if she still believed that the church was true, and she responded immediately with an "Of course, I know it's true!" She just has so much faith. Her husband is the problem; he's a drunkard, is mean, won't let her leave for church or pretty much anything, so that's why she hasn't been to church in so long.

But she's planning on leaving him and going to Bucuresti in the spring. We left her with a prayer and she said that she felt the prayer go straight into her heart. She's such a wonderful lady. There are many more situations like this out here, but I just had that experience yesterday.

 

Our lessons have been pretty great, we've been getting more bold with our commitments, with one of our investigators who's been kind of weefy about praying about baptism, but who knows and has told us that he knows that the church is true. 

 

We also had what was going to be a drop lesson with a guy and it turned into a lesson about each of our respective intentions, and I found myself having to be bold and stop him from cutting us off all the time, and just him talking all the time.  So we might meet with him again at some point but for now we'll just invite him to the activities and stuff.

 

But yeah everything is going great! This is Elder H's last week in the mission, and I'm going to do my best to make it one of his hardest working! We're going to get so much done! 

 

I love all of you so much! Remember to love each other like Jesus asked you, and to remember that we all have stuff we need to work on, so to open up, forgive each other so that you can be forgiven, and let God mold you into who you need to be!

Have a great week!

Love, Elder DeGraw

 

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