Yea!

Cluj is freaking sweet! This district is awesome, too. Everybody is super hard working and super fun. So yeah basically things are still going great here. The branch is very motivated to get enough missionaries for a chapel right now, so we're trying to ride that wave and bring people to church.

We had a meeting after church yesterday about bringing people to institute, and we came up with a plan of meeting weith one of the youth every week (with the institute teacher/branch president's wife) as well as calling lots of people and inviting them. That's basically what amounts to mutual out here, and it's for youth and YSA.

The Cluj branch had some people who would come, but they would be like the only ones and they felt kind of weird being alone with the teacher and some missionaries, so they stopped coming. But there are a lot of people who can/should come, who just don't see the importance of it. And this could be a big step in the right direction of building up the branch. The branch mission plan should also help alot; we're going to start doing a lot of member visits and start a Family Home Evening branch activity once a week.

Cluj is really motivated right now, and it's up to us missionaries to funnel that motivation in the right ways. So haha hopefully we do a good enough job.

Me and my new companion are great! Elder C is a very hard worker, and very good at having fun too. I've come to find out here that you need the right balance of hard work and hard fun out here, otherwise you go insane by either overworking yourself or just goofing off all the time. There is balance in everything, and we need to all find that. Me and him have probably the best balance of that out of any of my previous companionships. Haha I'm loving this transfer!


The weather has actually been really nice lately so I might not need to get a different coat! So that's nice. And we've been able to stay outside for longer periods of time! Haha when the weather warms up a bit and it's lighter outside things are just so much easier!


Haha the other day, it was a little warmer and we went and did some district english contacting, and I don't know what it was, but the time just flew! We walked around and talked to people and handed out english flyers for around 4 hours straight, and it felt like nothing, and we would have kept going if we didn't have to go home. We got out almost all of our english flyers, had many people tell us that they were going to come, and had a lot of really good interaction with a lot of people.


It kind of helped put a spark back into my contacting. I think I had been getting kind of unimpressed with the results (or lack thereof) of my contacting lately, but we got a lot out of this last district session and I'm a lot more back into contacting! Contacting is pretty much all we do in this mission, and a lot of the time it just gets so boring and unresultful that it's really hard to keep going.


We don't see a lot of the success of our efforts out here, so we have to make what we do fun. So that's why things like district contacting, specialty contacting (i.e. guitar, art, chalk, surveys, etc.) are so good, because they switch things up and make it fun! And when you enjoy it, logic follows that you will actually want to do it!


This transfer is really a blessing for me. I've had a few transfers that kind of took the fire out of me and I can feel it coming back. I hear Garret is extending a month! Sounds exciting. I hope everything is going well back home, and I hope you all have a great week!!

-Elder DeGraw