#3 Nyíregyháza: Wear Out Our Lives in the Work of the Lord

I’m happy to report that our week was quite pleasant. It was a good week for the work, but I'm exhausted. I think it's the sun, it been 33 degrees celsius, 91 degrees fahrenheit, all this week, and I'm dying! I hear it will be this kind of hot the rest of the week. I'm tired of having a perpetual sunburn, but I'm still happy.

Today we had a sport day with some members from the ward, we played soccer, which I'm absolutely horrible at, probably because I am American and really uncoordinated, but we also played a little American football, and though I'm not good at that either, I am better than Hungarians. It was fun. I also got to crack my whip. :)

This week we had a really good to have zone conference in Buda.

We had 2 new investigators this week. Our focus in finding has been about how we can find lasting happiness. One of the investigators is an older man with a family, and the other is in his 30’s. I hope that as we meet with them this week that their interest in the message will continue. We also had really good lessons with 2 of our progressing investigators, Dániél and László. With Dániél we taught the restoration lesson, and we committed him to read the book of Mormon from the beginning and pray continuously as he reads. He has expressed that he thinks that the book of Mormon is probably true, but he said he wants to get a testimony that it is. With László, we challenged him to pray to God, and ask him what he would have that he should do. László has had problems applying the gospel to his life, and now that he has finished the Book of Mormon, is kind of floundering, we are trying to figure out what is holding him back from baptism.

We had a really good visit with a member named Valéria, she has been a member since the 1990s. She is amazing and has an amazing testimony. We talked with her about the blessings of the gospel and invited her to talk with people about the blessings she has received and then invite others to come and try it out in their own lives. We asked her to prayerfully choose people to talk with. It was one of my favorite member visits of my mission. We also taught Tibor about the priesthood, priesthood keys and how the church is organized; he is doing so well with his new member lessons.

I also held splits with elder Thomsen. Elder Thomsen from the great state of Georgia, and he loves Gerogia. Our focus was using the book of Mormon to draw people nearer unto god. We used that as our focus when we taught Dániél, it went really well. When we were done teaching Dániél we went to the town square and sat down on bench to have companion language study and we were streeted by two "Members of the Faith" congregation, it was an 18 and a 15 year old girl, and mostly the 18 year old girl talked. They approached us but we ended up teaching them about the restoration and bore testimony of the Book of Mormon. They didn't know what how to respond to us and asked us to talk to their youth leader. So we were worried that talking to him might just turn into a bible bashing kind of conversation but we decided to try our best and we went over to the other side of the town square where they had set up a booth near a very large catholic church. They had lots of people there and they had guys there jamming out on gitars. One of the girls asked Elder Thomsen what he thought about the music, and he said that this kind of music isn't what he thinks of when he thinks of God and his spirit.

Then the youth pastor caught sight of us and came over and talked to us. It was an interesting conversation and Elder Thomsen did a good job putting the conversation into a non-threatening way. The first thing the youth pastor did was to take the Book of Mormon and read the title and when he read the words, "Another Testament of Jesus Christ," he took offence to that and said, "Why do we need another testament?" We explained to the youth pastor that there are plain and precious truths that have been lost from the bible over the many hundreds of years of translation and human error and that the Book of Mormon was brought forward in our time to restore those precious truths and stand as another witness of Jesus Christ. Elder Thomsen bore strong testamony and invited them to read the Book of Mormon.

It was a good conversation, and it was good practice for introducing the purpose of the Book of Mormon, they were not receptive but we leaned a lot from the interaction. It was two hours of speaking Hungarian in an intense teaching experience, and afterward we were pretty tired. Something I learned while preparing for the split and then when we were teaching and streeting is that no matter how good we are at explaining the Book of Mormon, or using the Bible to support our message, ultimately it comes down to how willing the other person is to accept the challenge that the book of Mormon presents and act in faith. Of course it is important to be a competent missionary when explaining the doctrine, but I think more than that, testimony helps us invite people to Christ.

Overall, it was a good week. This coming week we will have another splits with the elders in Debrecen. I'm looking forward to it. Love you all and I hope that school starts well for Charlie. He can do it!

I have also noticed today that I'm having a hard time writing in good English grammar, it makes sense, but it just sounds a little Hungarian, and its funny. lol MY BRAIN IS CHANGING!!!! 

Also maybe Russian would be fun to learn after this is all over.

Have a good week, love elder Morgan.

From Elder Gilson's Email:

Zone conference was really good and I was able to take a lot from it. The first thing came from my mission president. He talked to us about when work we need to have a purpose that drives us. I really like that because you could be a working machine but with out a purpose your empty and our work doesn't have meaning behind it. I think it is really important that what ever we do in life we have a purpose behind it. That purpose gives meaning to our work and meaning to our lives. And if that purpose is strong then when hard times come we have that purpose or "reason
why" to keep going and to stay strong.

The other thing I really liked from zone conference is about being our best selves every day and about raising the bar in our lives so that we can achieve a higher potential. I really liked this because it reminded me about all the sports and activities I did before my mission. I remembered that if I wanted to be a better swimmer then I would have to raise the bar in my swimming life and aim my self higher if I wanted to be better and reach my full potential. That is the same with our day to day lives as well. If we want to reach our full potential in life then we need to raise the bar in our life to a higher plane and start going for that higher potential. We should shoot to be our best selves every day and with that we should have a higher bar or standard that we should reach for each day so that we can grow and truly see our full potential in life.