#2 Pest II: 21 Day Book of Mormon Challenge

Long time no see... It feels like it's been only four days since I have sent you an email... oh, yeah, that's because it's only been 4 days since my last email.

So, what I have I been up to in the last few days?

Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday was eaten up by lots of Zone Leader Administrative stuff, so it was nice to get to regular missionary work on Thursday, except for the three hours we spent at the hevital to register in our new area, which was a fail because we decided to stop waiting after three hours and we'll have to go back next week. Friday was district meeting, and Saturday we did our weekly call with the mission president as zone leaders. We talked about the new 21 day Book of Mormon reading challenge the Church is doing for Europe. It officially starts the 1st of September, but we've gotten a head start. We will be using it in our proselytizing and in our district and zone meetings. Every day there is a scriptures passage, a question, and a conference talk. We started with Alma 22:1-16, it prompts the discussion, "Is God real?"

We met with our investigator named Moni and used the Book of Mormon challenge discussion about Alma 22:1-16. I found her with Elder Durney when we were streeting before I went to Nyíregyháza. She has a lot of faith, we taught her about the Book of Mormon and she was super excited to read it. She told us yesterday that she has already read quite a bit from it. We also meet with another investigator named Sandor, we read with him Enos 1-12 and talked about prayer faith and repentance. It was great. Unfortunately, he told us that he is going away to Romania and then England for the next 6 weeks. We have also been doing a lot of tracking and streeting. We set up a lesson with a man that we streeted named Laszlo, apparently, he is an old investigator who met with the missionaries about 10 years ago.

Ouch!

After church on Sunday we went tracting in the soviet apartment buildings, the building we went into had been painted hot pink! OK, so the deal is that in recent years they have tried to make these old soviet buildings "look better" by painting them. Some of them have murals on them and are pretty cool, and most of the solid color ones are OK, but this one was super hot pink and another kind of pink... it was too painted. Strange. Near there we tracted some houses and we tracted into a old woman from Vietnam named Schmidtne, Doctor Vo., she's an herbal medicine doctor who married a rich swiss guy and got her Hungarian citizenship from the President of Hungary back in the soviet days...  there's something interesting behind that story but sometimes she could understand what we were saying and sometimes there was a language barrier, so I'm not sure exactly what her story is. We are going to get a Vietnamese Book of Mormon for her to read.

Since I've have been doing the 21-day book of Mormon challenge I have enjoyed the themes we have studied. I really liked this verse from Mosiah 4:10-12:

"And again, believe that ye must repent of your sins and forsake them, and humble yourselves before God; and ask in sincerity of heart that he would forgive you; and now, if you believe all these things see that ye do them."

"And again I say unto you as I have said before, that as ye have come to the knowledge of the glory of God, or if ye have known of his goodness and have tasted of his love, and have received a remission of your sins, which causeth such exceedingly great joy in your souls, even so I would that ye should remember, and always retain in remembrance, the greatness of God, and your own nothingness, and his goodness and long-suffering towards you, unworthy creatures, and humble yourselves even in the depths of humility, calling on the name of the Lord daily, and standing steadfastly in the faith of that which is to come, which was spoken by the mouth of the angel."

"And behold, I say unto you that if ye do this ye shall always rejoice, and be filled with the love of God, and always retain a remission of your sins; and ye shall grow in the knowledge of the glory of him that created you, or in the knowledge of that which is just and true."

I really like the focus here on the relationship between happiness and repentance which is our whole goal as missionaries. I also love the charge from King Benjamin: "If you believe all these things see that ye do them." That is the hardest part for us, and honestly for everyone.

I'm really happy to be back in Pest. I've been continuing my Book of Mormon study of the everything we learn in the Book of Mormon about the Holy Ghost, it's nature and characteristics, personal revelation, the Spirit, etc. It's really cool! I've learned that they talk about the Holy Ghost in just about every page so far. I'm enjoying this study, because since I read through 5 years of General Conferences during the first part of my mission, I've been bouncing around from one study to another without a good focus; so this focus on the Spirit has been really great and added depth to my personal study.

(I am using an English keyboard, and my brain hates it.)

I love you all!