#3 Buda: Rescue Mission

Let me start out by saying 2018 was a ride!! The only year of my life when I was 100% missionary 100% of my time. So as I set my 2019 new years resolutions I split them into two section, the half of my year that will be as a missionary and the other half of my year not as a missionary.

This week was a good and cold one. The main adventure of this week was keeping Elder Smith from dying.. We took him to the university hospital. I was chosen to be the navigator to get there because of the missionaries in the office I'm the one who knows Budapest best, so they sent me and Elder Udy to go get Elder Smith at the metro and take him to the hospital. Basically he had a bad infection and needed a bunch of antibiotics because of his high fever and coughing his lungs filled up with liquid so he had that on top of it. To make things worse, Wednesday he called us and he was having allergic reactions to his medication, so we had to go get him again and bring him back to Budapest and take him to the hospital again. So, after two hospital visits, two sets of medications and most the week of rest with us here in Buda. I think he will be alright. He was happy to be going home to Békéscsaba on Saturday. It was wonderful to have him with us, he is one of the best friends I have made in my mission, and though unlikely, I would love to serve with him in the future.

On Sunday we went over to Elder and Sister Russell's for dinner and we had fried chicken. P-day was pretty normal, grocery shopping, errands, etc. Had pizza at the train station with the APs and we planned to go to a small town on the bend of the Danube on the Slovakia boarder called Visegrad. There is a castle on a bluff that's really cool. It was about a 40 minute train ride hoping to go to the castle but because of bad timing we missed the fairy to get across the river to the castle so we were only able to see it from the hills on our side of the river and take pictures from afar.

We were awake at midnight new years eve when the fireworks were going off! But the thing that made our New Years Eve one I will never forget was the rescue mission, ER adventure through Budapest with Elder Smith.

My time in the office goes by really fast. We have lots of duties. One of those is the maintenance of the official church Facebook page in Budapest. So we do that everyday which is pretty cool. We did our normal office work throughout the week and it wasn't super eventful, and we had to stick close to the office and home for Elder Smith, but it was good that we got some missionary work done this week. It was a pleasant week.

We had a couple lessons set up for this week but they all fell through, so we filled what time we had left over with streeting and tracting. We found some potential people to teach that way. We also tried area book finding since we were inside with Elder Smith and actually found 3 people who are willing to meet with us this next week. I hope those lessons actually happen. Elder Udy and I also looked up some inactive members of the Buda ward, we learned that some of them have moved and now we are working on tracking them down.

One of the recent converts we have been working with, his name is Zsolt, was baptized during the summer. He has been inactive since his baptism but we have been working on reaching out to him in the last few weeks. He is a doctor, and currently has been in Vienna for the last month or so, but he is looking forward to coming back church when he is back in Budapest, in a week or so, so we are pretty happy about that, it will be good to see him in church. That was pretty much our week.

I've been pondering a lot this week about the restoration, mainly because our zone leaders have challenged us to study it in preparation for Zone conference. I've tried to imagine myself living in Palmyra in 1828 and I've asked my self the question, "would I have believed the stories of crazy ol' Joe Smith and his gold bible, flying angles, and daemons in the woods" or would I have sought the truth for my self, and then asked god to know the truth. I hope I would have done the latter. The great thing about the restoration is its not a static event, but a continual process, and today I can go to my father in heaven an ask to know the truthfulness of what is unfolding. I'm grateful for the opportunity that I have had to live in the time of the restoration of Christ gospel, and I pray that I can continue to strive in it the rest of my life. I love the Gospel. Wish you all the best.

Love elder Morgan