#4 Buda: The Restoration, a Blessing to the World

Hello Family & Friends,

This week started out with a little trip down south to Dunaújváros, a soviet city that was built in the 1950s. It's strange because it's a communist built planned city, it's one of two of these types of cities. It's odd to think about a city being built because the government decides one day they are just going to build a city and make people move there. It's seems so unnatural. It used to be named after Stalin but it was renamed after communism. We had a wonderful exchange with our zone leaders. I was with Elder Bridges. We spent a ton of time streeting in the middle of snow blizzard -- well maybe not a blizzard, but it was snowing pretty good -- but the people where really nice, and miraculously we found 7 new investigators in one day! Yes, even in the snow! It was awesome. We also had a wonderful lesson with someone new they are teaching who has set a baptismal date. We reviewed the restoration of the Gospel with him, it was very simple but for me very powerful.

A silly picture from last weeks' trip. The only new picture I have this week.

We also had some good opportunities this week to find in our own area. We did some streeting and tracting with the Assistants, and had some good conversations that way. We found two people to teach who are from China. Though we experience lots of rejection, we just kept going. It was a good week, it blew past. We met with one of the people we are teaching named Lajos, he is an elderly man who is an active church going Catholic but he has some doctrinal problems with the Catholic church. Despite that he is pretty attached to the Catholic church because of how much it has helped his life since he started attending weekly. For the last 3 weeks has gone to mass as usual but he's also gone to church with us. We had a good lesson with him. We talked about Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ and how our view of them differs from the Catholic church. He is open to learning more. We are going to focus on the why the world needed a restoration next week. I hope it goes well.

As we have been getting ready for this weeks zone conference, Elder Udy and I have been studying the restoration and making questions for each of the points, it has been a good exercise. The restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ in it's fullness is a very powerful message to the world. It can be very simple but for those we teach it takes a lot of study for them to understand it. I love that we have Christ's restored church on the earth again.

On Friday we had district meeting and English class. In English class we were explaining to them groundhog day and they were really confused because it's a strange holiday. They said they have something similar with bears. The word for bear in Hungarian means "honey eater," which was pretty funny to learn. District meeting was interesting because the Assistants were traveling and so it was just Elder Udy and I and all the sister missionaries. That was interesting.

On Saturday we did a lot of streeting but no one wanted to talk to us, it's interesting how one day can be so different than another. We also had to help the Bradshaw's, a senior couple who is in charge of the self-reliance program in five countries. Part of the self-reliance program is an English program but they haven't received the books yet so we were making some paper copies for them because they don't know how to use the copier; but helping Sister Bradshaw with the copier gave us time to talk. We had a nice talk about college and my future life. She challenged me to read my patriarchal blessing again. She talked about an activity that comes out of the self-reliance booklet for return missionaries, that has you annotate your patriarchal blessing. So I did it for my personal study and it was really cool.

Love you all. I'm sorry I don't have pictures this week. I was going to get some of Dunaújváros but it is just a huge communist 10 story jungle so I didn't. I have enough of those kinds of pictures.

Elder Morgan