Creative Contacting

Nazdar!

Hey all, so this week started out with a major bang. Our Nitra super-star returned from Praha, he is back in the house, haha. This is one of the Slovaks who's leaving very soon for a mission in the Alpine, Germany mission, and I have the opportunity of working with him for a bit before he heads off to the MTC in England. SO cool. But this week I didn't really take a lot of pictures except for the beginning and the end, so I apologize for the lack of visual explanations, I'll go over it during the week overview.

So Monday, we hit one of the oldest churches in the known world, it's this little old Roman chapel up on a hill overlooking all of Nitra, way cool. Also, our superstar showed the first PDA I think he's done in his whole life and put his arm around his girlfriend, she's a member from Bratislava, kindergarten teacher, way cool, and I got a picture, haha. I never thought that I would ever sound like that much of a creeper, but too late now, so oh well, they're just awesome.

Tuesday: I noticed on Monday on the hike that that little pain in my foot was especially strong, and discovered that somehow, that callus that I've built up from just walking around everywhere, had a blister on it. Somehow I got a blister on top/underneath my callus, I'm not sure which entirely...Also it's a little painful, but I'm just gonna put some dirt on it and it should be healed then. Also, finally got everything set up for the newspaper article. If you want to see the article, head to echo.sk and click on Nitra and there I am on the front page along with an article that my companion and I wrote in Slovak! Isn't that cool?!? But had an awesome experience on Tuesday night where I was a little bit fed-up with doing calls and having no one answer so I decided to just be a teenager about it and text our entire phone just a simple sentance: Ahojte, mozeme sa zist tento vikend? From that, looking back on the week, we had 7 potentials set up with US just because of that one text, so cool how modernization can be good for the work. BTW, our mission has been approved for technology, so we will probably be receiving some pretty cool gifts from our mission president pretty soon.

Wednesday, was when my companion and I got again a little bit tired of just going places to set things up for us and did some focused contacting for the first time that week and it went REALLY well, especially because NOW, I can actually say to people, "yes, we'll accept your email if that's better than a phone #." But just a good day to get ready for the rest of the week, we did more personal preparation that day than on P~Day just because on P~Day we don't really have time to take a deep breath and slow down at all anymore just because we have to always rush around and get things done, that technology can't come fast enough.

Thursday: We had our exchange with the AP's. Funny story, President kind of switched up the formula on us, and when I heard about the exchange on Monday I called him up and gave him a piece of my mind about it... I had only ever heard of the AP's going on exchanges with normal missionaries (not in leadership positions) when those missionaries are being disobedient, and I couldn't stand my president thinking for even a second that I was being disobedient, but he resolved my concerns by telling me that he had been advised by Elder Holland to not use the assistants to "put out fires", but to use the District Leaders instead for that, and use the AP's to strengthen young missionaries that you intend to use later, so good signs, but I'm a little bit worried about what that means. Anyway, the exchange was amazing, somehow the biggest miracles always happen then. We met a guy who was so excited about learning more about our church that when He said, "I'll give you my phone so you can call me," I thought he meant his # until he tried to give me an ACTUAL phone because he wanted to make sure we could call him again. High hopes for him.

Friday: Went to visit the a family today, and finally got to find out the mom's main concerns, she's been avoiding telling missionaries this since the beginning, but she's not obeying the Word of Wisdom 100% and so we're going to help her work on her testimony of that so that she can feel and be ready for baptism. Unfortunately, at the moment I can't remember a whole lot more about Friday other than it rained and wasn't very pleasant, but I don't remember why so whatever, Friday was a day my brain doesn't want me to remember. Found a cool guy that day though, who is a Born-Again Christian preacher who says definitely he wants to try to get baptized just in the off-chance that our church happens to be right, haha.

Saturday: Uneventful, other than getting some good ice cream.

Sunday: Horrible, I really needed every bit of what I learned on the exchange and throughout my mission so far to keep myself from just sitting down in the middle of the sidewalk and crying. Speaking of which, on the exchange I learned 2 things, neither of which I expected to learn. 1:Another missionary is a very positive guy, and I noticed something in me, that I tend to wait until the people around me show some sort of positivity before I actually am verbally or outwardly positive. I mean, I obviously don't have a bad attitude, but I've been neglecting trying to build up everyone around me regardless of how they're feeling at the moment thus far, and so I'm trying really hard to just wreck Satan with my positivity every second, and it's going well so far. 2: I feel like I'm a pretty good finder, and I feel like a really very effective missionary, however, I noticed that the more opportunities I look for  to find people, the more opportunities I'll find. I really took to heart right before the exchange the phrase in Preach My Gospel to always be prepared to share a short powerful statement of restored truth, and those always seem to be interesting to people, whether it's the person right behind the person you're already talking to, or even the information desk lady at the mall, or the angry man who threw your badge into a bush. The worst part of Saturday was this lady who we contacted who was really really nice, or at least seemed that way, because she just randomly started attacking us in every way she could. She found out really quickly that she couldn't break out doctrine because she wouldn't let us open any scriptures so we were teaching and testifying from the heart, so she started attacking our appearance, our accents, our age, our families, America, everything you can think of, she insulted me personally about. I was so hurt. But we had the opportunity after the contact of looking at each other and saying, we can NOT end on that, and contacting around for another hour without success before the Lord blessed us. On the way home, feeling sad and broken but not wanting to have anyone see us like that, all of a sudden because we decided to go for one more contact and go out on a limb, we were blessed with an opportunity to each teach a lesson, and get a bunch of people to listen and be interested and invite their friends over to listen and be interested as well. They're going to invite us to a community grill next week where they want us to talk to all of them so they can learn more. Also visited a sister in the area, who's an angel. But that's why we have Halusky on Sunday nights. We always need to end on a good note.

Ja mám vás veľmi rád, a ja dufám že tato sprava vám dava silu a sťatie tento tyžden, (Google translate: "I got you a very happy and I hope that this report gives you the power and become this week.")

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