Hello!
So Google Translate has a really bad translation of my
subject line... It translates to "Respect your boss, because you could
have a worse one" I just thought it was funny, and it rhymes and sounds
really cool.
Its been a really good week, the work is going well. This
next week is Elder Guthrie's last one of his mission so we are going to go out
strong, everyone pray for us to finish strong!
We had a bit of a miracle yesterday, we had not one, but TWO
investigators show up to church. The first one is a man named Andrzej he showed
up to church last week as well, he was a self referral. So basically he just
decided that he wanted to come to church and learn about Mormons so we are
happy to teach him! He is probably mid twenties, and comes from a Catholic birth
(shocker) but now aligns more closely with Lutheranism. He has learned a lot
about various protestant churches though. He really likes to draw comparisons
and contrasts between ours, Lutheranism, Catholicism, and Calvinism.
And the second person was Wiola, the daughter of Jan and
Maria. She is actually really interested in the church and is reading the Book
of Mormon, she has a lot of questions which is good. Most of her questions are
classic things like Polygamy, that we are Amish (everyone in Poland has seen
this one show about the Amish that translated Amish to Mormon...), about
temples and other things. She is making progress which is really cool. Pray for
her! Church was really awesome though because the members did a really really
good job of welcoming her. Especially Viola (who spells her name with a V for
some reason), Viola is an angel. She basically talked with Wiola and come to
our Gospel Principles class and made excellent comments, then after that she
invited Wiola to the Relief Society Enrichment night, and sat with her during
3rd hour. It was amazing. Viola is so great, she is a translator for the
church, its her job. So a lot of what we read in Polish was written by her, she
translated PMG, the Gospel Doctrines book, a lot of teachings of the
presidents. So she speaks perfect English, but as a matter of principle only
speaks with us in Polish. It is so nice.
Speaking of that, we were talking to her last week about
General Conference because she is a translator for that. We were asking about
"Ponderizing" from Elder Durrant's talk, so basically he smashed
together the words Ponder and Memorize, but in Polish that does not work the
word for "to ponder" is rozważać and the word for "to
memorize" is zapamiętywać, but if you smash them together like English you
get rozpamiętywać which means something else entirely. So the word they used to
translate Ponderize was "rozważanio-zapamiętywanie" she said it was a
nightmare. They took a 3 syllable word - Ponderize, and turned it into a 7
syllable monster. It was apparently very hard to keep up with him during the
talk.
We had our MTC night on Saturday. Basically we wanted to
have a sort of training activity on how to treat less-actives when they come
back to church, because it is apparently a problem here... We gave bad and good
examples, the bad example was really funny. But also not really funny because
they took a bunch of things they have actually seen and put them together. It
was something like "Hey Kasia, you haven't been at church in a while, you
know it's a commandment to come right? You really are not keeping your
baptismal covenants if you don't come. What do I smell? is that smoke? Kasia, I
know you had a problem with smoking before, have you been smoking again?"
It was really uncomfortable, and the members recognized that was bad. Not very
members came to the activity unfortunately. Only 5 people, but it was really
good regardless. Plus the other elders made enough cookies for like 20 people
so we got to eat a ton of chocolate chip cookies.
We met with Tomek and Sergeiusz, who are members. They were
really cool, Sergeiusz is from Ukraine but he speaks Polish fluently (except
with a Ukrainian accent) He actually is from Szczecin where he joined the
church and was visiting Łódź for a month and now is moving to Poznań. And Tomek
is super cool as well, he is from Łódź and has been a member for about 2 years.
We talked a lot about their experiences with Baptism, Confirmation, and
receiving the priesthood. It was really cool. They also gave us cookies and
fruit tea which was cool.
I'm not sure if I really have much else to share, so that
might be it for this week. Love you guys, have a great week! I'll let you know
what happens with transfers next Monday!
-Elder Everett
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