Monday, October 19, 2015

"Szanuj Szefa Swego, bo możesz mieć gorszego" -Sign at the hair cutters (Week 32)



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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