Czy Pan zna Jezus Cię osobiście? (Week 35)

Hello!!!!!!!

Role Play

I'm going to start off my email by explaining my subject line, because I think its really funny. It's kinda a play on words in Polish, because in Polish "Pan" can mean sir, or Lord (as in Jesus) and when you talk to someone you don't know, you call them Pan and talk to them in the third person. So.... Directly translated my subject line is "Does the Lord know Jesus You Personally" but because Polish is the way it is It is actually saying "Does the Lord Jesus know you personally?" And it throws Polish people off a little bit because they aren't used to Americans doing weird things with their grammar. Elder Cowley and I got a kick out of asking people that while tracting.

So we had a bit of a miracle happen on Saturday. In order to explain I will need to give some background, so Elder Cowley and I had the idea to do something like what the Elders did in The Best Two Years and take a bunch of Books out and try to give them all away. So we wrote our testimonies in and signed 20 Books of Mormon and went to Nowy Świat University and started talking to people about the Book of Mormon, it was super cool because we found a bunch of people who were really interested in the book and promised to give it a read. But the miracle came after we were finished. We stayed until we had given away all 20 of the books we came with, then we started walking back towards the Church office there (for some reason we own a random office space that is never used) to return the whiteboard we were using. As we were walking we got contacted by a group of college aged kids, and they read what we had written on the whiteboard "Mormons? Who was Mormon? Ask!" Then they got super excited because they had never met Mormons before, and one of them asked us if he could see The Book of Mormon, I told him probably not because I thought we had already given them all away, but when I checked in my bag, lo and behold, there was an extra book sitting at the bottom. So we had only given away 19 earlier, but the Lord put one more interested person in our path to take the last one. We also swapped information and he was super excited to talk more about our religion.

 

Also this week we had our MLC, which is a leadership training that is held once a transfer. It was really good, it started on Tuesday evening and went until Wednesday afternoon. We stayed at the Mission home all night. Also I got 14 free ties :) the AP's bought a box of like 200 ties with small faults in them, so in all each tie ended up being about 10 grosz (3 cents) so they gave away the ones they didn't want. I'm actually wearing one right now, its pretty sweet.

Anyways, moving on from the ties. We talked a lot about vision, about how we need to grow our vision and expect more from ourselves and others. We also talked about our planning pyramids, i'll include a picture, basically they did away with the standard of excellence last transfer and now each companionship is supposed to set their own "vision" of what they want to achieve and strive for that. It is designed to help us focus more on our weekly planning goals, and also on our vision every day. I took that picture because it's an extraordinary amount of books given out.

 

We also did role-plays about giving commitments, specifically focusing on using personal experiences when committing people to things. It was really really good.

On Friday we had a fireside from Elder Adler (I think he is an area general authority) for the Warsaw missionaries (perks of being in Warsaw) It was really good, he talked a lot about not getting discouraged and giving ourselves credit for the work we do. He said like 5 times that the Poland Warsaw mission is NOT a difficult mission, I think because a lot of missionaries will complain about how our mission is extraordinarily difficult as far as baptisms and things go. But whenever we do that, we are really just shooting ourselves in the feet by lowering our expectations. It was really interesting.

The runners

Other than that we are finding a lot of really cool people, specifically two brothers named Bogdan and Anitoli are super cool. They are Polish but were born and raised in Western Ukraine, and are studying here in Warsaw. they are super cool and wanting to learn more about the church. Also we are meeting with an awesome man named Andrzej who is a doctor, he was randomly in the sisters phone and they sent him a text and they set up with him, then we went and taught him. (The sisters keep giving us referrals, they are awesome!)

Okay, I am out of time, but I love you a lot and miss you!

-Starszy Everett