Sorry I couldn't email last week (Week 46)

Hey!

Sorry I couldn't email last week, we ended up going out to visit the Pawlik's for p-day, they live like 2 hours away and we ended up staying longer than we were planning so I had 0 time to email... oops! 

I'll fill you in on some highlights from the past 2 weeks!

The Pawlik's was awesome! We got to tour his factory again, the Daltons have pictures from it. We also got to peek around this bunker outside the factory that was made by the Soviets because it used to be a War plane factory. I'll send pictures of some of that.

The Pawlik's doTerra collection.

On Tuesday we went around with an English Student of ours and taught him a little about our church, he also showed us some cool Catholic stuff. We went to this place where apparently Jesus appeared to a Nun and told her to create a picture of him so people could worship it. It was super idolatrous but pretty cool to see/learn about regardless. If you google "Jezu Ufam Tobie" you can look at that, or you can look up Saint Faustyna and learn about it.

We had a really cool broadcast on Wednesday last week, it was a worldwide missionary training about "Teach repentance baptize converts." Elder Anderson spoke, among with several other apostles. We learned a little about working with Less actives, Recent converts, and Members to drill them for referrals.

So we have this pretty cool Investigator named Sassan, he is from Iran and is really really awesome. He speaks pretty good English and is really interested in the Book of Mormon. And we had a little miracle on that note, we just happened to have a Persian Book of Mormon in the chapel which we found after we met him... We had a really good meeting with him on Friday at Romek's house the spirit was really strong. I actually wanted to ask Dad for a little bit of help, there was an Iranian recent convert in our stake, I was at his baptism shortly before my mission. At the baptism were 2 young missionaries Iranian speaking, and also a Elderly sister missionary from Iran. If you could see if you could find any contact info for one of those missionaries it would be sweet. Sassan has some questions about the Book of Mormon that are really hard for us to explain in English to him and it would be nice to have someone who speaks his language.

We had a really cool Missionary Correlation Meeting last Saturday, it ended up being at the branch missionary leader's house way out past Wieliczka which is like 40 minutes by car. The Branch President took us and the Daltons took the sisters. It was really cool and I think the Kraków branch is really starting to get a solid vision for the future and some plans looking forward.

Crazy Nativity

Random side note, while Elder Mulder and I were on Exchange in Warsaw (the exchange was awesome, but not much particular to talk about) I got these workout cd's off of Elder Jones, he sold them to me pretty cheap. It's called Insanity Max-30, its pretty much designed for missionaries because it has workouts Monday through Friday, then a easy workout on Saturday, and nothing on Sunday, and each workout is only 30 minutes which is how much time we have in our schedule for working out. So Elder Mulder and I are getting Swoll.

Speaking of working out and getting swoll, on Saturday the branch had a YSA activity where they went rock climbing at an indoor facility here in Krakow. President Kucia asked us if we would come so we did, unfortunately rock climbing is against the rules so we just hung around and chatted with people. The best part is the list of people who went: we had a Less Active who hasn't been to church since my 1st transfer here, a recent convert who brought 2 non-member friends, and one of our investigators. So we got to build some really good relationships with all those people. Definitely a good activity.

Other than that there isn't anything extremely exciting to talk about, Church was awesome yesterday. We had dinner at the Daltons and got to teach a Ukrainian investigator the first, with a Ukrainian member couple translating from English to Ukrainian. Really good couple of weeks though.

Love and miss you!

-Elder Everett

Literally no time!!! Sorry! (Week 45)

So I have zero time, we went to Mielec to visit members there for P-day and we got back pretty late so we need to get out and work, just wanted to let you guys know we're okay!

Love you!

Balthazar, Gaspar, and Melchior (Week 44)

Hello Everyone!!!!

3 Kings day parade

Greetings from Kraków, big news... There has been snow on the ground like all week, it got really cold last week then it snowed for a while, but it's warm again so a lot of the snow has melted.

It's been a good week, we have spent a lot of time doing finding trying to get some more new investigators. There have been some good things that have come out of that, and we also got to do a lot of cool other stuff this week.

Random pic while tracting

On Monday night we went to visit Teresa, she has been a member here for a really long time. She's pretty old, unfortunately she hasn't come to church in a while, so we were going out to visit her and see why that was. It was pretty funny, we went in and sat down and she immediately went back in the kitchen to start making us food. So we just talked with her while she was doing that, and we talked with her Grandson Oskar. He was hilarious, he's like 10. The food was delicious, she made us these hash brown type things, but they were different than normal hash browns, more polish. Also this soup (can't remember what it's called) its made from spoiled rye, its actually really tasty. It was really cool getting to see her, hopefully she will start coming to church again.

 

On Wednesday the Daltons had us take our Lunch hour and check out the 3 Kings day Parades. 3 Kings day is huge here, its a really big holiday. So basically they have a special mass in 3 different cathedrals throughout Kraków then afterwards all the people from the mass, plus a bunch more people make big processions and march from the Cathedrals into the Rynek, then everyone hangs out in the Rynek and sings carols and stuff. We only stayed long enough to see 1 of the parades come in, they had a group of Brazilian drummers with them and it was super cool.

Snow!!

Then later that day we went to go caroling, because its a thing that on 3 Kings Day catholic priests go caroling and bless doors. So we tried it, unfortunately people kept trying to pay us (we put the money back in their mailbox's) or people would say they already got caroled to and close the door on us. We also tried to carol to these deaf people... i was the only person we didn't realize they were deaf right away, so I looked pretty dumb caroling by myself to a couple deaf people. It was pretty fun.

We had Zone Training in Katowice on Thursday, that was awesome, we talked a lot about morning exercise and how we can start our days off better with that. Then we talked about Morning prayers, and that it's a bad idea to roll over first thing in the morning and start praying b/c then you fall asleep almost immediately. We also talked about ways we can have more effective Comp Studies.

The Wisła is frozen. The swans just walk across.

On Saturday we had the opportunity to have Alex with us, he is a recent convert from Indonesia, I might have talked about him last week, if not, he is awesome. We got to teach our investigator Tomasz with him, I don't know if you guys remember Tomasz from last time I was here, but he is still investigating. It was a super cool meeting, we had it at the Strobel's house and Alex was there (triple member lesson) and he committed to work towards baptism on the 6th of February, so we're praying for him to be ready by then.

And now a little bit of a spiritual though: I have been studying the book of Acts lately, I started looking through it because I was wondering a lot about how the early Apostles had the courage to speak so boldly and proclaim their faith with such power. I was impressed by a few things, but one specifically is when Peter is arrested shortly after the Martyrdom of James, we read that "Peter therefore was kept in prison: but prayer was made without ceasing of the church unto God for him." And then later we know that an Angel came and delivered Peter from the prison. Then when he returned to the house of Mary he found "many ... gathered together praying." I think that sometimes I underestimate the power of prayer, that God will answer prayers and perform miracles, if we have the faith to ask.

My Bible collection

That's pretty much everything worth talking about for this week.

Love you!

-Elder Everett