Elder Schwanke is awesome. (Week 50)

Hello everyone!

The Plan of Salvation

Oh man, I forgot my planner at home which is how I usually remember what we did during the week. Hopefully I will be able to remember everything important that happened. I guess first of all I will say that Elder Schwanke is awesome. It is seriously great getting to serve with him. A little about Elder Schwanke: He is from American Fork, Utah, the 3rd youngest of 5, has a twin brother serving in Spain right now, played the mellophone in marching band in High School so we talk about that sometimes, and he is planning on going to Utah State after the mission (I won't hold it against him though). We are doing really well and are planning on really picking up the work this transfer. Dad actually wrote me an email a couple months ago in which he talked about having 20 progressing investigators, that once you get that many is when you start baptizing regularly. We are shooting to get there by the end of the transfer, of course that is going to be hard, but very possible as long as we work hard.

So on Tuesday after we emailed we went and I showed Elder Schwanke a little bit of Kraków, we went to Wawel castle and looked around a little bit. We also went to the Rynek and looked around there as well. We were mostly just getting our bearings, nothing too exciting. It was annoying though, because we had changed our P-day to Tuesday because of transfers, so I was expecting all the museums at Wawel to be open (almost all museums in Poland are closed on Mondays) but by the time we got to Wawel, the museums were only open for another 15 minutes so we saved the 10 zlots and just went to the normal stuff that is open on Mondays.

Elder Schwanke at Wawel

I have probably already talked a little about Jakub, he is one of our investigators. He is an English student who just moved here to Krakow and we have met with him a couple times. He came to the branch ice skating activity on Saturday and also to Church and to dinner at the Daltons on Sunday. Pretty cool guy. We finally sat down with him and talked to him about what the Book of Mormon is and why it is so important to us. I didn't realize that we hadn't explained that very well yet, because we have known him for so long. So he has finally actually become an investigator.

As far as everyone else goes we didn't really get too much of a chance to meet with other investigators this week due to them being sick or out of town, but we did meet a couple of cool people street contacting. For example, after the ice skating activity on Saturday we went out and we talked to this really cool girl named Agnieszka, we talked a lot about Authority and stuff. I've developed a little bit of strategy whenever the conversations turns into this, I basically talk with them for however much time about the bible and how the primitive church was organized, then once we come to the conclusion together that we will have to agree to disagree based on the bible, because there just isn't enough information, we whip out the Book of Mormon and commit them to read and pray about it to find out if Joseph Smith was a prophet.

Church was really good, we had a good turn out. We have had a man in church from Ukraine the past couple of weeks, and that has been interesting during Sunday school i learned enough about the Cyrillic alphabet to basically turn pages for him and make sure he was on the correct page. So I can pretty much read Ukrainian now, not really but I was looking through the Book of Mormon and I can catch the drift sometimes.

We had a really good Sacrament meeting by the way, one of our members from Ukraine gave her talk in English, which means I had to go up and translate it live from the podium, which is pretty nerve racking sometimes. It went really well though, she gave a beautiful talk and I didn't run into any major problems in translation so it was a success!

Also we had a super Sunday School, president Kucia gave the lesson from the Book of Mormon and at one point after President Kucia bore testimony about the Savior, I heard our Investigator Jakub say under his breath "Spoko" which is like sweet, so that was pretty cool. Spirit was really strong.

That's going to be it for this week, love you!

-Elder Everett