Witam w emailu!
Hello everyone! It's been good out here in Poland, some good
experiences and good people we are working with. Our week starts off shortly
after I emailed last week. We had FHE at the Daltons at the end of P-day, we
have been trying to make an effort to fellowship a recently reactive member
named Marcin, he is awesome.
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| On the train |
On Tuesday we went to the chapel at 11 for a
"Translation meeting" basically we were told we were doing a reading
of the new translation of the Doctrine and Covenants. We showed up at 11:00
which is when we were told it started, and the only people there were the
missionaries and Agata, who is a church translator. Elder Dalton told us that
it had already ended and we missed it. We actually believed him for like 20
minutes because nobody was there, not even the guy who was supposed to be
running it from Salt Lake. Eventually we found out that everyone was just late.
One member ended up coming, and the guy who ran it came like 40 minutes late
(he had a car accident or something) and we read 2 chapters from the new D+C in
Polish and gave our feedback. It was really cool, and we learned that the
Polish scriptures are going to be on Gospel Library in the next couple of
months (finally) and they new translation will be online by the end of the
year, and we will have hard copies around the time I finish my mission! Pretty
cool.
We had district meeting after that, it was good. I think I
forgot to mention this, but I'm not actually district leader this transfer.
Elder Schwanke is heading that up, we had some confusion at the beginning of
the transfer and we ended up having Elder Schwanke do it. District meeting was
good, but pretty short. We had to go catch a train. So we took the train up to
Warsaw, I slept the whole time. Then when we got there we had to wait like 30 minutes
for the APs to get us because of traffic... classic Warsaw. then we went and
did a whiteboard with Elder Campora and his trainee -- Elder Burdwell. It was
really good, we talked to some good people and got a couple of people's phone
numbers for the missionaries in Warsaw.
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| Finally the hymnal is published in Polish! |
The next day we got started bright and early and went to the
Fishbowl to do an English blitz at like 8:30 in the morning. The idea was that
there would be tons of people there that early that we could hand English
fliers. By the way, my last week in Warsaw Elder Cowley and I had this idea to
change the English program in Warsaw in a couple different ways, and they
actually did it, so both district's English programs are listed on the same
flier and it's way better. So we had like 10-12 missionaries in the Fishbowl,
and we made it on some guy's snapchat story. It was pretty fun.
Then later we got to meet with Bogdan and Anatol (we is
Elder Jones and I), they were Elder Cowley and I's investigators back in the
day. We had a really good first half of the lesson about the baptismal
covenant. They spirit was really strong, but then we said something refering to
the celestial kingdom and there was a little bit of confusion. We realized they
had never been taught the Plan of Salvation, after 6 months of investigating
with at least weekly meetings... So we had to explain everything, and they had
a couple of problems with some of it. At one point Bogdan said "Nope, I
don't believe it. No way..." We totally thought we were about to lose
Elder Cowley and Bebel's investigators. Luckily we explained everything and we
ended on a good note, then they met with Elders Cowley and Bebel a couple days
later and everything was good. But we were scared for a while.
Then later that day we met with Michał, who was actually
also one of Elder Cowley and I's investigators... I'm not sure how he ended up
in the AP's teaching pool, but somehow he did. We met with him and basically
just discussed his progress in the gospel. We talked for a little while about
programming, which was fun Michał was explaining lots of concepts to Elder
Jones. At one point he was talking about how attractive knowing lots about
computers is to Women and he said the quote from my subject line. It was pretty
funny.
The next day we went back to Kraków and did some calls to
set up with people, and then went out and contacted. It was a pretty calm
night, which was nice.
Then on Friday we had a bunch of meetings set up, but only 2
of them actually happened. We first met with a man named Muhammed from Sudan,
he lives here sometimes because his work takes him between Sudan, Egypt, and
Poland. He was super nice and was really interested in reading the Book of
Mormon, but we dropped the ball and forgot to bring it in English (and we don't
have any Arabic copies in Kraków yet, we ordered some.) But we will get it to
him at the end of the month when he comes back to Kraków. Really great guy, I
don't think I have ever had a negative experience with a muslim on my mission.
Then later we went to meet with a man named Kamil way out in
the south of the city, he lives in a hotel so it was kinda hard for us to find
him because we didn't expect him to live there. He is a full time sushi cook so
he lives there permanently. We talked for like 10 minutes then he basically
told us that he wasn't prepared to talk about religion at that moment (I guess
I wasn't really clear on the phone why we were going to meet) and so we left
and we will go back another time.
Then on Saturday we met with Maciej, he is super good. Still
reading the Book of Mormon and praying. He is progressing really well and
accepts everything we tell him really easily. It's kinda refreshing to have
somebody accept what we tell them. Then we had weekly planning session then
went tracting. The tracting was interesting because the building we were in had
like 10 people answer the door, and like 2 of them were foreigners. And another
one was the super old lady who didn't understand us, so she rang all her
neighbor's doorbells and they all came out into the stairwell and we talked to
all of them. Then we went ot the floor below and they kept talking about us for
like 5 minutes, it was super funny because we could totally hear them, they
weren't even trying to be quiet.
Church was really really good. We got new Hymnals! But only
10 so we had to share between all 36 people in church... The new hymnbooks are
sweet, and they even have "If you could hie to Kolob" and "Oh my
Father" so now we have to be prepared to answer people's questions about
Kolob and Heavenly Mothers.
We also had like 3 investigators in church. None of those
people are super progressing though, but it was nice to have people there. And
it lets the members know that we are actually doing stuff (the members actually
all like us a lot, and they know we are working hard). We had a great Sunday
School lesson by Marcin, and he shared his experience with coming back to
church after being inactive. It was super powerful, he wants to make big
changes in his life, which is what the Gospel is for.
I think that is pretty much everything, Love you!
-Elder Everett
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