June 24, 2013
Servus!
First of all, I forgot to say Happy
Father's Day to you Dad last week! I am sorry about that. Father's day is the
day after Mother's day here in Germany so I completely spaced on it last week.
I hope it went well though.
First of all, I know Mom might be
upset with me if I don't give her this update at the beginning so here it goes;
Wien is probably the hottest and most humid spot in our mission and on top of
that this week we had a huge heat wave come through. It was a huge adjustment
trying to go from rainy Stuttgart to smoldering Wien and I didn't react or
treat myself very well. On top of that at night it is still super humid and we
found out that the way my bunk bed is built and positioned (I sleep on the
bottom bed) it turns the area where I sleep into a hot box in a sense. Needless
to say it made it very hard to sleep at night and I had gone about 3 nights
this week with only 4 hours of sleep. With lack of sleep and the heat problems,
I started having some pretty bad migraines this week. BUT! Everything is ok
now. I got in touch with the mission nurse and President Miles and we got
things taken care of. The nurse had me stay inside and rest for a couple of
days and told me what I could do to take care of the heat problems. I have also
pulled my mattress out of my bunk bed and I just sleep on it on the floor and
that has helped me a lot at night. Today, I am back to perfect health, the heat
wave has died out, and it is actually raining today so everything is good. The
other Elder Smith who is my roommate, was also having some cold and allergy
problems and so we stayed home together for a couple of days while my
companion, Elder Smith and Elder Martin went out to the various appointments we
had. Again everything is well now. Since there is only so much resting or
cleaning or additional study you can do when you have been confined by the
nurse to stay in the apartment, and so roommate Elder Smith and I also found
another way to help us recover like arranging a couple of songs on the guitar
since he is a bass player for the jazz band at BYU and we have two guitars in
our apartment, among other things. However, things are back in order, all of us
are healthy and I am excited to be back out working again.
However, we do have some great
investigators that we are working with. There are three in particular that are
making a lot of progress. The first is Rebecca. She is Austrian and about 21
years old. She was referred by a friend of hers who is on a mission. Rebecca is
accepting everything very well. She was originally taught by the Wien 2 Elders
but she moved into our area about 4 days before I got to Wien. She has a
baptismal date for August 11 and as far as I am concerned she is perfectly
ready for it. I have not been able to actually have a lesson with her yet, but
Elder Smith and Martin said their appointment this week went great. I have met
her at church and she is very nice and humble. The second is Jan. He is from
Poland but has been living in Wien for the last 23 years. We met with him last
Tuesday and the appointment went really good. We found him our second day as a
companionship and so that was our first appointment and he seemed really opened
to everything and excited about the church. He went and started reading the
Book of Mormon in the park right after our appointment with him and says it's
brilliant. Our third investigator with progress is Thomas. He was a former
investigator that Elder Smith and his last companion got in contact with again.
He said he had been really trying to find the missionaries again, but didn't
have the right number. He currently has a baptismal date in July but it will
probably need to be pushed back because he can't meet with us to regularly and
there is still a lot we need to cover as well as help him overcome smoking, but
we have high hopes for him.
I am really excited to work with
this ward. They seem very motivated about missionary work and very willing to
help out and invite their own friends frequently to church. Our ward mission
leader was actually the Branch President in St. Pölten about 5 or 6 years ago
as I found out yesterday. This week we had an eating appointment at a members
named Sister Jelinek and she had gone through and invited about 6 of her
neighbors to come and listen to our message about the restoration before we all
ate and played games and it went over very well. They all enjoyed what we had
to say; none of them have time at the moment to spend to learn more, but they
all happily took a Book of Mormon for themselves. It was a really good example
of working well with the members.
We also had a fireside last night
for the stake missionaries, mission leaders (bishop, ward mission leader, ward
missionaries, etc) and anyone else who was interested where they unveiled the
new stake mission plan. The concept was actually very interesting; instead of
making some grand majestic plan with specific points, the main theme of the
plan was to invite, encourage, and remind members to pray every day for more
charity for mission work as well as for more opportunities. It was an idea that
President Miles had really been pushing for and the Wien stake decided to adopt
it. The theory is that if members are praying each day for these two things
then they will start making their own mission plans like taking their own initiative
to work with the missionaries. I think it iss simpl, but brilliant.
I think that will be it for this
week. I hope all goes well. I love you all.
Elder Bodily
Gott sei mit euch bis aufs
Wiedersehen
No comments:
Post a Comment