December 2, 2013
Servus!
I hope you all had a wonderful week and Thanksgiving! Last
Monday for P day we had all the Missionaries in Wien plus a few from outside
cities come together for Thanksgiving at our YSA center. I also had the chance
to go back to St Pölten because the Bxxx family had invited me back when we had
Stake conference. President Miles said it was ok because the nonmember dad had
invited me and he said it would be a good missionary opportunity. We celebrated
Thanksgiving with them (they don't have it in Austria, but the Bxxxx wanted to
celebrate it anyways and so did the St. Pölten Elders. It was way fun and really good to see my old
city again.
Cxxxx is doing just as well as ever. She is really busy
right now and it's hard for her to meet, but because of the new policy in our
mission we are allowed to stay in contact with investigators through email now
and send them links from Mormon messages and lds.org. So we sent her one
of the new Bible videos during the week and she told me on Sunday she went
through later and watched almost all of the New Testament videos and really
enjoyed them. If she doesn't get baptized before I go home I feel it won't be
long after that.
On Sunday we also had an investigator, Axxx, who we had been
teaching a lot, but she had gone to the hospital for awhile and wanted to take
some time to recooperate. Well, she showed up at church yesterday for Sacrament
Meeting and she really enjoyed it. We will meet with her later in the week, but
it was really good to see she was doing well and still excited to learn.
We have the new elders in our ward all settled in now, too.
Elder Mohn and Elder Talbert are doing well and it will be great to have them
in the ward. Their first night here we had a meeting with our ward mission
leader to figure out how best to divide up the area and investigators. It has
also been nice because Elder Fletcher has still been getting pretty sick now
and again, so if needed we can do exchanges and still get work in our area
taken care of.
We had a cool experience with a family in our ward this
week. We ate with this family called the Sxxxxx which is an older couple and
they have family that are not members. They have a grandson that lives with
them who doesn't tend to like to come out when guests are around and has been
having some struggles as of late concerning depression. On Saturday we were
invited over and the grandson, about 20 years of age, was asked to help prepare lunch. I got to talk
to him a little and then I noticed as I passed his room that he had a guitar,
and so I asked him about that. Apparently he loves playing guitar and I was
able to talk with him about that and about some bands that he really liked. Then
we got to play together a little bit. Then his grandmother had the idea that we
should do a guitar number for our ward Christmas party and the grandson said
that he wouldn't mind depending on whether he has time with work or not. So
later this week we are going to head back over and put together an arrangement
of a Christmas piece to see if we can do it for the ward Christmas party.
This Christmas I imagine will be a lot different than last
year. A number of members came up to me after church and said they wanted to
make sure they had me over for Christmas before I go home and so we already
have 5 invites for families to visit and spend time with between the few days
around Christmas. It was really touching and I am way excited for it.
Something I have been doing this last week which has been a
really spiritual experience is that I have been reading through my journal and
taking notes of the more spiritual experiences. When I am done I am going to
buy another journal and rewrite some of these experiences (because some of them
span over days or weeks or months) into good solid entries and make them my
very own small plates.
I hope those involved with the Book of Mormon challenge are
doing well. I will be done by the end of this week, but you still have 38 days
left as Elder Mohn consistently reminds me, (he keeps track of how much time I
have left. I believe he is trunky for
me).
I love you all and I hope you have a great week!
Elder Bodily
Gott sei
mit euch bis aufs Wiedersehen
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