Week 5 in C Bud

Ahoj! Can't believe it's already week 6 of the transfer. That is crazy. After this week there are only 3 weeks left! I don't know where the time goes. Well this week was ridiculous, as usual. I don't think I'll ever have a "normal" week in CBud haha. We have a new mission president! President Irwin called and said goodbye on Friday, which was nice, but sad. We have training this week on Thursday so we will get to meet President McConkie. I'm a little apprehensive about it, just because I don't know what to expect, what things he will change. So that will be interesting. I'm hoping we get to meet his family. I felt like this week we worked really hard, but not on proselyting stuff, which is frustrating. It was all things that needed to be done, but I felt like they didn't contribute to me helping others come unto Christ, you know? We cleaned and cleaned our apartment (still not done, but almost) and cooked a ton of stuff for the branch bbq that we had this morning and district lunch yesterday, and our phone broke, so we wasted half a day trying to figure out if we could fix it and then deleting all the numbers off the replacement and putting all our numbers into that one so we could get ahold of people. I was really glad that we've been on top of the records--the only numbers we lost were people in our English class, not investigators or members. And I spent most of my language study this week translating the talk I gave yesterday in sacrament, so I didn't get to work on my language level either. (there are three levels, and when you finish each you get a certificate at the next training--I'm so close to being done with the first one). We've been working out like crazy too, so both of us are pretty exhausted. oh yeah and we had to walk home for an hour from an inactive member's yesterday, because buses are dumb and don't come very often on weekends. So yeah, this week has been a bit of a blur--I wish I could sleep for a couple days, but oh well, c'est la vie. I can sleep in a year and a couple weeks, right? We did actually get to watch the training, Elder Hansen got permission for us to watch it at the church. I loved it, it was really good and definitely inspiring. It made me really want to be such a good member missionary when I get home. But it was a little hard to watch as well because it was the ideal, and we are so so far from it here. We had 3 members (out of our active 8), 2 investigators and 1 potential at church yesterday, along with us missionaries. (My talk was on the Gospel of Christ...and the member's talk was supposed to be on oppostion--except he talked about Satan, and Kolob and Egypt and black magic instead...gah.) I would absolutely love to work with a ward, but we are the ward. The branch bbq that we put on this morning had 4 members, 2 of the Elders investigators, and 3 of our potentials (we haven't taught them anything yet). It was a lot of fun, but it's hard to balance running the branch and finding people to teach too. I did really like that Elder Nelson said in the training that "there is no line of distinction between those who have never heard the gospel and those who have fallen away" to the Lord. That made me feel a lot better about all of the less-active work we are doing. We are finally making progress with that--we teach 4 of them regularly, and another 6 have said we can start teaching them, out of the 30 I think we've tried to get ahold of. So that was really good. We taught a new less active yesterday, and phew when we got out of that lesson, let's just say I finally felt like a real missionary. She told us (all in Czech) that she believes there is no devil or hell, that she can progress better without the church, that she believes in reincarnation, that she has faith and so she doesn't need church, that we need to read in the Book of Mormon, cause we're young, but she's old and already knows it...etc, etc. So after we waded through all of that (I was praying so hard to know what to say, because she just wanted to argue, and Sister Hicken didn't really understand most of what was going on). Finally I asked her why she let us come visit in the first place. It was really neat, because the Spirit was able to work on her. She paused, was quiet, and said I don't know. And then she basically said that she feels guilty for not coming to church, and that she doesn't want to be an "odpadlik" (I don't think there is a literal translation for that, it sort of means renegade or apostate, odpadlictvi means apostacy). I was so grateful that we were able to show her enough love for her to finally open up. She was telling me that she makes costumes for some school group, and is the only one who talks to them about God, so she doesn't have time for church because she helps them. So I pulled out Mosiah 2:17 and pointed out that when she serves them, she is serving God--so she is doing something right. That was inspiration right there. Then she had a complete change of heart and agreed to start reading in the Book of Mormon again, even though she had just refused a few minutes before. After the lesson she asked how many people come to church now, so I told her that around 15 is the most we've had, and she was shocked. She kept repeating, I don't want to be an odpadlik, that would mean I've lost my faith, that's so sad that so many people have fallen away. (there used to be 40 attending and 100 on the rolls.) So that was a really neat experience. Unfortunately she's going to be in Tabor for the next 2 months so we can't visit her, but hopefully she won't lose the progress in the meantime. I want to call and check up on her in a couple weeks. Let's see, other things...We only had one person at English this week, Viktor, who is an English teacher, so his questions are always really specific (this week he asked what the section of the library is called where you can't check out books, only look at them, took me a day or two to remember reference haha cause it's been so long since i've been in a English library!). He's a really strong Catholic. But, it was really cool, cause at the end of the lesson where we usually do a spiritual thought, he asked us what our favorite scriptures are. So we ended up sharing favorite scriptures and having a really neat discussion about faith. And he came to the bbq this morning! So we think he might be a little more curious about the Book of Mormon than he will admit. I offered to give him one, and he said he'd think about it. So we'll see where that goes. Also, during the broadcast we had a pretty cool experience too. The background is that I had been feeling like we should call formers (past investigators) from the area book. so we did that, called almost every single one, and got one appointment out of the whole book. So it ended up being during the time we watched the broadcast, because we didn't know about it when we scheduled it. So we reluctantly paused it, went downstairs to wait, even though he probably wouldn't show up. So we waited for 10 minutes past the appointment, and sure enough he didn't come. But we decided to wait for 5 more mins just in case, and a guy stopped to look at our window display and actually walked in to talk to us (that has never happened before). Turns out he is a priest in a different church, but was curious about ours. So we gave him a building tour and our card, and he said he'd look at our website. I think that was important--even if I never know what comes of it, because so many unexpected things happened for us to be downstairs with the door open at the exact time that he walked by. Well that is about it. We couldn't meet with Jarda this week, but he read! It made me so happy. His wife said it would be the first book he's ever read, so I was a little worried about that. And he wants to come to English tomorrow. And the Tuckovi's 8 year old Anezka actually keeps her commitments, which was exciting. She's reading in her scriptures, not every day, but hey she's 8, and no one else in her family does it, as far as we know. She's so cool. Today's her birthday, so I guess she's 9 now, we gave her cookies :) We are going to ask President for permission to invite her to walk with us to church, because she told Sister Smith last transfer that she misses church but it's hard when her parents don't go. love you all so so much, say hi to all the family for me Sestra Cooper