Scary old guy......but it's all good now! ~Phew!

~A little shot of their kitchen in Tusla. Pretty cool!~

2/25/2013

Hey family!

So....Brianne goes on a mission, and somehow I lose the title of favorite missionary....I think you are counting your chickens before they hatch. I could still end up being the favorite ;).

That's cool about the shoes. Isn't it crazy? The type of stuff we're prompted to do. I guess it just shows how much Heavenly Father cares about us...to help us with the little things. You have an all powerful being, and somehow, He still cares enough to help you find a good pair of shoes.....it's pretty nuts.

The Winters (the senior couple) are humanitarian missionaries, so they had their supervisors from Germany here. They spoke in Church. Because we had 3 people in church that needed to be translated for,  I got sucked into translating. It wasn't too big of a deal. I've conducted meetings before, but it was the first time I ever translated in church. Well, we had 2 people show up along with 8 missionaries (Valentino and his nonmember cousin). Well, during the lesson, a drain in the floor started spitting up a little water. It was just a puddle, but then something happened, and it flooded the room. We ended early. 45-minute church is so nice. I'm spoiled over here. We borrowed a squeegee from the bar next-door and got the water out. We are trying to get the landlord to send a plumber today. We'll see. We stopped by the church on the way here (the library) and it hadn't flooded anymore. So, so far, so good.

Tell the Gardners hello.

So...about the safety factor.......Last week, it would've been scary, but it's all good now....A guy threatened to slit our throats, but we saw him again and he said that everything is fine now and he'll love us like his children....Okay, so more details....We met a guy... some old   guy named S or something like that. Well we ran into him everyday for like a week. He then told us that we'd better get out of town, or "slides finger across throat". We didn't take it seriously because he's just a crazy old guy.   We saw him again, and everything is fine now. So, no worries. It's totally safe besides that. Which is good, because "becoming a Christian martyr while a Mormon missionary in Bosnia" isn't one of the things on my bucket-list.

This week was good. We had good English classes. Nothing out of the ordinary. We found 3 new investigators. One is a single old lady named A, her husband died in '96. We had a good lesson about eternal families and that the Book of Mormon tells us what we need to do in order to secure an eternal family. The other two investigators are a senior lady   and her  grandson. They were super cool and said that they would read the Book of Mormon. We've got hope they will.

We had interviews with President Rowe this week. A thing to cross of the bucket list: having an interview with your mission president with call to prayer going off outside at the same time. The interview was really cool. We talked about the best way to work here. He mentioned that because of the culture, finding investigators really shouldn't be very tough, which has proved to be true so far. He said that hard part would be getting over the walls of traditions and people's fear of change. He suggested using Alma 32 and telling people that they just need a particle of a desire, and then they can find truth from there. We just have to help people have enough courage to experiment.

I'm trying to think of more to tell you. I think that that's probably about it for this week. I'm doing well. It's not really ever easy, but it's good. Time seems to be going by faster and faster. It's really starting to be scary fast. I'm over halfway done and that blows my mind. I hope you all have great weeks!

Love,

P.J.

P.s. the Tanners (the ones who were called to be mission president) got their official call this week. They aren't English speaking after all. They got called to open up the Philippines Cibu east mission (one of the new 58 missions). I wish them luck. It's kind of sad. We were all hoping it would be somewhere in the U.S. so we could all road-trip and visit, but oh well.