Monday, November 26, 2012

Event manager needed


This week was packed with action and events, as I'd expected. All the things that happened could have easily been enough for two weeks. xD I feel a little overwhelmed with all the things. We had a specialized training on Tuesday with President Freestone. We also had interviews with him. Then we had many event in church, with various councils. The problem with being the missionaries assigned to the YSA (Young Single Adults) is that you have to deal with all their activities all the time on top of normal missionary work. xD On Saturday we also had a great service project in church for the YSA where we cleaned up the top floor of the building and got rid of ancient  artifacts (from 2003) and started putting up the wonderful Christmas decoration. It was a fabulous success.
Happy workers!!

Monday, November 19, 2012

Illness and Recovery


We've had a fairly good week. It wasn't quite how I had hoped. Sadly I came down with a real flu by Monday night and I was out of the game all of Tuesday. I ended up just sitting at home and staring at the clock for a major part of the day. But I'm glad to report that I made a full recovery and I'm now back, full of energy and up to no good. Elder Uhlig was a great help during that time. I was pretty much out for the count by the time we got home on Monday night. He was so good, he insisted that I go to bed immediately and he took care of everything like planning, nightly calls and co. The next day he was also a great sport when I announced that I didn't feel well at all and that I think I should stay home, making all his planning from the night before void.

The view from Nafplio last week! Isn't it amazing?
We had some nice experiences this week which I loved and enjoyed. There were many learning opportunities this week. The Lord had His hand in my life again this week. As He always does. On Thursday I had an exchange with Elder Gibbons and we learned a lot from each other. But during the exchange we had a very interesting experience. We were just making ready to leave the church to go to his area when a man rang the doorbell and we went to great him. He's a refugee here from Iran and he had seen the church a few times in passing. We brought him back up to the 3rd floor and called Elder Coleman (he'd asked for the man in charge xD). Well, we sat down and we had what turned out to be a great lesson with this man.. xD We invited him to church and gave him a Book of Mormon in his language. And guess what! He came to church on Sunday! That was a real cool miracle. I hope the best for him and his future...

When I was sick we had an example of real Christian service by Elders Neville and Bernskov. They agreed to do an exchange with us (at expense of their time) to help us to teach one of our investigators that has a baptismal date. I think it was a big sacrifice for them but I'm very touched and grateful that they did that for us. It was a sign of love and support from them. It was also very helpful for us.

We had a great Sunday in church. We got the chance to serve before church started by helping a Nigerian member, who'd come from Georgia (the country) here and had been looking for the church for a few months, to come to church and find the building. He was super happy to be there. We also got to serve again when our Elder's quorum president turned to me right after sacrament meeting and asked if we could give the Priesthood class because he hadn't had the chance to read the manual. I answered "yes" without hesitation. Elder Uhlig and I then scrambled to get a manual and read what we were going to teach in less that forty minutes xD... The lesson went well. We had great input from the participants and we all learned together.

I'm looking forward to next week! We've got training, baptismal interviews and a whole new investigator coming up soon "in the footsteps of Paul"...

Canada (middle) with his friend Daniel and my companion Elder Uhlig.

Don't forget to drop a comment if you like this week's update.

Baptism!


Sorry for not updating last week. I ran out of time because of circumstances beyond my control. So here goes last week's update:

It was a great week. We had a great time with teaching and helping Canada progress towards baptism. And YES he got baptized and confirmed. (Canada is on the right in the pic and Karim (his friend who baptized him).)
Karim (middle left) baptized Canada (middle right)

Monday, November 5, 2012

Miracles upon Miracles



We've been blessed in many ways this week. We had a steady week of great lessons with great people. We were able to continue to teach the people we found last week in our efforts and the efforts of the members to help us. I have to say that the whole week was a great blessing. We managed to teach 20 lessons and get two new baptismal dates and one of our investigators (Canada) passed his interview for baptism! If those are not blessing of the Lord and His hand in my life I don't know what is....

Elder Uhlig studying Greek! It looks difficult :)