Monday, September 29, 2014

Birds, Cauldrons and Impatient Trains

First of all, Happy Birthday Dad! I hope you enjoy the big day, it sounds like you have good plans.

So my new companion is Elder Gonzalez, he is awesome. Cuban dad, Hungarian mom, lived in Canada, so knows English, Spanish, Hungarian, and French. It's been good to have a fluent speaker out here, the ward loves him. We got off to a good start on our first day, when our train got back to Tatabánya I had trouble opening the doors (I accidentally opened the wrong side at first), and the train was running late so right after when I opened the right door the train started moving. Luckily we were able to jump off quickly while it was still going pretty slow, and avoided a 2 hour trip out to Györ.

This week was hard, I had to call everyone to set up appointments because Elder Gonzalez doesn't know them, which was a little difficult. We didn't end up having a lot of programs, a lot of people canceled or didn't show. We had a couple good ones though, and this next week is looking a lot better.

We did have a really good branch activity on Saturday. We hiked up to the Turul, the big bird statue, and cooked up a big cauldron of paprikas krumpli. It was super good and we had 3 investigators show up and interact a lot with our branch members. Elder Gonzalez also brought a chess set, I never knew how much Hungarians loved chess, that was a lot of fun.

We had a good district meeting yesterday on the importance of commitments, how we should be setting up the commitment before the lesson and planning the lesson to help them keep that commitment. I think that is something we could work on a lot, hopefully it will help our investigators progress better. I have to keep remembering that this is a big change and so I need to be patient with them. I have been getting better at being bold though, straight up telling them the truth, not trying to hide the hard stuff or avoid the difficult questions. It really makes things easier, here's the truth, if you read this book and pray you can know it too. It always comes back to the Book of Mormon and prayer.

Sorry no pictures this week, the computers here are very on and off on whether or not they accept my camera. Maybe next week.

Love you all!
Parkinson Elder