First Week in Eger

This has been a busy week. I will have plenty to do this transfer here in Eger. We have a very small branch here, the branch President is a senior missionary, Elder Bailey (I served with the Baileys in Miskolc, now there are here to help out the branch), and I am the second counseler. The Baileys are in Romania right now because they also do auditing around easter Europe, and I still haven't met with the first counseler. On Sunday we had 13 people at church, I conducted, helped bless the sacrament, and gave a 25 minute talk. One of the sisters who just got here gave another long talk, played a musical number on the violin, and taught Sunday school. My goal for my time here in Eger is to get the branch up and going more so that the members are carrying the wait more by themselves. I am also hoping to work a lot with the inactive members this transfer, we have a lot, apparently a ton of people went inactive about a year back, so we are hoping to meet with as many of them as possible and get them back. The members I have met so far are great though.

My companion here is awesome, Elder Egan (funny because it sounds like Igen, Hungarian for yes). he has been here for 5 weeks so far, was just getting trained by Elder Hall, who Tom played basketball against back in high school. (Note to Tom - I think he told me to say hi to you from him my first day in the country but I forgot, so hi). He is great, loves to work. We don't have a lot of investigators here either so we are hoping to change that.

Eger is a beautiful city though, super European.

We had an awesome experience on the street last night, we met with a young guy from America, he is religious, knows the Bible and we had a super awesome talk. He had a super good definition of how grace and works, works isn't want saves us, only Christ does that, works is just a natural consequence of what we do because we are in awe of what Christ did for us. Super cool guy. We had a hard time explaining to him why our message is important though, because he doesn't really see a need for a church. We told him we'd try to formulate a better answer for him and meet up later this week, after we left I had one of those I really need to read the scriptures more moments.

I also just finished the Book of Mormon in Hungarian! I made it a goal to get it done by my year in the country mark, and finished a few days early. That book is true!

I'm out of time, but life is going great here! I love you all!

Elder Parkinson