The Very Hungary Missionary

Hello everyone!

The work is going forward and onward, here in Sopron! This week has been great! Our finding efforts have increased and we have definitely found the fruits of our labors this week.
We have found many new people to teach and we will be meeting with them this week, to begin our teaching with them and we are pumped!

I have to share an interesting story about how we met one of our new investigators. This actually happened two weeks ago, but I forgot to write about it so I will write about it now! So we had just left the Senior Couple's house and was streeting home. The route that we take from our house to their house and vise-versa is always the same, but this one night, I decided to go a different way. We knew that it would lead to our apartment, so it's not like we were just walking in a different way, and hoping we'd get home, but as a matter of fact, we did know where we were and where we were going. On this particular root we ran into a honey-suckle bush. I never really knew what honey-suckle was. My companion took this time to educate me on what honey-suckle was and how you would go about getting it from out of these lovely blossums that were on this bush. We stood for a while as we gently picked a few blossums off of the bush, hoping that we could pull the stem right so that we could partake of that miniscule, but yummy drop of honey-suckle (?) Ha, I'm not sure if that's how you say that, but it sounds good to me (; Anyway, we had stayed there for a while, because you have to pull the bulb at the bottom of the blossum ever so gently so that the drop of honey-suckle comes out, but we kept on messing it up. I swear I went through about ten, and my companion went through another five. We were about to leave when a lady from the house that the honey-suckle bush stood in front of opened her window and started talking to us. At first, I was thinking "Oh no, she's going to yell at us for picking off her bush." Instead, she was asking us if we had ever tasted of honey-suckle before and then she asked which flowers to pick. The dead ones were brown, the almost dead ones were yellow and the live ones were white, so we told her that the white ones are the ones you want to pick and the ones you can extract the honey-suckle from. Then she said "Can we get together sometime and chat."Uh OF COURSE! You don't have to ask us twice! We learned about where she works, because right now she is taking care of her elderly mother and it's not convientent to meet at her house, but we are to visit her at work. Last week, we went to the place where she worked (so we thought) we sit down at this restraunt and ask her for and the waiter that was waiting on us just said "I don't know who you're talking about."We were a little bummed, because apparently she didn't work there. We ended up going back to her house on Friday and knocking on her door. Now this was around 1:45 PM and her mother answered the door, actually she just opened the window and we talked to her through the window, she said that her daughter was at work, but that she was to get off at two. We said thanks and said we'd drop by later, then we headed home. Then something awesome happened, we ran into her on our street! She actually recognized us, which is a miracle because if she wouldn't have recognized us, we definitely wouldn't have recognized her, but she came up to us and was so excited to see us. We told her that we stopped by her "workplace"to visit her, but that they didn't know who she was. She ended up correcting us and telling us that we went to the wrong place--oops. The amazing thing was that the route we took from her house back to our house wasn't very close to her work place (from where she was leaving to go back home) and it wouldn't have made sense that she take that route, if she was wanting to get home quickly. What I'm trying to say but failing to do so is that the route she took was definitely not the fastest way and it was only because Heavenly Father wanted us to see her so that we could get the location of her correct workplace and set up with her. Another thing that astounded me was her excitement to see us, she just was so happy and gave us hugs and kisses, yet she knows nothing about us other than we are robbers of her honey-suckle bush (; I can't wait to meet with her!

That's my story of the week. I hope all of you made it through the whole thing! (:

That same day, we actually ran into two other people on the street that we had gone to their house and they weren't home, but then ran into them on the street and went home with them and taught them.That day definitely strengthened my testimony that Heavenly Father knows me and knows the perfect timing so that his work can move forward. It just takes patience from our end.

Something else that was cool this week is that the Senior Missionaries who are in charge of Family History came to Sopron this week and gave us a really awesome presentation on Family History and Family Search. We talked about how to start Family History and the many many resources that you can use to find our family. I have never really been interested in family search, but my mom and dad have been, and they have collected many records from their ancestors regardinng their family. The elders and us actually went tabling (when we set up a table and have pamplets and fliers talking about our church) and while we were tabling we did some chalking (which is drawing on the sidewalk information or questions about our church that some people might want to know about). It was so fun and this week we did chalking about family history and tried to invite as many people as we could to come to our családikutátasi (Family Search) program. I took some pictures of my family tree that I wrote on the ground, but it was really fun and according to me, it was a very effective finding tool, because tons of people looked down and even though they gave us strange looks, once we started talking about what family history was and why it's important they took an interest to it. Even some of the members called us after we were done, later on in the day and was like "I saw your drawings on the ground!"So that was cool too.
 Familysearch.org is a great place where you can learn about your ancestors (It's free, too). I encourage all of you to try and spend a set amount of time each week learning about your family and ancestors, for it was because of them that you're here today, and they made great and mighty sacrifices for our behalfs (I don't think that's a word, sorry, my english is already slipping). Try to go and look up somebody in your family this week. That is a challenge (;

Lastly, I just wanted to share a little thought that I had this morning when I was studying. I was reading about commitments and how it is important that we, as missionaries extend commitments to those we teach. One of the main reasons for commitments is that we show our Faith and our willingness to follow Heavenly Father. We make a decision to change, and my companion shared an interesting quote that her father shared with her and the quote goes something like this "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." I thought about that quote for a while and I concluded that, it is so right. If we go throughout our whole entire lives just thinking about praying or planning on going to church, or intending to read the scriptures but don't actually do it, what good is it? It's not. I read in the scriptures today and no where could I find that it said that we would be judged according to "our intentions" or "times that we almost did..."but they say that we will be judged according to our works (Alma 41:3 and 1 Peter 1:17 plus a billion more sciptures). Work is a word of action. You have to be active when you do works, whether it be for yourself or if you're serving other people. It's important that we make a commitment today to follow the Savior's example and that when we stand come upon the bar of judgement that we won't see a film of our thoughts, but instead of our works that we performed to build up the Kingdom God.

God be with you 'til we meet again.

Whitaker Nővér