A Needle in a Haystack

A big hello from Prague!

It is truly beautiful here! Everything is going good. We are in a new area so we haven't been teaching so much, but we did teach one lesson this week! It was way cool because on one of the many full days of kontakting that we had, we stopped in a park for a water break after 4 hours of just straight rejection and I said to Sister Bateman why can't we just find someone who is at least curious about us. Someone who wonders why we are here and why out of the 1.3 billion people in Prague we stopped them? Sister Bateman just being the patient, persistant person that she is said, I don't know. And we kept walking. Then we kept walking and kontakting and after wandering around and getting lost for like 30 minutes we found this guy. It was an empty street and we just stopped him and told him what we tell everyone, we want to talk about God and he asked, Why did you stop me, where are you from, why are you walking down this street? It was so crazy. I didn't even know how to answer. We just said, We don't know, God just wants us to be. So we switched numbers and met with him. He is so nice. HE SMILES SO BIG. That is actually the reason why he met with us I guess, he said that he felt good energy from us because people in the Czech Republic don't smile enough, but we smile all the time. He has some pretty weird ideas about God, so we don't know what to expect, but we are excited.

We have also had some cool experiences kontakting and finding people that have absolutely no interest in our message, but as soon as we are done we ask if there is service we can do for them. Their faces change after that. They are so much more happy and willing to talk to us when they find out we want to serve. My companion was way awesome in comp study she said that we needed to serve more and reminded me that Ammon didn't go to the king and say that he wanted to talk to him about God, first he said that he wanted to be his servant, and then he served him. We don't know what the secret is going to be to get investigators and open the Czech people's hearts, maybe it isn't such a secret but I know that as long I just keep going. That has been the biggest thing I have learned this week. KEEP GOING. Life is so unpredictable and hard and sometimes we wonder, why is this happening to me? I can't handle this, I wasn't prepared for this. Everyone else is seeing success, why can't I? But God has given us THIS life. Your life my life, it's ours. We just have to know and trust that God knows us and he knows what we need. I hope you can feel God's love for you, no matter what is going on right now. I know everyone is having a tough time but God really loves you and the only reason why I tell you that is because I know he loves me! And if he loves me and I love you, well love is just everywhere, that's all.

Keep the faith

S laskou

Sestra Bruno

Belief in a Higher Power

AHOJ MUJ MILOVANY RODINY,

My week was pretty crazy. We are still on the hunt for investigators so we did A LOT of kontakting this week. Like A LOT. Every time we are on the tram, we talk to someone. Everytime we are walking home from our apartment, we are talking to someone. But nobody is biting. 

WHY DOESN'T ANYONE BELIEVE IN GOD???? is what I would say if I was discouraged, but I'm not. Proto jsem tady. (that is why I am here) And that is what I keep telling people when we kontakt them and they don't believe in God. 

We have had some pretty cool miracles this week. While doing all this kontakting, we have actually had 2 lessons result from it. Sestra Woodworth does this really cool thing were she asks people if they have time while we are kontakting for us to teach them a lesson. Most of the time they don't, but they will at least give us their number, but sometimes they do! We taught 2 lessons this week with people that had time. One of them was a 20 year old boy who didn't believe in God, but did believe in a higher power. We told him God was his Heavenly Father and we talked about how he loves us and gave us the book of mormon. Then he asked if he could have a copy and we said of course, but neither one of us had one with us!!!! It was a serious missionary fail moment. I WAS SO MAD AT MYSELF. We made an appointment to meet him the next day and give him one, but when we called the next day he had already gone home for the summer (he is only studying in Brno, he isn't from Brno) but we said we would keep in kontakt with him and in 3 months when he gets home, the sister missionaries will be all over it. He just needs a little more preparing.

Then we had another kontakt in the park with a man who had just called his boss and lied that he was going to the doctor when really he just wanted to spend an hour in the park. We were scared because at first he wasn't interested in talking about God, but we won him over with our charm... haha not really... and he invited us to sit down next to him in the park and ended up asking us what we teach people about our church. He had awesome questions. He didn't understand why God was important, he thought there was just a higher power and he didn't know really what happened when we died, or that we lived with God before. I guess he tried to be religious when he was younger but he never felt anything and he told us after we talked to him that he had learned a lot and felt different and that he was going to tell all his friends... BUT ALAS, he isn't from Brno either. He is only in Brno like 5 times a month, but maybe we will catch him the next time he is here. He just needs to be prepared too! 

I am definitely learning patience. hahaa

BUT we do have 2 investigators. One of them, Jana just turned 18 and she is getting baptized!!!! WE ARE SO HAPPY! But her parents don't know... Kind of a hot mes

 

The other is a 19 year old boy, Vojta who thinks he is so cool (and he kind of is) he works on motorcycles and has million friends and is having a hard time believing in God all the time because he thinks that sometimes God isn't there and sometimes God isn't fair. AND he hates when people tell him what to do... which makes commitments SO HARD because he doens't keep any of them!!! UGHHH But we love him so much. It's definitely tough

FUNNY/ SCARY story of the week:

 

Yesterday in our lesson with Vojta we read 3 Nephi 11 because we wanted to teach him about Jesus Christ and make sure that he felt that Jesus Christ was his Savior. We read the chapter and then we asked if he had questions. There is a verse in that chapter that says if you are not baptized you will be damned. And he said that that wasn't fair because his family/friends don't know about the gospel and they haven't been baptized and it's not fair that they should be damned, but we didn't realize that the word damned and lost were so close (ztraceny is lost and zatraceny is damned. The difference is 1 A!!!!) so we thought he was saying lost and we were really confused and couldn't answer the question and then we got home and realized what he was saying and we were so scared that we had just told him that he and his family were going to be damned because they weren't baptized. SERIOUSLY HOT MESS. Luckily he is meeting with us again on Wednesday so we can clear this up. We kind of tricked him into meeting with us again because I made him take my memory journal home with him because he is my first investigator that I ever taught in Czech and I wanted him to sign it. So he has to meet with us again to give it back. hahah. But IT was one of those moments were I was really sad I wasn't serving stateside or english speaking. I'm so embarrassed! 

I hope everyone is doing well

P.S. This Wednesday is the Sacred day of Bruno... weird huh? A member told me that on Sunday. They love that my name is Bruno and I am serving in Brno. 

I love you all so much

Sestra Bruno