30 Nov 2015

 He actually plays right outside our chapel on this street! He does it for money, and he's acutally CRAZY good. I gave him 5 Złoty, but I need Elder Berlin to hold me back because I want to give him everything I have each time.

That's a dog friend I made.

And the usual plate for Sam on Thanksgiving

Guys. I ate a orange.

A whole entire orange.

That and the fact that I got a haircut all by myself should be reason enough to consider this mission a success.

Yeah, with Piotr and Małgorzata definetley was something special, and I don't expect that to happen every lesson, but those two are really cool. They were at Thanksgiving with us, and just everyhting about them is great! And I do keep a journal and have written in it every night except three. I don't know what happened, because one day I wrote the date according to the date of the previous day, and I realized that it was off. No one knows where those days went. They just disappeared. 

Thanksgiving was awesome! Definitely a "banquet of universal proportions" as Elder Cutting calls it. It was really fun, and no one really ate the corn bread we made, so I was able to eat just about the entire batch in the following days. Very nice. We didn't do a lot otherwise because Elder Berlin spent the entire day cooking. He really likes cooking. So I did some area book work, and did some other studying that I have to do as a new missionary. 

We do take trams and busses everywhere. The city's not too big, so trams usually get us wherever we want. When we go to other cities, though, we take trains. The city we always go to for conferences and the like is Poznań, which is about a two hour train ride from where we live.

Pretty much the entire day is contacting on the streets, then going out tracting at like 4.00, because people put their children to bed here at like 6.00. It's ridiculous. Probably because it's as dark as night around 5.00 here. But that means in the Summer it doesn't get dark until 10.00 or so. We don't really do anything with the Sisters, and everyone is too unimaginative to do anything that isn't street contacting or tracting. Any Ideas? I would really like some. 

Touristy things would be nice for P-Day. Today we went to the tallest building in Szczecin, and looked around there, and that was nice, but we haven't done anything else that's fun. We definitely have time, but Elder Berlin likes taking about 3 hours to do email:) No plans to buy boots. Should I have plans to buy boots?

We have districty meeting every week on Tuesdays. We had a training meeting for district leaders last month, and we have zone conference on Friday. The district meetings are alright. They've never really been anything special, though. 

If Elder Berlin were to leave, I'd be able to get to the Chapel, home, and the stores pretty confidantly, but nothing else. He knows everything and usually forgets that I haven't been here for a year like he has. And yeah, on December 20th or somewhere around there Elder Berlin will have lived in Szczecin for a full year. President Edgren does that sometimes. There's been a couple of missionaries who are in the same city for the vast majority of their missions. I'm not sure how I would feel if that was me.  I'm not sure I would like that, but he really likes it, because he can see the growth that has happened over time.

Our apartment is part of a big building, yeah. It's got a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and study room. The kitchen is pretty big, and has all the parts that a kitchen should have, so that's nice, but the overall size of the apartment is smaller than most of the other ones, they say, but that's not a real problem, we're never in it, anyway. I've never met the people around us, but apparently they hate it when we jumprope, so we don't do that.

No iPads or plans for them.

We can watch mormon.org videos if we want, but probably only on P-days because we're not really doing work if we're watching those.

I do e-mail both Caleb and John! No other missionaries, though. But they're pretty consistant, and seem like they're not dying out in the world. Which is good.

AND SPIRITUAL THOUGHT TIME!

We were teaching a man- Grzegorz (oh, by the way, in Poland everyone is named either Grzegorz, Piotr, Mariusz, Mateusz, or Tomasz. Ask around. They're all that exist.) And we had brought up Alma 32, the chapter about faith, and later on he asked us where our evidence was for this being true. And then it hit me- the verse where Alma says "faith is the evidence of things hoped for and not seen". At least according to Alma, Faith isn't hoping for things that aren't seen. That's hoping. Faith is the evidence of those things that are hoped for. Those things not seen being God, Christ, and everything they've done for us. So my faith, your faith, and the faith of every member of the chruch is the evidence. If you want proof of God, you listen to us. Because we know. And if our faith isn't enough for you, then nothing will be enough. Because there is nothing else that is true, solid evidence.

A pretty normal week this was. But just the overall feel of it was good. And fast. It's interesting how quickly it's going...

I LOVE YOU!!!

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