well, this week has been pretty good. we beat all our weekly goals except for sacrament attendance. Either we are horrible at helping people understand why church is important, or... something. it's easier for people to commit to baptism than to attend a church service. i don't know why. if anyone has ideas for fixing that problem, i'm open to advice, because i'm out of ideas. or if someone wants to move here and buy a car and help drive people to church and never move away, that would be appreciated as well. well, here are the people we have on date for baptism: Andrea- I'm so excited she finally agreed to a date. and she's not living with her ex-boyfriend anymore, so that's a huge step. and i'm glad she's meeting with us more regularly now. I'm excited about her. Mirjana- Marijana's grandma. She's great. she doesn't understand 100% all of the concepts, so we'll have to re-teach some things like the plan of salvation and such a couple times, but she's committed to do everything she can to support this church because of all we've done for her family. Ivica- Marijana's brother. He just needs to stop drinking coffee and smoking. and we have to figure out how he can go to church because his job makes him work on sunday. The working on sundays will be the hardest part. His grandma's way excited about that though. She's been saying for the past couple weeks how much she wished Ivica would start caring about religion and coming closer to christ. We were having a lesson with mirjana, and he was passing by, so we asked him to sit and talk with us a bit. Marina- Her dad still doesn't want her to get baptized or go to church, so we'll need a miracle for her to be able to be baptized right now. and i have full faith she'll get that if she does everything she can to make this happen. the hard thing is that she's not putting this first right now, so we'll see. she still can definitely do it though. Petar- He's some guy that asked us for help with writing a letter in english, so after we helped him, we read a couple scriptures with him, and asked him to be baptized. he said sure, as long as he's not in america (he wants to get a job in america. we'll see if he gets it.) we're going to hand him off to the elders though. it'll make things easier.
I'm pretty excited about these. It's great, because the biggest reasons people have for not being baptized or interested are: I'm too old, I've been catholic too long, so i can't change now, and once in a blue moon, I'm muslim. but andrea's muslim, and mirjana's been very catholic for a very long time.
Elder Texeira is coming to our mission on thursday, so that should be cool.
Suzana got a job on the coast and is moving tomorrow. she says if her fiance doesn't change his mind about letting her get baptized by the time she gets back, she's moving out on her own. I'm pretty sure she'll get baptized this year, even if i'm not still in osijek when it happens.
We started teaching this man from india because we were eating lunch last week in his restaurant, and we started talking to him. We gave him an english book of mormon for now, until we can get him a hindi one. we went back on friday, and he was asking us tons of questions about how he would know if it was true and what happens after death and such. it was fun. usually people don't ask questions about things like that, things that actually are important questions to ask. it was nice. so now we're teaching an albanian, nigerian, and an indian man. i think that's pretty much all the foreigners in the city, besides serbians or bosnians. osijek's not very diverse.
We met with Vera again. I asked her this week if she believes that Jesus is her savior. she seemed really offended that i would even ask, but then basically said that Jesus was a great example of how to live, but He wasn't any different than muhammed or buddha or any other religious figure. It's really sad, because she's only been baptized a little over a year, and already she's rejected most of the things she accepted as truth then.
Well, have an awesome week. love you guys!
No comments:
Post a Comment