Hey everyone, how's your week been? So, as the subject suggests, my mission once again has a different name. as of the 15th, our mission is now the adriatic north mission, and the albanian mission is the adriatic south mission. So, I get to be one of a few people who had their mission change names twice while they were out, and i haven't even been here in croatia for half a year yet. For the more exciting news, Bosnia is now officially a part of our mission, and young proselyting missionaries will be sent there ˝in the near future˝, so probably in march when we have transfers, but we'll see. also, for the first time i think ever, every single country in europe is now open for missionary work!!! It's an exciting time to be a missionary in europe. things are changing. pretty soon the assumption that you can't baptize people in europe will disappear. In our mission alone, we had more new investigators last week than may of 2008, when there were 31 companionships, compared to the 22 we have now. We also are teaching more lessons than we have for years. also, in the last 6 months, we doubled the mission's baptisms from the whole year before that. and we're still very much on the up-rise. it's exciting to see these things happen.
Sunday was awesome. Jelena has been out of town, so we haven't seen her, which was a little disappointing, but we had 2 other investigators at church, both of which had never come before. One of the elders' investigators came too. He's a boy named Miro, who has been coming to english for a little while, but hasn't been really interested in learning about the church before, but for some reason something changed, and he's been praying and reading the book of mormon. For church, I gave a talk about baptism and Zoran gave a talk about the holy ghost, so it was awesome. it was the perfect first sunday to have investigators there for. after that, since we didn't have any of our teachers there, we just watched the restoration movie for second hour, which we just got a couple weeks ago dubbed in croatian. we also just got ˝finding faith in christ˝. it's awesome. those are our first movies ever in croatian, so it's really exciting. we had a couple that were subtitled just on a home program or something, but now we have some actually made for us. After the movie, President Bell, Sister Milius, Marijana, and Zoran bore their testimonies of the restoration. I couldn't think of something better for Andrea and Lea, our investigators there. for various reasons, neither one had really even had a lesson on the restoration, so that was a good introduction for them. Lea is a 15 yr old we've been teaching english, and i think she's mostly just fallen in love with the feel of the church and the people connected to it. we had one english lesson, and then we invited her to aktivnost, and then to church, both of which she came to. We've gotten permission from her parents to teach her english, and they know we teach spiritual thoughts with it, but i want to go teach them too so they know what their daughter's been learning and don't freak out that we've been brainwashing her or something. The only problem is she's here for school and her parents practically live in hungary. Also, this week, Andrea committed to stop smoking, which was awesome. She went from lots to 4 cigarettes in one day to 2 to 1. she's realized that everything she does, her daughter looks at and copies (she's 2 and adorable. her name is Emina). She knows what kind of life she wants for her daughter, and we're trying to help her see that she can have that in her own life too, and that that's the way to help her daughter have that life too. She said she wanted her daughter to get baptized, but said she was too old. We pulled out Nicodemus' conversation with Jesus and talked about it a little and told her to pray about it.
To sum things up, things are good and getting better. love you all. thanks for your prayers. God answers them.
love,
Sister Black
