Hey Everyone! I hope your week was fantastic! Things are going great here in Osijek. We've been working really hard and learning lots. Sister Moody is a great missionary, and I'm learning lots from her. Guess what! have another baptismal date this week! Kristina Bronzović is about 23 and she's very sincere and wants to do what God wants her to. She accepted to work towards being baptized on the 21st of April. The biggest challenge right now is church attendance. She lives in a selo [village] about half an hour away, so she hasn't come. We talked about it a bit last time, and she said she'd try to come, but wasn't very committed. we still haven't met her family because she was meeting for english before, and she was meeting with a friend of hers, and I thought she lived much farther away and was only here for school during the week, not living with her family, but that was just a miscommunication mixed with just remembering the wrong person. anyways, I want to focus on that next. I think if her family knows more what's going on, she'll be more likely to come to church, and hopefully her family will accept the gospel too.
We're sort of at a stuck point with Iris right now. She's started to give up and go back to where she was before to believing that we can't help her and she won't receive answers. It's annoying because she was so close, and she's started to fall back and stop trying to get the answers she wants. She wants to believe what we're teaching her, but she's just given up that she can believe what seems to her like a fairytale.
We found a lot of way cool potentials this week. On tuesday, we found 7, which is my record for the day, and only 2 were people we thought probably wouldn't actually let us back or wouldn't be home when we came. unfortunately, none of them at all have let us back, and all the lessons we set up with them fell through, but we're still trying with the ones who haven't completely rejected us yet.
On wednesday, we went to zone conference. it was elder bell and sister moody's first time in serbia, so that was fun. I got on the tram to head to the bus station in the morning, and I just happened to sit in front of my neighbor, but i didn't recognize her. I just started talking to her, and it became apparent she knew me better than I knew her. You'd think after 6 months of living here I'd at least recognize my neighbors. That was a bit embarrassing. anyways, we had a great conversation, and she said we could come over and share more about her church. Zone conference was awesome. We talked a lot about ˝finding on the way˝, and I was glad I'd contacted my neighbor on the way there. We also talked a lot about teaching by the spirit and asking inspired questions. It was great. also, we had blue fanta as always, which you can't get anywhere except serbia. and bosnia i think. not sure.
for aktivnost, Zoran taught us to make pizza. It was the best pizza I've ever had in Croatia. I still have to get the crust recipe.
On Saturday, we contacted a cool couple who were evangelical/pentecostal-ish pastor type people from Đakovo. We had a good conversation with them, but it didn't really go anywhere. oh well. We had Seminary about David and Goliath and the rest of 1 Sam. It was pretty good. we had a good talk about sustaining leaders. It's hard to respect a branch president that's only a few years older than you.
On Sunday I gave my first non-written out talk in Croatian. Elder Bell told me on Friday night, so i didn't have all that much time to prepare, and Sunday morning I woke up to a text saying not to forget about daylight savings time, and that it was actually 7:30, not 6:30. It was nice to have our hour taken out of awake time, not sleeping time, but it meant I had an hour less to work on my talk. It was ok though. I was surprisingly able to talk a whole 20 minutes. Marijana, Zoran, and Marijana's grandma were the only people there. It was a bit disappointing, but part of that might have had to do with DST. I didn't even know until that morning. weird how it didn't match up with in america. Sister Moody had to lose 2 hours, one in america, and one here.
Anyways, this week was good, and next will be better. Love you all!
Sestra Black
ps. if i ever get sent to Bosnia and I have to get new Cyrillic nametags, I'm going to try to see if they'll let me have it say Sestra Crna (just literally sister black) or Sestra Crnković (the last name here that Black as a last name would translate to). because they don't have a character that matches up with the a in black anyways. which one should i go for? all theoretical though, because I might never go there, and they probably won't let me do it anyways. but it's worth a try)
