Elder Ure Serves Hungary: "Miracle Week"

This week has been a crazy and amazing and just awesome week as a missionary.

I will start off by talking about fast Sunday and how I had the best food I have had in Hungary yet. We had a program with a cute little old lady that is my new Hungarian crush because she is just adorable. When we walked in it was around 2 and we had about another hour of fasting because we started the day before but..... she had made a huge meal for us so we got lucky and got to eat early. (I hope a 23 hour fast is acceptable this month.) She fed us soup and bread and it just was the best thing I have tasted in a long time. I showed her pictures of our family and she said that my dad was a cutie and that I looked like him... So props to you dad, you have an old Hungarian lady hitting on you. I will talk more about this cute old lady later in my email.

This week I got a new record of shut downs in the fastest amount of time yet! I was streeting and I walked up to one person and they said no really fast then another and then another. I got shut down by three people in less then 1 minute. It was a new record and I was pretty proud that I just kept going because the only thing one lady said to me was “I don’t speak English” in Hungarian when I was speaking Hungarian or at least thought I was.

The cool thing about the language this week was what happened in Sacrament meeting. I was sitting there trying to pay attention because church is the hardest because they talk really fast and use weird terms but out of nowhere I hear my name said. The branch President was bearing his testimony and started talking about me! He talked about how my language ability’s are coming along really well and that the prayer I gave in the morning meeting about the sacrament was really amazing to him. It was super cool to hear someone say that about me and gave me a boost of confidence that’s for sure!

Also a really cool thing that happened this week was I had a dream and a little part of it was in Hungarian. I didn’t understand what the person said to me but it was in Hungarian so that is better than nothing. I loved it and was so pumped when I woke up.

Now on to the first miracle that happened this week. We started talking to a lady on a street a month ago that would have been an amazing investigator but just wasn’t interested so we just gave her a Book of Mormon and went on our way. Well, the other day we where tracting and were doing this building that we thought no one even lived in but finally someone answered, so people did live there. The way tracting works in Hungary is you first have to get into the building which is a tall building of apartments usually so you have to press the bell or csengo is how you say it in Hungarian and talk to someone through a microphone and see if they will let you in and then you can knock on people’s doors. Well I did the next csengo and I usually don’t use this approach because it doesn’t work and usually makes people mad but I said hello we are Mormon missionaries and today we are talking about Jesus Christ can we come in? The lady on the other end just laughed and let us in so I was super surprised and kinda blown away but when we got to her door she was waiting outside and it was the same lady we had talked to a month earlier! She said a really cool qoute about how if you don’t go to the mountain meaning us the mountain will come to you. So she let us in and we were able to talk to her about the Book of Mormon and her beliefs. She said she had read the first part of the Book and was thinking about us and then we were there! It was an amazing experience and I know that God led us to her again so that we could teach her.

Now back to the old lady story. This week I read the talk about what lack I yet. I prayed to know how I can be better and how I can become a better missionary. I received a really cool answer and it was shown to me through out the week. One of the things that I received was to not think about myself. To be more selfless, so this week I have been working on that and I had an amazing experience with this lady. The day we tracted into her I was having a hard time and was frustrated and just tired and was thinking about myself. We got let in and started talking to this woman, and she told us that her parents where killed in WW2 when she was 13 and had 11 siblings. I was hit with such a feeling of guilt and just shame that how could I think of my life as hard when other people go through so much more. I learned that I really do need to stop thinking about myself and that other people have it so much worse than me and that’s why I am here to help them. It was a really amazing answer to my prayer.

The last story I will share this week is about the family we met a long time ago that is inactive. She had a son that went to jail because of a branch president in the branch a long time ago but that is a really long story an I don’t really understand it, but the main point is she is having a hard time forgiving and that’s what I want to talk about. We shared a message with her and were able to get her to the point where she said she needs to forgive and to come back to church. She said a prayer and during the prayer started to bawl and was just crying about how hard it was to forgive and how she needs strength. What I want to talk about is how forgiveness is one of the biggest parts of this gospel. Jesus Christ forgives, we need to forgive, and we can be forgiven. It is such a hard thing to do for us to forgive someone that has hurt us or wronged us in a way that we feel like we could never forgive or they don’t deserve to be forgiven but when we do forgive, that is when we can truly be forgiven of our own sins. It is like a cycle. If we forgive, God will forgive us of our sins. I want to bear my testimony that God can help us have the strength to forgive even when it is so hard. He can give us the blessing of his love and spirit when we fully let go of past things and take a step forward and move on and not dwell on them anymore. It is an amazing feeling to forgive and you can feel the Savior’s love rush over you because he is forgiving you at the same time!

I love you all so much and know that my Redeemer lives. Have a great week.

Love

Elder Ure