two weeks worth of emails...

MAY 23, 2016

PLAN OF SALVATION

So this week I will start with last weeks’ P-day activity. We went to an adventure park! This is where they hook you up in harnesses and you do zip lines and rope courses in the trees! It was super cool and super cheap so we had a really good time. I think it was really cheap because no one really supervised you so you could pretty much do whatever you wanted and it was kinda sketchy but we had a lot of fun and only one of us smacked into a tree... that being my companion. He now has a big bruise on his leg but is doing well.

This next story might be a little T.M.I but it was still funny and I have to tell it just for the phrase. So this week I literally had ‘ants in my pants’. I was waiting for a train and I started to feel little stings around my belly button but I couldn’t check because I was in public so I just took the pain until I got on the train and went to the bathroom. Well come to find out I had an ant stuck in my waist band of my pants and it was just biting or stinging me like crazy so I killed it and that was that. Sorry for the random story I just thought it was funny.

Okay now that ‘missionary Elder Ure’ is back I will tell you guys about the sport day we had in Debrecen. It is a town close to ours and we got invited to go and got permission so we got to play sports all day on Saturday. There was a race and a soccer game and we brought one of the Football guys with us so we had a football and tossed that around so it was really fun and a big turn out! They had a lot of church things set out and we had a big meeting and talked about our church with all the investigators there. It was really fun! I have a very nice watch tan line from it. 

This week we found another inactive member that we met with and we brought him to church with us and everyone was so happy that he was there. The work here is a lot with inactive members, which is a good thing! We are working hard to get them to come to church on their own and have them realize the blessings that come from it! We also sadly got dropped by one of our investigators because all he wants is to learn English and we told him that isn’t what we do as missionaries so he said he didn’t want to meet so that was sad but we are moving forward!

Well it is now blazing hot here in Hungary and I am probably going to die in the summer. The other day we were tracting and this guy opened the door and was shirtless and right off the bat just started swearing at us with awful language. I didn’t understand a lot of it because I only know bad words from hearing them on the street.... sadly, but he was a very mean person and all we wanted to do was talk about how God loves him. So that was a very interesting experience. We didn’t even say what we were doing before he just started yelling at us. I guess it just wasn’t his time.

The other day I was fed more than I have ever been fed on my mission I am pretty sure. We got fed in the morning, which was a yummy Romanian dish that some lady made for us. I had never met the lady but it was the mom of one of the members so it was really nice of her. After, we went to a different teaching and they surprised us with food so we had to eat again and it was soup luckily so it just kinda went in the cracks. Then that night we went to help a member move some things and at the end he pulled out all this meat and right when I saw it I knew it was going to be rough. He said it was his own pig that they killed and have all the meat. IT WAS SO HARD TO EAT. It was super fatty and had a really weird taste and then he also gave us canned pig something. To this day I still don’t know what it was. Elder Lee and I put it down as fast as we could and we are both still alive so it was a success. People are very kind with having us eat their pig and for an American kid who has never had a piece of bacon that is ALL fat with little meat, it was a little hard. Mission experiences are the best. 

I would like to finish with a little experience that I taught myself this week. It was super cool. We were teaching a program about the plan of Salvation and I was bearing my testimony and the words that came out of my mouth taught me something that I had not realized before. The plan of salvation is perfect. We all have the opportunity to live with our families forever. All we have to do is try our best to follow Jesus Christ and we will receive all that God can give to us. It is easy. It is not hard. All we have to do is try and God will make up for the rest. I know that we all will be surprised how many people will be in the Celestial Kingdom. All of us should have a plan to end up there. If you don’t, start now. It surprised me when I said the words that all of us will be able to live in happiness if all we do is try. So MY advice for this week is just try. If you fall get up and try again because God sees you trying, and he will bless you for that. I love Gods plan. I know if we all try a little harder, the closer we will come to eternal happiness; and that is a very worthy goal to have.

Sok szeretettel,

Elder Ure 

MAY 17, 2016

THE COOLEST NIGHT ON MY MISSION SO FAR…

This week’s email is going to be full of a lot of non-missionary things that just were awesome and super fun and also some really cool experiences that happened this week. I will start with last week’s P-day.

Last week we went to one of the sisters’ investigator’s work place and he ends up being a bee keeper so he gets us all bee hats and we went and looked at all the bees and how he gets the honey!! It was super cool and I didn’t get stung so that was a plus! He even gave us free fresh honey!! 

Then the second crazy thing that I did this week was go watch an American football game in the middle of Hungary. The team that I helped during the winter had a game this week and they invited me so I went and watched. They even recruited some football players from America so I got to talk to some cool guys from down south when I was there. It felt like I was right back in high school on a Friday not getting ready to play. It was so fun but wow do I miss being out on the field! They lost but it went into over time and made the game super fun to watch! We made friends with one of the American guys and we might see him around later. He was really cool and even met a girl out here and is getting married!

This week I have been sick and it has been raining all week long and when you have no investigators, all you do is go tracting out in the rain so it was a bad combination but I am doing a lot better now. I had a cool thing happen while tracting this week that I want to talk about. It is very small but I saw Gods hand in his work through me. So before we went tracting, I prayed that I would have someone sent to me that I could share this message with, and went out. We worked for a couple hours and nothing happened. No one wanted to talk and we were tired and Elder Lee wanted a drink so we stopped in this store and he got a drink. The whole time I had a feeling to talk to the cash register person and when the time came I didn’t and we started to walk out but I about got punched in the face by the spirit to go back and talk to her, so I turned around and with my embarrassed and tired and sweaty face smiled and told her who we are. She ended up taking a Book of Mormon and I said we would come back and explain it so I learned that when you feel the spirit follow it no matter what situation you are in. And sometimes the spirit will give your kidney a punch to the heart and make you do it! haha.

Another really amazing miracle happened this week that was one of the coolest success on my mission yet- We have been working with this inactive family that hasn’t gone to church in over ten years and this week we got them to come back to church for the first time. They are an old couple that was baptized a long time ago and when they walked into the church building with us one of the old ladies in the ward that knew them from when they came to church just started bawling and was saying how happy she was to see them and she said something really interesting. She said that they were home. Church truly is home. For everyone. We all can feel God’s love in his house. It was a really amazing experience and I was so happy to see them there and be able to sit with them.

Now on to probably the coolest experience I have ever had on my mission. This week we went on splits to Miskolc and it was great and we worked hard and we went to go home and got on the train and right when we got on the train a younger girl saw us and started to talk to us. She first just started talking about the Book of Mormon but it quickly turned to a very deep conversation about the gospel. She had really amazing questions and was so interested in finding the truth. She had some things that were hard for her to believe or that she didn’t understand but she was still just so interested and it was really cool. She ends up having to get of the train abruptly, so we had to quickly bear testimony and give her the Book Of Mormon. So she gets off and we realize that it is really late and we are almost going to be late to get back home. So we ask someone where the stop for our city is and he says to us that we were supposed to switch trains 5 stops ago and get on a different train that goes to Nyiregyhaza..... So we hurry and ask for help and find that we have to wait a little more. Get off really fast and run to a new train which will take us back to the train station that we needed to switch trains and we will be able to catch the last train of the night. So when we get to the stop we hurry and run to get tickets and one of the train workers that helped us sees us and he runs over and tells us if we get tickets we will miss the train so he tells us to get on the train and he will deal with it. So we get on the train and start heading back and the really nice train worker got us tickets that were half price and we only had to pay a tiny bit. It was a miracle. We also looked on a map at where we just were and we found out that we were on the border of Hungary and Slovakia... Far far away from home. So we are heading back to where we came from and it is now really late and we are far past our bed time and the only ones on this train so we start looking out the window and it was the most peaceful and happy I thing I have ever felt in my life. It felt like God just said ‘I love you’ right to me in that moment. I had so many answers to prays answered on that train ride home and it was beautiful to just look out into the night with the moon light lighting up the countryside and to just look at Hungary. We made it home safely and it ended up being the coolest night on my mission because we got to into preaching the Word of God. It was such a cool experience. The coolest part was the train station that we had to wait for the next train at was the word for lucky in Hungarian..... So it was meant to be.

I know that God works in mysterious ways and can do anything through normal people. Don’t think just because you have no special calling or because you have made mistakes that you can’t be guided by God because I know you can. I love you all so much and I love my Father In Heaven.

Love Elder Ure 

I like bushes..and Endure it Well

I don’t have a lot of time this week sorry!! It will be a quick one!

So this week I am going to start off with the funniest story you all will ever hear. 

This week we went shopping and we ride our bikes everywhere so on the way home I had a massive bag of food full of milk and yogurt and all sorts of things and my arm got tired of holding it on one side so I decided to go no hands on my bike to switch the bag to the other side and I ended up clipping my left leg and it knocks me straight into a massive bush and I go down hard! I land on my bag of food and milk and yogurt and everything explodes all over me and I am just laying on the ground about dead and covered in food. What made it ever better is a Hungarian guy drives up and yells something at me and he said some Hungarian saying that I didn’t understand because it was a “Hungarian saying” that didn’t make sense but he ended up being a really nice guy and helped me clean myself off. I rode away with only a couple scratches and a really bad dead leg but other than that, I was watched out for so that was super cool.

Also a tracting update of this week, is we found a dog that when it stands on its back legs was taller than me, a hawk tied to a pole in someone’s backyard, and a crow for a door bell. It was a crazy week of tracting but it all went well!

The main thing I would like to talk about this week was a program that we had with a new lady that we found a while back and has just been really busy until this week. She is such a nice lady and we found her through tracting. When we went over there she wanted us to speak formally her in Hungarian the whole program out of respect for us and formalizing is the hardest thing to do in Hungarian so that made the experience even better. The first reason why this program was probably the best one I have ever had on my mission is because she was the first person that actually seemed interested in our message and asked questions and wanted to know more. It felt so good to be able to teach, have her ask questions, and then ask to know more. I was able to talk a lot and to use my Hungarian and it is just a great feeling when a Hungarian doesn’t care that I am awful at speaking but they listen and help you say things and are still wanting to hear more because the message is so important. She is so cool and would be the best Mormon ever but she can’t meet for a month and I will be gone by then so that is kinda sad but I am so happy that missionaries will be meeting with her.

In the city I am in.... and have been in for my whole mission I have never really had a lot of good missionary work. I have not had a lot of investigators, not a lot of success, and a lot of rejection and failure. I learned something really important the other day from being here for so long. 

Sometimes we pray for something to change or something to work out or for it to just get easier or for us to be able to just work something out and nothing ends up working out. We are praying and having faith and trying to grow that faith but seeing no success and it’s really hard and we all have felt times when we just ask..... Why is this happening? Why cant this be easier? Why cant I just get one simple little answer? Well the thing that I learned is about enduring. I learned that if we endure hard times well, we will see the blessings later. It might not be in this life, it might not be immediate but they will come. We will learn why it had to happen how it did and will be able to see how we grew and why Heavenly Father gave us these challenges.

So my message for this week is to just Endure it well. I Know I will see the good that I am doing here one day even if that means it is in heaven when I meet someone that later changed their life because of a smile from my missionary face. I promise to you all that everything can be endured and with the Savior we will be able to make it to the end and look back and say thank you. Say thank you that we had to go through the hard to become the people we are. I love my Savior and I love my challenges. Missions are hard, but I would never want it any other way. I love growing and I love being out here and I cant wait to meet the people that I helped. 

Endure it well.

Elder Ure

Handing out books

This week has been... well jam-packed and at the same time so full of nothing.

This week we realized that we have almost not investigators and if we did, we dropped them all because they are just wasting our time. It was really hard to do but they were not willing to act on the things we were teaching.

This week I have not been walking around like a old man with a broken back! I got foot inserts and they seem to be helping so that is great news. 

This week we had a massive miracle while tracting in a place called Oros. We rang a door and a guy answered and started talking English to me because he could tell I wasn’t Hungarian and said that he was a pro basketball player and has played on teams with Mormons before. He was super cool and said to come back sometime and maybe we can meet, so maybe this week I will be ‘ballin’ with a real B baller. Then the very next door we rang and a woman came out and started talking English to me again!! She was a English teacher and invited us in and said for us to talk to her children about Jesus in English! It was super funny but we went in and taught about the Book Of Mormon in English. It is really weird teaching in English for me now. I randomly put in Hungarian words and I sound like a fool. The mom and daughter then came to English class later that week and we are meeting with them on Friday. Pray for them to not just be intrested in English but also to be interested in the Gospel!! There name is the toth family! 

The place we went tracting this week was so cool. Oros is the name of the town and it is really nice. The houses are huge and we are going to go back out there a lot this week!

This week was zone training and we went up to Miskolc again. We got new B.O.M and got the challenge to read the whole book and to mark all the times it uses Jesus’ names, his teachings, his attributes,  and his words. It is going to be really cool and we are supposed to finish by August! I am excited and I am almost already to 2 Nephi!

We also went tracting with a recent convert this week. Remember the old lady that got baptized a while back? Well, she wanted to do some missionary work and wanted to see how it was so we took her with us! It was absolutely hilarious and sad at the same time and then towards the end we had some great success! When she would knock on a door all she would say is can we share a message out of the Book Of Mormon with you. Not even explain who we were or what we were doing. So she got a lot of doors slammed in her face and she was very surprised and said she did not think it was like this and was that hard to talk to people. It was sad but after we went streeting and I helped her talk to people... a fluent Hungarain needing help talking to someone... never thought I would see that happen. Anyway, we ended up giving out two books and she did a great job! She would always choose old people to talk to and when you talk to old people in Hungarian you have to formalize them and formalizing is so hard. It is even harder when there are two old people and those are the only people she wanted to talk to so I got a lot of good practice from that!

At the End of this week we were couting our numbers and realized that we gave out 17 books this week. That is a ton for this area and I was super pumped about it. Hopefully we will get some interested people from all those books!

Also this week I got fogyi which is Hungarian ice cream and it is the best ice cream I have ever had in my life. I love it and have to control myself while walking down the street because the ice cream stands are everywhere and they are so cheap. It’s seriously 80 cents for a massive ice cream cone. Such a temptation. 

Like I said earlier, we had to drop some people this week and it was super hard. We also had some people block our number and not want to meet with us so that was hard but we are going to work really hard this next week and try to find some new people. The work is great out here if I just think of the people that are getting the knowledge of the gospel and hopefully later they will fully accept its teachings. I love this gospel and I am grateful to be serving the Lord.

Love Elder Ure