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