This mission has changed my life...

Feb. 13, 2017

Well this week was super awesome. I had some pretty life changing experiences that I feel like I will remember for the rest of my life. 

I will start at the beginning of the week with splits. On Tuesday we went to Tatabánya for splits and I got to serve with Elder Leavitt again. He is super cool and I like serving with him a lot. He is a genius and always teaches me random facts that just blow your mind. It was one of the best splits I have ever been on. Before we left that morning I prayed that we would be able to find someone that would be baptized in the future during our split. I really wanted to try and bring a miracle with me to the elders there and all I thought to do was to pray for it so I did. While I was there we were able to get let into a home and teach an amazing restoration lesson to a young man that is very open to religion and I was able to teach from a bean bag on the floor so that’s a cool experience that I will never forget. I am preaching the gospel in comfort that’s for sure. It was great. Then while we were walking on the street we decided to stop a man and we had a really great conversation with him about our church and we found out that he had met with missionaries a long time ago but the relationship was somehow lost and he wanted to find the missionaries so bad that he almost got on a plane and flew to Utah to find the Mormons. When I heard this I about lost my mind and was just stunned. We got his phone number and I hope those elders will be meeting with him soon. It was a really great split and I am very grateful for the miracles that I was able to see and for the power of a prayer. It was super, super cool.

After that we had interviews with President Szabadkai, which was super great. I always like talking to him and just being able to hear the advice and help that he can give. It was a good interview. Sadly he didn’t drop any hints if I will be leaving or not but I think I will be. I have been here for a super long time but we will see next Tuesday! 

We also saw a crazy miracle in our own work too this week. This week we received a call from a man that has been learning about us ever since he saw us on the street one day and he decided to give us a call so we could meet and so that he could learn more. This never happens so we were super excited to meet this guy so we set up to meet before English class and we were able to meet with him and taught one of the best lessons we have ever been able to teach. It was amazing and the spirit was there and we just went through the restoration and just had a really good talk and answered his questions. We will be meeting with him again this week and I think he has some serious potential. We are super excited!

This week I was humbled a ton and I was able to look inside myself and realize that there are some things that I need to work on before I can try to help others work on themselves. We met with an investigator that has a really hard situation and it was always hard for me to go to his house because of how the house smelt and looked and just the atmosphere. When we went this time we talked to him and he really opened up and told us about his life and how if he cleans and does the things that it would take to make himself and his house cleaner he and his son would starve because they do not have the money to clean to the point they would like to. They were really sensitive about it and I could tell they wished they could invite us into a big very clean house but they just don’t have the money. I for sure repented super hard because I felt super bad after. The things you learn on a mission I feel like you can’t learn anywhere else. I am really grateful for that experience and I am going to try to be better to not judge and to love more.

This week we were able to also meet with our old lady investigator that is just the cutest. I love her. She just won’t do anything, which is the hard part.... so we are working on that. She promised she would read the Book of Mormon everyday and try to see the difference in her life and then she is going to come to church this week so I am excited. I once again had to dodge her when she tried to kiss me on the cheek. Ha-ha I was talking about how I new I would understand a older woman’s prayer before I came on my mission and I told her that she was that woman and she flipped! She was so happy she just couldn’t help but come after me with her bright pink lip-sticked lips ha-ha. It was a good time. 

This week was the awesome week of Roland’s baptism!! It was really great and went super super well. Elder Gentry did a really great job when he baptized him and then on Sunday when he gave him the spirit. It was super cool because I trained him and now he is speaking Hungarian and doing all this cool stuff I am just proud of him. It was really cool to see. The baptism went really well and I was able to give a talk about the spirit, which went super well I think. I talked way longer than I meant to...  I think I went for like 25 minutes or something I didn’t even realize it. I think it went all right and I was happy about it. Roland was super happy and he is making friends with kids in the ward so I think he is on the right track. 

I would like to finish with a really cool and but kind of sad story. This week we were streeting and started talking to this guy on the street. It was super awesome because he was black and he immediately started talking in English and come to find out he speaks no Hungarian at all but has now lived here for a year. He was a super cool guy and even invited us to go clubbing with him... had to turn that down! But we had a really good talk and got his phone number. The next day we called him and he said we could come over and talk to him. So we went over to his house and we got to know him... I was so humbled hearing about his life and anything that I thought was hard about my life flew out the window. This guy has been through it all. He lost his parents when he was a kid and his older brother and the last thing his mom told him to do was to just run, to leave where he lived and to just go and make a new life. So he ran away and made his way to Hungary and started a life here. He is Muslim but doesn’t really practice his religion obviously because it would be hard to do that here in Hungary. We talked to him about the plan of salvation and the Book of Mormon and at the end of the conversation we asked him to pray to know if it was true. He bowed his head after we explained how we usually pray and he just sat in silence. We waited and when he looked up he seemed so light and just smiled and said.. It’s good. It was really cool and made me realize that. The gospel is good. Life is good. We have so many reasons to be happy we just need to be the people to decide that. It was a really life changing experience for me and I am so grateful for it. I know that anyone can find happiness through the gospel and I know that life is hard but for some, it’s way harder, so we need to be super grateful because you never know what the person next to you is going through.

I love serving here. It has changed my life. 

Elder Ure

Feb. 6, 2017

This week is snowed again and it was a blessing from above. I was so happy.

Last p-day we met with Roland and his mom. It was the second time that we have been able to meet with his mom and we were able to bring Mecséri Oliver and his son. They are like the coolest people in the ward and they helped a ton to teach him more about baptism. We talked about the baptismal covenant and she was really interested. She said that we could continue to talk to her about the gospel. Roland is doing really well and he is ready for his baptism. He is a very amazing person and I am so grateful to have been able to teach him. He will be the first person that God has put on my path and I have been able to find that I will be able to see be baptized. I am so grateful that I have been given this opportunity and have been able to teach him the gospel. The only problem is that Roland has started to learn words from the internet and he only decided to learn swear words in English so we will be teaching and he will spit out swear words... so we are working on that. Ha-ha 

Also this week one of the most frustrating things happened and I was so mad... We were going to look up this German guy that said that we could come back and share a message with him so we walk up to his door and this old couple is carrying a bunch of random stuff out of the door so we asked if we could help and they said well actually we don’t need the help here but we need it somewhere else and so I told them that we could go there and they agreed so we rode our bikes over there and we figured out that they were helping move things for a German guy... the guy we were looking for. So we walk in and say hey we are the Mormon missionaries we saw that these old people needed help and we wanted to ask if we could help them move your things... note: this guy spoke n0 Hungarian and only spoke English and German. He turns around and sees that we are missionaries and is like no you are from the church we don’t want anything. And I was like we aren’t trying to give you anything we are trying to help you move your stuff and he was like just go away we don’t want anything to do with your church. So I am like getting heated because I don’t want to make these old people carry this guy’s stuff up 4 flights of stairs and it was a ton of stuff. So I was like okay look we just want to help these old people so they don’t have to walk up and down the stairs with all this heavy stuff and he was like. Leave.... I was like about to explode so I calmed myself down and just walked away and went back to the old lady and told her that he wouldn’t let us help and she was like... well if he wont let you help just help me and you wont have to say you were helping him ha-ha So we carried all the stuff up and just didn’t let him see us. So it was cool because the lady was really happy.

The next day we visited the cutest little family in our ward that has a young boy and two little twins. They fed us dinner, which was such a blessing, and then we shared a message. During the message I was sitting on the couch and the kids started out calm and then the sugar from the dinner hit and they went 0 to 100 so fast. They started jumping all over the place and pretty much used me as a jungle gym... it was great ha-ha I just sat there as these two 1 and a half year olds climbed all over me. One of them stopped and grabbed onto my arm and sat next to me while I talked and just laid her head on my arm... it was so cute I died. 

This week we also found a pretty crazy guy ha-ha. We some how set up a teaching with a random guy and he didn’t live where we thought he did and so we went searching for him and we couldn’t find him. We were standing in the middle of the road in a pretty sketch part of town and these kids walked up to us and started talking to us and one of them was like hey I am who you are looking for and we were like for real? So we start walking with him and he makes up this story that goes along with what we thought and right as we start asking him questions about how we met first he brakes and starts begging for money. So it was super sad but we had to leave and walk away and so we kept trying to find the real person and when we decided to give up we saw him walking across the street and he yelled at us and was like hey I am who you are looking for. So we go to his house and we started talking to him about the gospel and we got into the craziest teaching ever. This guy was getting to pumped up about our message that he would stand up and start singing and saying praises and all this crazy stuff. So he was super happy to hear about the gospel but we are not sure how legit he is because he has lived a crazy life and we don’t know how it will work out because he has done some bad stuff and had been on hardcore drugs so we will see but it was cool because he wanted to change his life around. So we are going back this week. 

Also this week we went on splits in Szombathely and it was super fun I went on splits with an Elder from Germany and it was a super good time. He speaks pretty good English and is a total stud. One of the funniest things happened though while we were tracting. We went into a building because a neni let us in and I was a couple of steps behind this elder and the neni and so they went into the elevator and the doors shut before I got in and it took off... So I was left by myself just laughing because I know this elder is just freaking out because he is a new missionary and he was along with a woman... So when it comes back down the doors open and his face is pure white and he just says.... I am so sorry... I just started laughing and told him it was totally fine but he totally thought he was going to get in a ton of trouble. It was really funny. 

This week in our own work we are still having a hard time meeting with people so we have been finding a lot. We have been doing look ups and calls and trying to get solid investigators that are willing to her our message. This week we had a couple miracles happen. One of them just happened yesterday on Sunday. Earlier in the week while we were tracting we found a younger man that let us into his home and we were able to talk to him about why we were here and shared a message with him and he said we could come back and he would introduce us to his roommates. So yesterday we went back and we were able to meet with 3 of his roommates and all of them wanted to learn more. One of them asked me to write my testimony in The Book of Mormon that I gave her and told us that she is going to read it and pray about it. It was a really amazing experience for me and I saw God’s hand in our work. We were able to set up a return appointment and we will be meeting with all of them next week. I know that God is preparing people for our message; we just have to work hard to find them. It was a super cool experience and I am pumped to meet with them again.

This week is Roland’s baptism and we are so excited. He is ready and it will be really great. All the members are helping a lot so it should turn out really great. 

I would like to finish with something I learned this week. Sometimes in the life we see people and we don’t know what they are going through. We don’t know what happened two minutes before you talked to that person and we don’t know what they have been through and that’s why it is never a good thing to judge someone even if they act in a bad way towards you. I learned to love those that reject you. And to try to understand where they are coming from and to help them from there side. I love you all so much have a great week.

Elder Ure

ps... I hit my 2/3 mark tomorrow.... crazy