Isten szeret minket

Sziasztok mindenki!

To start off, thank you all for the birthday wishes!  Stringham Elder's birthday was just a day after mine, so we had a super fun district party with the two Sisters on P-Day, during which we ate German Chocolate cake, played instruments, and swallowed live gold fish. The week before last, we started to get really creative in our efforts to find people. We baked cookies and brought them to everyone in our building, and through this found 2 new people to teach! (though one of them did shut us down pretty hard... he said "I respect you, but this is all ridiculous" after we told him to pray about whether or not the Book of Mormon is the word of God.) We're still going back to teach him, though! We visited the gypsy family again (the one who Seamons Elder called to repentance), and they had a few Hungarian violins that they let me play. Apparently they belonged to his father who was a "prímás": I looked this word up in the dictionary I carry with me and it said "primate". He then asked me if I knew any prímás music when he gave me a violin to play.. I was a little confused as to what primate music exactly is. But when we returned to our apartment later that evening, I looked the word up in a more comprehensive Magyar dictionary and it said that prímás either means primate or the leader of a gypsy band!  Life started to make a bit more sense.

This past week our efforts have really been paying off and we found 5 new people to teach! That we found them through the grace of God, I have no doubt.  Our first month here in Nyíregyháza have been pretty slow as far as teachings go, but the work is really start to pick up. They are all from ages 16 to 84, and though their levels of interest vary, they keep wanting to set up with us!  While we were teaching two of them, I was explaining the Book of Mormon, and they were both kind of laughing but trying to stay composed. I was a little confused, but I kept explaining. Also I felt this moisture on my forehead that I kept rubbing away. Then Stringham Elder turned to me and said, "your face is leaking." I turned to look in the mirror, and it turns out that I had been smearing BLOOD all over my nose/cheek. It was a horrendous sight! Though slightly embarrassing, everything turned out alright and they invited us back! (though maybe only for their own amusement).

On Thursday, we were going around town, visiting the homes of some church members.  We stopped by this one lady's house, Hoffmann Margit, who I've never met, but she has a very tragic (though amusing) story. She popped her head out her window when we rang the doorbell at the gate, and her eyes were huge and red and swollen. She started immediately telling us about how life is so hard, and she's always sick because she has 15 cats but she is ALLERGIC TO THEM! She told us how she didn't always have 15 cats, but one day they started coming into her kitchen and she doesn't have the heart to send them out into winter's cold. She says that she would go to the hospital to get an infusion but it wouldn't do any good because she would have to go home again and her house is literally infested with cats. She said that every time she walks into the kitchen, she dies. She is really depressed because all her cats are literally killing her. She told us she would pay anyone 40,000 forint to come and take away just one of the cats. She said that when she's at home with her cats, she just wishes, and I quote, that "a bomb would drop on this city and end all this misery!"

Earlier this week, I was wondering why it is that God loves me; what have I ever done to deserve His love. On Friday night, we were on splits (I was with Robinson Elder who typically serves in Miskolc), and we were inviting one of the people we are teaching to be baptized. I found myself bearing testimony of God's love for this man, and at that moment I felt the Spirit so strongly. I knew in that moment that God does really love me, and that fact was definitely confirmed, but I still didn't really know why. The next day, I was talking to Schrad Nővér, and she said to me, "I could quote a million scriptures, and I could give you a million answers to why God loves you, but what I think you need to do is look inside yourself, not for the qualities you don't like about yourself, but the qualities that make you like yourself. Those are why God loves you, because if nothing else, He can use those qualities to bless His other children, of whom we're absolutely sure He loves unconditionally." I took this to heart and it WORKED. God is able to look past our imperfections to the things that we are good at, the things that are useful in building up His kingdom on the earth. Those are the reasons why we are special to Him, why, at least in part, He loves us.

Much Love!

Adam

This is Kornél, the man whose rain gutter I knocked over!

This is the ceiling that we helped Kornél install!

Stringham Elder and I got zip up Hungarian bibles for our birthdays from a Greek Orthodox book store.

The Nagy Templom

Robinson Elder and I on splits! He's an awesome missionary!