Spirit Helps in Overcoming Trials

Hey fam.

We had a great week this week. We saw another baptism this past week in our branch. The Elders are really killing it finding people, they have another baptism this week too. WAY AWESOME.

I played the piano for it and I was TERRIBLE, but it's okay, I'm over it. One of the members who just got back from his mission said that we were really lucky because we learn humility in this mission. It's definitely true. I have truly been humbled. I have never felt so spiritually uplifted and stupid all at the same time. hahaha

I have really been working on my faith this week. With God, with myself and with the people. Sometimes faith in your investigators is the hardest thing because you don't have control over them and you have to just hope that they feel the spirit and will come again! It's really hard to have complete trust in God but when you do, you see miracles.

We had the most amazing lesson on faith and repentance with one of our investigators Radek. His family is Catholic, his wife and his son, but he has so many questions. Things don't make sense to him and when we told him we were going to try to help him with his questions he was really interested. We had one of the members of the branch presidency who has a similar story, his wife and children were Catholic and he was too, hardcore, but when he started meeting with the missionaries and getting answers to his questions he knew this was the true church. It was an amazing lesson. I wish I could have tape recorded it so I could watch it over and over again... Even though almost everything I said in Czech was wrong and they had to correct me, the spirit was strong. I know that even if we had recorded it, it wouldn't be the same. The spirit really makes all the difference. I hope you all will strive to feel the spirit sometime this week. It will really help with any trials you have been going through.

Gen---Good luck with the baby this week! I'll be praying.

Michael--- study up on PMG. You'll be glad you did

Everyone else--- I love you all!

Have a good week

s laskou 

Sestra Bruno

Weird Stuff

AHOJJJJJJ

Sometimes it is hard being a missionary when all this crazy historic stuff is happening because I feel like I do not have a clue what is going on.

I heard that elders can wear khakis now?

I also heard that they are opening an all sisters area in Columbia? weird weird and weird

This week was really good. We found a girl named Felina from Ecuador. She is awesome. GUESS WHAT. Her mom was baptized 3 years ago, but she moved here 4 years ago so she knows all about the missionaries but she wasn't there to get taught. It was so amazing because she prayed at the end of our 2nd lesson and she said that she knew that she met us for a reason and that she was really going to try to figure out why. I already love her. She reminds me of Desi sort of. hahahah she is the best. After the lesson S. Woodworth and I just said that we would go through a transfer like this one every time if it meant we could find someone like her every time. I am excited. She still has a lot of concerns but as far as I know, she is ready.

My new mission president is so amazing. He told us about the miracles that we can see on our mission if all we do is tell people our testimony. All we have to say is we know God lives and Jesus Christ is our savior and the Holy Ghost testifies. That's all. Nothing else matters. He is way awesome. I cant wait to see the cool stuff that happens while he is the president. And his family is sooooo awesome. Love them already.

As for this week, I am working on faith. I thought that I came into the mission having so much and knowing so much but I am realizing I still have so much to learn. If you have a chance you should read what the Bible dictionary has to say about having faith. I love when things are explained so simply. Sometimes I think I try to make things really complicated but I am figuring out that the most beautiful part about missionary work is when you can explain a principle of the gospel, in whatever language, with the Holy Ghost present, and have someone understand. Those moments really are miracles. 

I am excited to see what this week brings.

s laskou

Sestra Bruno

Keeping Missionaries in Our Prayers

What´s up y´all?

I´m just chilling... IN THE CZECH REPUBLICK. 

That is still weird to me. 

This week was pretty good. Our District leader challenged us to give out baptismal dates to everyone we were teaching and we did and... nothing. People have a really hard time with commitment. Sister Woodworth and I are having a really hard time getting people to meet with us taky. We don´t really know why some people show up to appointments and others don´t but believe you me, we are going to find out. 

We have one really cool investigator that is so interested in finding truth. I am grateful for him because we finally have a PROGRESSING INVESTIGATOR!!!! Wohooooooo!!! My first... besides Jana who just got baptized. I could not be more excited for him. Even though he hasn´t accepted our invitation for baptism, he is really thinking about it. He is truly looking for the truth. It´s hard to meet with him though because he works so much but he is the nicest, kindest man ever. His name is Radek and he is the best! 

 

Please keep the missionaries in your prayers this week so that we can find more people! And just baptize the world hahaha, but really.

We finally watched that broadcast everyone was talking about. It was way cool. We just got a new mission president so we don´t really know if anything is changing or not, but we will find out soon I guess if anything is. He is so cool. He speaks Czech and he has the cutest family! He came to our branch and talked yesterday and everyone there already loves him! He is going to be great.

I heard from Adam Walker... He gets home in 3 months. WEIRD! 

I can´t believe Michael is endowed... that is even WEIRDER. Is he ready to go on his mish yet? I keep meeting really cool french people, mostly from Africa and Belgium but still he is going to love it.

Has Gen already moved? 

What else is going on?

I love you allllllllll

s laskou 

Sestra Bruno

What Will Missionaries Do in 20 Years: Farewell Mission President's Letter to Czech/Slavak Mission Parents

Dear Parents

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your wonderful children.  It has been a privilege for Sister Irwin and I to come to know your son/daughter as a disciple of Christ.  We have felt an instant love for them as soon as we learned of their call, but that love has grown and grown as we have shared experiences of this great work and come to know each other better.  We know that our missionaries arrived in good shape but we also know that if we did not send them home better than they arrived then we would have failed.  Three years ago it was made clear to us by the members of the Quorum of the Twelve that the way they would judge our success as a Mission President and Wife would not be by the number of baptisms we have or whether we create a Stake but rather by what our missionaries would be doing in twenty years time.  That is a wonderful illustration of how important our missionaries are to our leaders.  Our goal, therefore, has been to try to help each missionary grow.  We have tried to help them to not only establish the gospel in these great lands but also to establish the gospel in their own hearts.  We are anxious that they return to you – not having gone through a mission but rather having had the mission gone through them.  

For the rest of our lives we will have an interest in your missionary.  We love them dearly and we will miss them.

President and Sister McConkie will be a great asset to the work of this mission and they will bless the lives of the missionaries.  We know the McConkies and we love them and we know that the missionaries will love them too.

Thank you once again – we are full of admiration for you in all that you have done to have provided us with the best missionaries in the world.

Sincerely – David and Lyn Irwin

Barriers in Missionary Work

ahoj muje rodina. Jak se mate? Still hard at work here. I still can't believe I have almost been here for a whole month! This week was pretty sad because we had zone conference with President Irwin for the last time. I guess I only knew him for 3 weeks, but he was so awesome. I'm excited for President McConkie to come. He'll be awesome too! One thing I have realized this week is how truly blessed I am. I was born in America. I have a family who respects my free agency and I am a member of the only true church on the earth. FROM birth. God really trusted me to get work done. Yesterday after church we were talking to one of the Priest in our ward. His name is Jiři. I guess his family is originally from Russia and they became members because his father drove a taxi and he used to take missionaries to church. One day the missionaries talked to him about the church and the rest is history. He didn't talk much about his father, I guess something personal happened that he didn't want to talk about... but here is why I want to be more like Jiři. Every Sunday his family wakes up at 5 am and takes an hour bus to come to church. Church doesn't start until 9 am but the bus only goes at certain times so they wait for 3 hours just for church to start. Then when church is over they wait another 3 hours to be able to go home. He comes almost every week because he knows how much the ward needs priests to pass the sacrament. His sister isn't a member and missionaries usually don't visit them because they live so far away. Right now Jiři is 18 but he isn't in school anymore because he has to work and help his mother. (I asked him if he was going to serve a mission, that's how we found all this out) He said he wants to but he doesn't know if he will be able to. I guess he understands 5 different languages: Russian, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian and one more that I am forgetting. He is so smart. I just wanted to cry after hearing all this. So many people don't want to hear what we are teaching so it's kind of hard sometimes but now when I remember Jiri and his family and how much they love the church, it gives me hope. There are people here that are willing to sacrafice so much because they know what I know. They know the church is true. One of our investigators, MY FAVORITE ONE, Vojta pretty much dropped us yesterday because his friends found out he was taking the discussions. They told him that he would never get a girlfriend if he became religious and his friends and the thought of a future girlfriend matter a lot to him, just like any normal 19 year old boy. He is leaving for 3 weeks on vacation and while he is gone he said he is going to decide whether or not he will keep meeting with us. I was so sad. Partly because what his friends say is true. It's really hard to date and be a member of the church. You are treated a lot differently. And this doesn't just happen in the Czech Republic, it's everywhere. People just treat you differently and question your morals and you have to just care more about God, but he says he doesn't have enough faith in God yet to do that. We are meeting with him one more time before he leaves and I just hope that the spirit tells him to keep meeting with us, despite what his friends say. I wish I could tell him all about Jiri and what he goes through, but it's so hard to communicate in Czech. He never understands what I am trying to say. I don't know... I guess I'll let you know what happens there. Despite all this I know that there are so many miracles happening here. Anyone that does agree to meet with us is a miracle because there is really no other reason other than the spirit for them to come. I am so grateful that I have the HOLY GHOST. WE had 4 people at church this week. That was a serious miracle! I hope you are finding ways to be missionaries because... it's important!!!! I love you all and hope you are well WE HAVE A BAPTISM TODAY. I AM STOKED s laskou Sestra Bruno

Belief in a Higher Power

AHOJ MUJ MILOVANY RODINY,

My week was pretty crazy. We are still on the hunt for investigators so we did A LOT of kontakting this week. Like A LOT. Every time we are on the tram, we talk to someone. Everytime we are walking home from our apartment, we are talking to someone. But nobody is biting. 

WHY DOESN'T ANYONE BELIEVE IN GOD???? is what I would say if I was discouraged, but I'm not. Proto jsem tady. (that is why I am here) And that is what I keep telling people when we kontakt them and they don't believe in God. 

We have had some pretty cool miracles this week. While doing all this kontakting, we have actually had 2 lessons result from it. Sestra Woodworth does this really cool thing were she asks people if they have time while we are kontakting for us to teach them a lesson. Most of the time they don't, but they will at least give us their number, but sometimes they do! We taught 2 lessons this week with people that had time. One of them was a 20 year old boy who didn't believe in God, but did believe in a higher power. We told him God was his Heavenly Father and we talked about how he loves us and gave us the Book of Mormon. Then he asked if he could have a copy and we said of course, but neither one of us had one with us!!!! It was a serious missionary fail moment. I WAS SO MAD AT MYSELF. We made an appointment to meet him the next day and give him one, but when we called the next day he had already gone home for the summer (he is only studying in Brno, he isn't from Brno) but we said we would keep in kontakt with him and in 3 months when he gets home, the sister missionaries will be all over it. He just needs a little more preparing.

Then we had another kontakt in the park with a man who had just called his boss and lied that he was going to the doctor when really he just wanted to spend an hour in the park. We were scared because at first he wasn't interested in talking about God, but we won him over with our charm... haha not really... and he invited us to sit down next to him in the park and ended up asking us what we teach people about our church. He had awesome questions. He didn't understand why God was important, he thought there was just a higher power and he didn't know really what happened when we died, or that we lived with God before. I guess he tried to be religious when he was younger but he never felt anything and he told us after we talked to him that he had learned a lot and felt different and that he was going to tell all his friends... BUT ALAS, he isn't from Brno either. He is only in Brno like 5 times a month, but maybe we will catch him the next time he is here. He just needs to be prepared too! 

I am definitely learning patience. hahaa

BUT we do have 2 investigators. One of them, Jana just turned 18 and she is getting baptized!!!! WE ARE SO HAPPY! But her parents don't know... Kind of a hot mess.

 

The other is a 19 year old boy, Vojta who thinks he is so cool (and he kind of is) he works on motorcycles and has million friends and is having a hard time believing in God all the time because he thinks that sometimes God isn't there and sometimes God isn't fair. AND he hates when people tell him what to do... which makes commitments SO HARD because he doens't keep any of them!!! UGHHH But we love him so much. It's definitely tough

FUNNY/ SCARY story of the week:

Yesterday in our lesson with Vojta we read 3 Nephi 11 because we wanted to teach him about Jesus Christ and make sure that he felt that Jesus Christ was his Savior. We read the chapter and then we asked if he had questions. There is a verse in that chapter that says if you are not baptized you will be damned. And he said that that wasn't fair because his family/friends don't know about the gospel and they haven't been baptized and it's not fair that they should be damned, but we didn't realize that the word damned and lost were so close (ztraceny is lost and zatraceny is damned. The difference is 1 A!!!!) so we thought he was saying lost and we were really confused and couldn't answer the question and then we got home and realized what he was saying and we were so scared that we had just told him that he and his family were going to be damned because they weren't baptized. SERIOUSLY HOT MESS. Luckily he is meeting with us again on Wednesday so we can clear this up. We kind of tricked him into meeting with us again because I made him take my memory journal home with him because he is my first investigator that I ever taught in Czech and I wanted him to sign it. So he has to meet with us again to give it back. hahah. But IT was one of those moments were I was really sad I wasn't serving stateside or english speaking. I'm so embarrassed! 

I hope everyone is doing well

P.S. This Wednesday is the Sacred day of Bruno... weird huh? A member told me that on Sunday. They love that my name is Bruno and I am serving in Brno. 

I love you all so much

Sestra Bruno

Missionary's Secret Weapon

So let me tell you what:

IT has been RAINING SO MUCH! We thought it would never end! I guess there was flooding in Prague. It made me so grateful that I am in Brno because in Prague they had to shut down most of the trams and they are having a really hard time getting anywhere. A lot of our appointments were cancelled and we are just having a really tough time! Luckily the sun has finally come out this past week-end and let me tell you, people are a lot more receptive to hearing about how the gospel brings joy when the sun is shining! 

The language is definitely tricky tricky. I maybe, MAYBE understand every fifth word that people say. And I definitely understand when they tell us that they don't believe. But I'm not letting it slow me down. I'm trying to speak as much as I can and when they don't understand me, I just smile. I smile so much. I think it is because so few people do it here. They just need a friendly reminder. But they are so nice... and really try to help me practice my Czech. Me and Sister Woodworth made a goal that we were going to kontakt someone everytime we are on a tram. It is so hard going up to someone all by myself and trying to speak Czech to them. Sometimes they don't understand, and a lot of the time they aren't interested in talking to me about God, but whenever I ask if I can practice my Czech with them, they help me! My companion told me I am a secret weapon because it's hard for people to tell me no. I think it's because they all think I am a lost 12 year old and it's hard to say no to some one who is either smiling at you, or looks like they are lost. It's a great strategy though. I have slipped in a lot about the church that way. Mostly people just think I'm crazy, which is true... but then other times they listen to what we have to say. If anyone has any suggestions on how I can kontakt better I would love to hear them. It's pretty hard in Czech, but I will try anything!

This has definitely been a week of firsts:

My first time dropping an investigator, don't ask... that was a hot mess.

My first time getting dropped. That was the saddest thing ever. They said that they had their own church and just weren't interested.

My first time bearing my testimony in sacrament meeting in Czech! Everyone was laughing so hard. Probably because my Czech was soooooo bad. But the man that gave a talk afterwords said that it was fate that I was in Brno because my name is Bruno. And everyone says they love my smile. So that is my advice for the week. JUST KEEP SMILING! Even when people are telling you NO, because they might change their mind. You never know.

My first time solo kontaking. We did a singing display and I kontaked people in the namesti allllllll by myself, in CZECH. It was terrifying, but I know Heavenly FAther is helping me.

It was so good to hear from all of you. Especially about the squirrell. To that I say, what the Heck??? And also, bahahahha. I'm glad you are all having such a good time. I love you and I am working so hard I promise!

Love you love you love you

Sestra Bruno