100% Diligence

Hi mom and dad :) .Thanks for the picture of Tamsyn, I got you all some pictures this week from some of the stuff I've been up to. I will get your letter off to you this week 100%--I literally have half a page left to write. Thank you for the CDs, our music selection recently got limited to MoTab-style only, so everyone else's supply of music has become unapproved. Leaving us with my skimpy supply of one album of MoTab ha. The farewell meeting for the missionaries returning home sounds pretty cool--we don't do anything like that here. We don't even do departing testimonies among us missionaries in the zone conferences anymore. I really did like the birthday package, though. I'm already a good bit into the journal you sent, and most of the food has been devoured. Plus Mike Wazowski lives again for now, and our other Flatscots are overjoyed about that.

This week was pretty crazy full of things we've been doing, and it's all been really productive and really good. One big highlight is that we're working with J again, and he's coming back around. That's a big miracle that we're really grateful for. President Pilkington came to sacrament meeting on Sunday with his wife, and they did a fantastic job with their talks. Sister Pilkington had prepared a small but impressive testimony in Slovak that she moved half of the people to tears with (both men and women), and everybody was dead silent while President spoke, eyes riveted on him and scarcely breathing. From the youngest child to the oldest man, all eyes and ears were on him. Not even the young men or women were even slightly bored. That's saying something. I absolutely love hearing President speak--he's got a fantastic presence about him that just pulls everyone's focus to what he's saying. That Sunday we (all the missionaries in the Slovak branch) had also been praying really hard for sunshine because we wanted everyone possible to make it to church. That morning was probably the sunniest one out of the last two months, and we walked rain-free to church. Prayer works, what can I say?

We've begun teaching some of the people we've been finding in the Manor area, and things are going well there. We also have found another area (Manor Top), where we tried a brief bit of finding before the wedding of R and R. We had finished District Leader Specialized Training and got out a bit later than expected. Our plans included doing an hour of finding and then coming back to the chapel for language study before the wedding, but with getting out late, we ended up with only about 25 minutes left for finding. Counting in travel time to the area we wanted to try and back again, it left us with less than 10 minutes to actually walk around. It was raining, and I'd forgotten my umbrella at the flat, so it was a little tempting to help set up for the wedding or something to not have to go out for a seemingly meaningless 10 minutes, but we went out anyway, figuring we would at least be diligent with our time. After we got off the bus in the area, we walked down an alley and at the very end of the alley coming our direction was a woman who looked Slovak. I stopped her and spoke with her for a couple minutes, and ended up with her address and a return appointment for this week. Soaked, we walked around for a few minutes and then went back to the chapel. Those 10 minutes in the rain proved the concept of giving your all and being blessed in return true. We also now know that Slovaks live in that area, and we weren't sure before. This was a fantastic miracle, and it confirms my testimony of 100% diligence all of the time.

That's all I've got time for, but I love you lots and hope you have a great week!

Love,

Elder Brown