Monday, September 1, 2014

The work, Religion, Preperation day things

Hey everyone, another week has passed by and of course its short, but in the moment is another story. 

This last Sunday we had 3 less active people come to church and it has been such a blessing. My companion and I have been really focusing on those members and trying to help them with their needs. We basically told ourselves that, yes we're trying to find people to teach, but also we have a lot of people already, they're just lost, needing to be found to see what happened. 

Since the area has doubled in size, so has the members in our area including ones that no one knows about but that they are on the directory. We also have been working with some investigators that are actually progressing and that is always exciting to. 

It's interesting to see how the major religion here, Provaslav, what people believe in God. For a lot of people here, they honestly don't know their own believe or the religion that they say they are a part of. I guess I have just realized what they really think recently. It's for sure a different idea about who God really and what he expects of us.

Today around 4:00, my time, everyone here in ...is traveling to ... for passport work. My companion and one of the sisters needs to do it. It's weird having only 4 missionaries in a city instead of 6. Personally, the more the better ha ha. Speaking of that, from this last transfer and the transfer before that it sounds like Visas to live here in Bulgaria have been getting "harder" to get. Elder ..., (him and Elder ... served here with the 4 current missionaries here) had a really weird transfer call because of expectations of missionaries not getting Visas. I'm just glad that no one in my group had a hard time with Visas. That's a blessing.

Another thing that we have been actually today is the process of closing down the "other Elders" apartment. The landlord is actually a member. Let's just say it took and will take a lot more time than what we expected. Yea.. I'll just leave it at that ha ha. When we met with him, earlier in the week, we looked at old family photos. He has photos of his parents being kids with his grandparents. The photos look so old and it's truly a treasure that he has. that's one of the things I want to do is learning about family history and looking for photos/information about them. It's interesting because my desire for the gospel, family work, and well... all of that good stuff has increased beyond what I even imagined. It's a blessing of just being a part of the missionary work with the missionary life here in Bulgaria. 

I'm wanting to print photos, or a lot of photos to be able to show people of family and other things. I know this email usually gets forwarded or posted to family all around, so If anyone has good pictures of family things I would love to print them off. Also any family history stories, I would love to hear more. I'll probably print photos next preparation day or whenever I have time on a Monday.   Usually, it's really busy on those days, just like every other day. I've been saying to myself I'll do that ever since I got here in ... ha ha. Life is just to busy, but the busier for missionary work, the better. 

My companion and I have 3 progressing investigators right now and also working with a lot of members / less actives. I think we taught up to 14 lessons this last week. It's been a lot compared to other weeks. I don't know the exact number due to me switching to a new planer today. It's been a blessing to work with so many people. 

I love you all, I can't wait until next week to hear more.

Love Elder Green

I forgot to tell everyone this with the desire of family history. My companion and I are trying to apply family history into missionary work more. I've translated info or the names and dates into Bulgarian. We're going to laminate the paper with all of the info and it's going to be really nice. I'll need to send a picture once it's completely done. I'm really excited for it.