Hello my beloved family and friends!
First of all, thank you all so much for the birthday wishes :) I cannot tell you how much I appreciated all of the love :) You all rock and made one little sister missionary in Hungary feel very special!!
This last week was crazy!!!! This week every missionary in Hungary focused especially on being obedient! And as a district, we all wanted to get Super Standard this week. So let me tell you a little bit about what happened:
Monday: "Birthday" P-day! It was fun :D I went to my very first Tisza store here in Hungary! (Tisza is a Hungarian-only brand of shoes.) Every missionary here gets at least one pair on their mission, I think. It was super fun trying the shoes on (really, what a perfect day for me, right?) and I think I might have to join the ranks of Tisza-owning missionaries at some point in the future :) We spent the night before our programs in the mission home. One of the elders in my district, Mathews Elder, found Oreos (I am not even sure how... they are rare here in Hungary) and he and the senior sisters made an Oreo-layer cake for me :) (I think my parents have a picture of that they can put up on the blog.) It was super sweet :) That night, we went to a member's house for dinner and it was super fun. This really cute younger couple invited us over. They told us that they do not invite missionaries over very often (we felt quite special :P). It was really fun, though, because the husband had served a mission in Provo, Utah, so he regaled us with stories of his mission (in English haha. It was a nice break from Hungarian.). It was super fun and they want us to come back and bring investigators! It is great getting members involved in lessons because they are able to share their experiences, which are so much more special and personal and relatable to most Hungarians.
Tuesday: My actual birthday :) I am officially 22 years old! (Yikes! :P) (And on that day, I had exactly one year left on my mission! Where is the time going?!) We didn't do anything all that special-- we had a lot of programs planned. Some of programs cancelled, though, so we went looking for people to teach. Sister Johnson really wanted to go streeting (which just means talking to people on the street). Not really my comfort area. But we were able to give out a few "Book of Mormon"s and talk to some really cool people :) That night was fun, though! We had a program set up with... a FIREHOUSE! I had just found a contact in our phone labeled "Attila- Fireman". It sounded interesting :P So I called him up! And somehow I set up a program with multiple firemen at the firehouse. We brought this super cool member named Livi, who can speak English and Hungarian (we thought that would be a help :P), and we went. It was super fun! We had a little group of firemen and we talked about the Book of Mormon and what we believed. We all laughed a bunch, too. It was fun and they want to meet again! Who would've guessed haha? Later that night, we went to the branch house and our elders presented us with a delicious chocolate cake that they had made for my birthday (I am not sure why everyone felt like I needed cake? But it was delicious :D).
Wednesday: More cake actually :P A member fed us delicious cake for my birthday and her daughters drew super cute birthday cards for me :) It was so sweet-- I really appreciated it :)
Thursday: I taught the kids' English class this week. They were kind of crazy actually :P Especially since I don't really know how to tell kids to behave in Hungarian :P But it all worked out and we had fun drawing pictures about our families and things we want to do. One of our investigator's little brothers came, which was sweet :)
Friday: We went tracting and were actually let into someone's home! It was kind of a weird experience (I felt like I was going against all I had been taught about strangers and stuff when I was little haha) but it turned out pretty cool! We were tracting in a 10-story apartment building and at one door a woman actually wanted to know more about what we were sharing (we are so used to people saying no that I think we were a little lost for words at first when she said she wanted to know more haha!). We gave her a Book of Mormon and she invited us in. She told us it was weird that we knocked on her door because she has actually been praying and thinking about religion a lot lately. I thought that was pretty neat :) And we set up to meet with her again this upcoming week, so we will see how that goes!
Saturday: There was a baptism in our ward! Her name was Ica. She is a super cute lady who was taught by the elders and just so prepared. She has loved learning more about the gospel and coming to church. The elders asked us to sing a special musical number at her baptism, so Sister Johnson and I sang "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" in Hungarian and it went really well. After the baptism, everyone told us that we sounded like angels! And some of the senior missionaries actually made us sing it again so they could record it :P (I will see if I can get a copy for you all.)
Sunday: I somehow ended up playing the piano again in church! And I said the closing prayer :P (I think this ward just likes hearing from me :P) Sunday was the day that would determine whether or not we would get Super Standard, the goals we had been working all week towards. This week has been very crazy because we had a lot of programs cancel, which made it harder to get our goals. But we rallied and had found and scheduled new programs and so finally, we just needed 2 of the people we had taught to come to church! We waited expectantly, having invited lots and lots of investigators. However... we only had one come :( BUT. That is okay!!! We still made the Standard goals!!!! And that is great! And honestly, the most important thing is that these goals drove us to work harder this week and share our message of happiness with more people than we might have otherwise. That counts as a pretty successful week in my book :)
So, yeah, it has been a busy week full of birthdays, programs, finding, teaching, and having fun :D I hope you all had similarly fulfilling weeks!
Love you all!
McKenna aka Kramer Nővér
Inspiration for this email's title came from the talk "Your Light- a Standard to All Nations" by James E. Faust. Check check check it out!
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