Hristos a inviat!
Monday, April 25, 2011 by Sora Jay
Hristos a inviat! is the traditional greeting for the 40 days following Easter. It means 'Christ has resurrected,' and anytime you say it to somebody they respond "Adevarat a inviat," which literally means "true, he resurrected," but is more like "Yeah he did!" It's pretty cool.
We went to the Catholic church and to the biggest Orthodox church Saturday night, they are really close to each other. It was pretty much the same at both of them, with priests singing, and everyone brought a candle and we passed the flame along by lighting other people's candles. I don't think that it's one of the 'unrighteous traditions' that we are here to tear down. It was actually really nice to be together with a lot of Romanians celebrating Christ's victory. People were really nice to us yesterday too. Easter put everyone in a good mood (even though everyone was super tired from staying up really late to go to church).
I got sick again this week. I realized that it's like the fourth time in the past two transfers that I've gotten sick. Like Tom, I have to do almost everything because my companion doesn't speak very well. I have had to manage every contact, teach nearly every principle in every lesson, make, or listen carefully to, every phonecall to translate or clarify, make sure that everything is recorded accurately in the Area Book in case my companion understood something incorrectly, and take care of the city needs like going to the Primaria and putting things in the newspaper. I'm really tired.
But, at least things have been going well. We found a new investigator who is really cool, she is really outgoing and happy. She's almost exactly like one of the recent-converts that I worked with when I was in Bucharest. She has a big family too. While we were out in her area we saw a man with a herd of goats and talked to him a little bit. We gave him a pamphlet and invited him to come to church.
When we were headed to our church Saturday evening we saw one of the boys that's usually there and he begged us to give him a Book of Mormon. I didn't want to give him one because I have already given him other things and he just loses or destroys them, so we just talked to him for a little while. There was a little girl there too and she talked to us too. I was surprised when she gave us some of the classic responses that every Romanian gives us, because she was only like ten years old. She said "Isus (Jesus) should be spelled Iisus otherwise it means 'donkey' in Greek," and she said "You never should have left your first religion." And I said, "Little girl, I never was orthodox. And I'm from America where we spell Isus with a j." It seemed incomprehendable to her. She had an automatic response programmed into her and she was still really little. I guess that's why everybody else gives us the same responses, they must have been programmed when they were little too. They probably teach them that in school. The little boy wasn't brainwashed though, he was catholic.
I appreciate the other churches for the way that they make it more acceptable in general to go to different churches or to change your religion. They came in to prepare the way for us. The elders told us that the branch president compared it to school in a lesson yesterday. Other churches are a little better than nothing so they're like going from elementary school to Junior High, or High School, but what you really want to get to is College, and that's what our church is.
We found even more investigators for the elders, too. It's always nice when you invite someone to come to church and they do.
It should be fun contacting people using "Hristos a inviat."
Love,
Sora Jay
We went to the Catholic church and to the biggest Orthodox church Saturday night, they are really close to each other. It was pretty much the same at both of them, with priests singing, and everyone brought a candle and we passed the flame along by lighting other people's candles. I don't think that it's one of the 'unrighteous traditions' that we are here to tear down. It was actually really nice to be together with a lot of Romanians celebrating Christ's victory. People were really nice to us yesterday too. Easter put everyone in a good mood (even though everyone was super tired from staying up really late to go to church).
I got sick again this week. I realized that it's like the fourth time in the past two transfers that I've gotten sick. Like Tom, I have to do almost everything because my companion doesn't speak very well. I have had to manage every contact, teach nearly every principle in every lesson, make, or listen carefully to, every phonecall to translate or clarify, make sure that everything is recorded accurately in the Area Book in case my companion understood something incorrectly, and take care of the city needs like going to the Primaria and putting things in the newspaper. I'm really tired.
But, at least things have been going well. We found a new investigator who is really cool, she is really outgoing and happy. She's almost exactly like one of the recent-converts that I worked with when I was in Bucharest. She has a big family too. While we were out in her area we saw a man with a herd of goats and talked to him a little bit. We gave him a pamphlet and invited him to come to church.
When we were headed to our church Saturday evening we saw one of the boys that's usually there and he begged us to give him a Book of Mormon. I didn't want to give him one because I have already given him other things and he just loses or destroys them, so we just talked to him for a little while. There was a little girl there too and she talked to us too. I was surprised when she gave us some of the classic responses that every Romanian gives us, because she was only like ten years old. She said "Isus (Jesus) should be spelled Iisus otherwise it means 'donkey' in Greek," and she said "You never should have left your first religion." And I said, "Little girl, I never was orthodox. And I'm from America where we spell Isus with a j." It seemed incomprehendable to her. She had an automatic response programmed into her and she was still really little. I guess that's why everybody else gives us the same responses, they must have been programmed when they were little too. They probably teach them that in school. The little boy wasn't brainwashed though, he was catholic.
I appreciate the other churches for the way that they make it more acceptable in general to go to different churches or to change your religion. They came in to prepare the way for us. The elders told us that the branch president compared it to school in a lesson yesterday. Other churches are a little better than nothing so they're like going from elementary school to Junior High, or High School, but what you really want to get to is College, and that's what our church is.
We found even more investigators for the elders, too. It's always nice when you invite someone to come to church and they do.
It should be fun contacting people using "Hristos a inviat."
Love,
Sora Jay
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