Jay Family Missionaries

مرحبا

Tuesday, May 31, 2011 by Sora Jay

مرحبا
اسمي نعمة ، وأنا فتاة شابة جميلة جدا، رأيت بروفايلك اليوم ، وتوقفت عن اتخاذ تبدو جيدة جدا في ذلك. أريدك أن تعرف أنني سوف تكون مهتمة لمعرفة هل لأنك أفضل صوت حلوة جدا وجميلة في ملف التعريف الخاص بك ولذا فإنني سوف مثلنا ان تصبح صديقا ونعرف بعضنا البعض وmore.Here هو عنوان بريدي الالكتروني
(blessingdoe27@yahoo.co.uk)
أرسل لي رسالة بالبريد الالكتروني اليوم وأنا سوف نرسل لك الصور، واقول لكم المزيد عن لي من فضلك! (تذكر أن المسافة أو السن أو اللون لا يهم في العلاقة أذكر ولكن الحب المسائل ألتو)، وأنا في انتظار ردكم الآن! هنا مرة أخرى بريدي الإلكتروني
(blessingdoe27@yahoo.co.uk)
لك إلى الأبد،
نعمة.

HELLO
My Name is blessing, i am a very beautiful young girl, I saw your profile today and i stopped to take very good look at it. I want you to know that i will be interested to know you better because you sound very sweet and nice in your profile so i will like us to become friends and know each other the more.Here is my email address
( blessingdoe27@yahoo.co.uk )
send me an email today and i will send you my pictures and tell you more about me please!(Remember that distance,age or color does not matter in a recall relationship but love matters alto).I am waiting for your reply now! here is my email again
( blessingdoe27@yahoo.co.uk )
Yours forever,
blessing.

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Confirm Receipt!!

by Sora Jay

You have been awarded Ј850,000 from the OXFAM GB - UK
the cash/grant donation Promo for Global Financial Economic Growth.
For disbursement, Contact Dr. Dr Terry Williams.
via e-mail (enquiry_terrywilliams021100@live.co.uk)

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Romania 30 May 2011

Monday, May 30, 2011 by Sora Jay

Hello again,

I didn't get any emails from Tom and Ed this week. Hope it's all going good.

This week we had Zone Conference in Chisinau in The Republic of Moldova, so on Monday our whole Zone was here in Iasi and we went to the giant orthodox church to see the saint inside. Sfanta Parascheva (I think that's how it's spelled) in the Metropolia church, you can look it up. Her body was found a couple hundred years ago and it wasn't decayed so she was declared a saint. You can touch her hand but it was covered with cloth. Our district leader talked to one of the priests and the priest showed him what to do, so he crossed himself and smelled the hand. He said it smelled good. While we were there at the church we saw two of our investigators...

Zone Conference isn't usually very encouraging. We usually focus on all of the things that missionaries do wrong and it usually makes me feel bad even when I have already been striving to do all of those things. We had some time to go contacting in Moldova though, I can understand when people say simple things in Russian like "I don't speak Romanian." One of the missionaries said he always starts his contacts in Russian so that if the person says they can't speak Russian he can talk to them in Romanian. I don't know that much though. We got back from Chisinau at about midnight Wednesday night.

There is one girl that has been investigating the church for the past five years that we have been working with again, Alexandra. She has something wrong with one of her ankles so she usually walks with a little cane. She's really cool. She has always come to all of the activities and sometimes to church but she never got baptized. We got her to talk to her mom about it last week but her mom said she shouldn't do it. She told us that she wouldn't get baptized. Then she asked if she could stay with us if she came and visited America next summer and we said she could. Then she told us that if she went to America she would get baptized. We told her that if she went to America she should go to the temple. She agreed. So maybe she will get baptized sometime soon. We have made a lot of progress with her just by being her friends.

We had about four investigators at church on Sunday. It was cool. Getting to church is one of the most important and the most difficult things for investigators to do for some reason, but we got a few to come by focusing on it for the rest of the week after Zone Conference. Andreea who left on her mission last month was the Relief Society president so they just called a new one, Daniela Padure. When the Branch President was announcing it in sacrament meeting he announced that she would be the next branch president and nobody gave her a sustaining vote. But then they all corrected him and she was sustained. She has been a member for about 12 years so she knows how things go. She immediately started helping us with less active members, and she got one that we have been trying for a while to meet with to come to the church and meet with us, and then come to church on Sunday as well. She told us it was gossip in the branch that made her and a few more members go inactive.

The week before last we started a competition for healthiness among the sisters where you get points for exercising and drinking water and eating fruits and vegetables, but minus points for eating desserts and white bread. We turned in our points for the first week and I won. It was actually one of my goals at the beginning of this transfer to exercise a lot so I was already exercising more than I ever did before on my mission. I have been pretty consistent throughout my mission of doing at least the basics, and I have gotten a lot more flexible.

That's probably about it for now.

Love,
Sora Jay

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Romania 23 May 2011

Monday, May 23, 2011 by Sora Jay

Hey everybody,

I have a cool story to tell you. There is an investigator that the elders have been working with for the past few months that they just barely passed off to us (and I don't know why they waited so long because she is a young girl) named Andreea. We met with her for the first time last week and she said she had lots of questions to ask us, about being married in heaven, and becoming gods, etc. so we just told her to write them down and said we would answer them next time. She is a 'recent convert' in another church here so she says people don't really like the idea that she's meeting with missionaries from our church. I'm not sure what kind of church it is, it's probably one of those more obscure ones. But anyway, the second time we met with her was Saturday night, she asked us a question about the Holy Ghost and that was pretty much the only question that we addressed because then the conversation changed and she told us about how uncomfortable she was questioning her new religion because she said if she changes again then there will just be another church and she will change again and it won't be good. We just brought it back again and again to the fact that she had to ask God what she should do. Even though she still holds on to the doctrines from her church she really wants to follow God. The elders had invited her to church tons of times and she had never come because her other church is held at the same time so we planned on inviting her. During the conversation she stopped and said "Don't be upset!" We hadn't acted upset or said anything to indicate that we were, it was actually surprising that she said it. She said it a lot more times and we told her that we weren't mad, and that we would be friends even if she didn't join our church. I think it was the Holy Ghost that was making her feel bad when she said she wouldn't come to our church because she liked hers. In the end she decided that she would ask God and wait for a sign (like somebody texting her a scripture or telling her something that encouraged her to come to our church). She was really sincere. So this is what it came down to, if our church was the true one she would be there the next day, and if it wasn't, or if she became insincere she wouldn't be there.

So, the next day, Sunday, we went to the church and we were welcoming everybody and finally it was time to start and Andreea wasn't there. We sang, and took the sacrament, and the first speaker was just starting when she walked in (she might have been in the hall for a while too). When we asked her after Sacrament meeting what had happened she said that that night she got a text from one of her friends that had a scripture in it (her friends text her scriptures a lot so it wasn't unusual), and that was what got her to come. She actually told us later on though that all that the scripture said was something like "trust in God" and she felt like she should come to our church instead of go to hers. So she made it.

At church Sacrament meeting was good and then we were going to watch a little bit of General Conference but the DVD was lost. But, the BYU students were there and they were having a Sunday school lesson in English and Andreea speaks English so we just joined them. Those BYU students are saints. Andreea participated really well but asked probably two or three provocative questions that may have been intended to insult the students but they were super nice and gave good explanations. It was funny because we actually read the verses from the bible where it says that there will be no marriage in heaven and Andreea chuckled a little just waiting to hear what explanation we had for those verses but the teacher just briefly said that you have to be married the right way, and continued. The peer-pressure of all of the other students agreeing probably kept her from saying anything else. But, anyway, that lesson went super well. Once again I tell you, those BYU students are really saints.

That's all of Andreea's story, we will still have to work a bit with her to get to baptism, but hopefully we'll get there. This week a lot of people have been actually 'investigating' us. We have been meeting with a cool social worker lady, Lia, that we picked up from English classes and she really likes what we have to say about families and asked us all about our families. There is a former investigator Andra that we picked back up who wants to do a research report on us for one of her school projects. And we met with a professor (Profesoara Cristina Dascalu) who is maybe even the dean of her university who asked us tons of questions. When we gave her a chapter to read in the Book of Mormon she gave us an assignment as well to write a paper on communication (which is her specialty) related to our work as missionaries in foreign countries and said she would like to publish it in a scholarly journal. Plus if you remember back when that guy was making a documentary about us, he is back and has filmed the elders proselyting some more. So people really want to know what we're all about. Now we just have to get them to want to know what we believe, and follow our examples.

Love,
Sora Jay

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Brazil

Monday, May 16, 2011 by Sora Jay

Querida familia,

It has only been a couple of days since the last time I wrote, but this week was pretty good. Saturday we recieved a reference of someone that called the number on the back of a pass-along-card and went to her house to giver her the DVD of The Lamb of God. We watched the DVD with her and her family, taught a lesson and invited them to church. The girl that asked for the DVD didn´t come this week, but her sister Jessica came after church we visited them again and marked the baptism of Jessica for this Sunday. You only have to come to church two times to be baptized here. I asked them how they had gotten the pass-along-card and they said that they were walking in the street and a lady was handing them out and gave one to them. Now I am wondering who it was because I don´t know any members here that would walk in the street giving pass along cards. Every once in a while God just gives you someone ready to be baptized. In Guarabira one time we found a paper in our house in the dish cupboard that had some addresses and we visited them and found a girl that was baptized in two weeks as well.

Today we had P-day of the Zone, and we played soccer like we do everytime the zone gets together. I am getting better, but the non-church-shoes that I have suck really bad and make my feet blister. My proselyting shoes are still really good and I think that they will last until the end of my mission.

My district has four companionships, three of them are pretty good, but I think that one of them is going to be difficult. They found one new investigator last week, and we are in Brazil.

Not much else to report. Thanks for the e-mails, and tell Jesh that if he wants to recieve my e-mails he has to send me one because I don´t know his e-mail address and I lost the paper where I wrote it down.

Elder Jay Brazil

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Romania 16 May 2011

by Sora Jay

Hello everybody,

I am writing this email later in the day than I usually do because this morning we were able to teach during a religion class at one of the universities here. We have an investigator who is studying for her masters in theology and she asked the professor if we could come to their class and tell a little bit about what we believe. A couple kids gave presentations on some other religions, there was one cool one about Jews in Romania, and then we got up and taught a restoration lesson. Our presentation was a lot better than theirs because we have a lot of practice and we're Americans so we didn't sit at the desk at the front and read off our presentation; we even asked the class questions. It went pretty well. We gave them our information and the teacher encouraged the class to write some questions for us so that we could come back and answer them. Hopefully that goes well.

This week the students from BYU arrived. Everyone was really happy to see them, and they doubled the size of our branch. We got to church and I looked at the monthly schedule and it said that I had to speak that day about hope, I wish that the branch president had told me rather than just posting it out on the wall that nobody looks at. Anyway, I got there to church and wrote up a talk really quickly and gave it. It was kind of a depressing talk for having been about hope, because I told them the story of William Geddess getting kicked out of his house for joining the church. It was cool because there is a missionary that left from our branch to Scotland, Radu Stoica, and when I mentioned the two missionaries in Scotland she got a big grin on her face. Her daughter left last week for her mission in England so both her kids are gone now. Her husband isn't a member, but maybe he will get baptized while his kids are on missions.
I only had to translate during relief society for the BYU girls. It's hard to translate discussions because you have to translate for everybody trying to talk over each other, plus we didn't have any materials in English, besides the scriptures, so I had to translate what everyone was reading as well. Translating scriptural stuff is kind of hard. They have a laptop though, so maybe next time they can come with all the stuff they need ready to go. One of the girls is a returned missionary, she went to Hungary right next door, and the one boy is a returned missionary who went to New York. We challenged all of them to give away a pass-along card and they were way up for it, except for one girl who said they aren't allowed to proselyte.

On Tuesday after English class President Lundberg called us and said, "I think there's something that you've forgotten to report to me..." Sora Mullen had answered the phone and we were both staring at each other wondering what he might have thought that we did wrong, but then it turned out that he had gotten an email from Sora Mullen's dad because Sora Mullen had been punched in the back by a gypsy. She actually did report it to him, he just hadn't read the email yet. It's really dumb that he cared more about what her dad thought than what she thought, he hadn't even read her email yet. Sora Mullen keeps saying, "my heart is still fluttering from that conversation with President Lundberg." But, we didn't have anything to worry about anyway; we haven't done anything wrong.

When we were street-boarding this week there was one guy who walked past and one of the elders tried to talk to him but he was really orthodox. Later he went walking past again with an orthodox priest and the elders were talking to some kids, they didn't stop to say anything but as they passed the guy said, "leave the children alone!" I think 'the children' didn't appreciate it very much. It was just funny for us. We have been finding a lot more college-age kids to talk to because we have been doing street-boarding near the university, and we got permission from the city to do it a few days every week for this month. It was kind of lame because I had worked everything out last transfer at the city building and then the new district leader came in and without even asking me what I had already done went and asked permission for us to do it in some locations that aren't that great and on random days. He also made the newspaper ads for English classes without regarding the advice I gave him, so he got ripped off and also put an ad in one of the papers that nobody even reads. It would have been a lot better if he had just asked me, and listened to me.

But, things are going pretty good. We have some nice people that could progress soon.

Love,
Sora Jay

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District Leader

Wednesday, May 11, 2011 by Sora Jay

Querida família,

It was good to talk with you guys on mother´s day even though it seemed really short with four different phone calls. Congratulations to Joni for the new baby.

This week was transfers, Elder Woolley and I stayed here, but I was called to be a district leader. Now I have to deal with other missionaries problems, but it will be good, I am learning a lot and now I get to go the leadership trainings.

Also this week Elder Araujo visited our mission and spoke with us, it was pretty good. He told us that the only talent a missionary needs is the talent of being an instrument, we just need to do what the Lord asks and he will use us to do his work. We just have to open our mouths.

I have a couple cool stories for you guys:

My first companion in the MTC was Elder Kennedy, he is from Sandy, but his dad wasn´t a member of the church and liked to talk bad about the church. Elder Kennedy was inactive for a couple year but he came back to church when he was 18 after he went to a temple open house and decided to serve a mission. Guess what happened last week. His dad was baptized and now everyone in his family are active members of the church. Pretty cool.

The second story:

We found a guy named Pedro my first week here and have been teaching him ever since he is married and has three kids. The teaching process has been a little slow because he used to be very active in another church, but last we he finally asked God if the Book of Mormon is true and he had a dream. In his dream he was reading a book that had the bible in the front and the book of Mormon in the back and when he saw it he started to yell, "It´s true, all this mormon stuff is true!" When he told us the dream I said that I would bring something for him to see the next time we came. I borrowed a quad from one of the members and read in Ezequiel about the stick of Juda and José joining and being on your hand and then pulled the quad out of Elder Woolley´s backpack and let Pedro look at it. Agora só batiza!

We also have an investigator named Jailma that already knows that the Book of Mormon is true and cries in the lessons because she feels the spirit, but she needs to come to church.

This week we did a family home evening in the house an inactive sister that started to came back to church and a lot of people came. It is weird when you are the oldest missionary and everyone just looks at you until you start the meetings and stuff. We had to set up this family home evening, but while we were there the members marked one for next week and they marked on for the 24th because it will be my birthday. I hope they make cake.

Gotta go,

Elder Jay

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