Jay Family Missionaries

Hello again everybody,

 

At the beginning of this week we had Zone Conference which included going to a castle a little ways outside of  Bucharest with half the mission.  I took a lot of cool pictures but my camera won't hook up to this computer so I'll have to see if I can send them on another missionary's computer before I leave.  We went in a bus and we watched 'The Errand of Angels' and 'The Testaments'.  The first movie was pretty lame, and it wasn't spirutual either, it was just pretty much sister-missionary drama.  Every single missionary was disappointed when they got let into a bloc and then the people said they only believed in the Bible so the sisters left.  It was the dumbest ever; a real missionary would have just testified and explained, and then leave when they started hitting you with something or when they grabbed your companion and flung her out the door.  Most of us slept through 'The Testaments' though.  That's what happens when you give missionaries a little break, they just try to catch up on all of the sleep they haven't been getting for the past few months.

 

At Zone Conference we did a bunch of role-plays.  At the 'beginning-teaching' practices my companion and I got to give a demonstration at the end.  I told the investigator that he had to actually do something if he wanted to change his life; afterward the missionaries were all impressed with how bold I was.  I say that to people in Romanian all the time though and it doesn't seem to effect them that way.  They just agree, "logic."

We had some bloc-knocking role-plays too and we did those in Romanian.  Whenever you go into someone's house here you take your shoes off so one of the tactics of getting into somebody's house was starting to take your shoes off.  My companion did a practice with this tactic but she used the wrong verb; she wanted to say "hai sa ne descultsam" (we can take our shoes off) but she accidentally said "hai sa ne distram" which means "Let's have some fun," which kind of has some implications.  I started laughing really hard, I was even crying because I was laughing so hard.  I guess it doesn't sound that funny written here, but if you knew what comments we got from people in the blocs it makes it a lot better.  I told her that the person probably would have let us in and that we should use that tactic more often.

 

Last night we were knocking the doors in our bloc because we're moving so we had an excuse to try to talk to them (to say goodbye) and then we asked if we could share a message with them.  People were super nice to us in our own bloc.  One lady let us in and offered us some grape juice.  I asked her if there was any alcohol in it and she said that there wasn't.  She gave us some fizzy grape juice and we drank it and she gave us more.  I asked her if she had carbonated it, and she said she hadn't done anything to it, 'it was totally natural.'  So, for there to be bubbles in it, it obviously was at least a little fermented (or at least there was some microbial activity in there).  I guess we couldn't hide it on our faces after we heard that because she said "I'm not trying to kill you or anything.  Even I drank some."  And so maybe we broke the word of wisdom last night.

 

This week we had a pass-off lesson with the elders with a guy that Sora Wilson had met in the parc while on exchanges; we had switched companions during sisters training.  So we taught a lesson with the elders.  Pretty much just me and the senior companion from the elders taught the lesson.  It was really nice and a really cool lesson, really powerful too.  With both of us being experienced we were able to toss off to each other and work together.  It's been a long time since I've had a lesson like that.  For the past two-and-a-half transfers I have been the more dominant companion and I kind of have to prompt my companion to speak sometimes.  Usually the reason that I would give for giving people to the elders was that they spoke Romanian better than me, but I don't think I can use that anymore.

 

Okay, I've decided that I'm going to write some letters and send them in the mail, but I'm going to start by sending them to the grandkids, because I figure that they are the ones who know the least about me because they don't have how to read the emails that I send, probably.  I'll probably just write to them starting from the oldest ones and down, so if nobody gets any letters I hope you let me know because I might be adressing them wrong.

 

Love,

Sora Jay

NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.