:)

 

 

Ahoj!

The week of diligence, that was our theme this week. It is amazing how you pick a theme and then, you realize just how horrible you are at that thing. ha ha It was a great week and I think there was definitely improvement, but as always, there is room for lots more! We will see how this week goes, we are working on patience. My companion has asked me to call her out when she is frustrated. I told her it was going to be a week of patience for her, but a week of courage for me. ha ha Love that girl, she teaches me so much!

This week after English the Elders had a surprise lesson and a planned lesson so they asked us, since our lesson fell through, to go on splits with them. So we sat in the doorways and Elder Earl and I taught the less active in Czech (Jirka) and Elder Burton and Sister Scerra taught their investigator with a baptismal date in English. It was a lot of fun. I love that less active! He is a funny character! Not to mention Elder Earl is like his son, so needless to say it was a fun lesson, but it was also a really good lesson! Exciting news, we have a branch presidency! Our old branch president (President Nvotny) was released (he has been solo president for like 17 years) and now we have an entire presidency. President Prazak with Brother Horak and Sergey V... as counselors. So that was neat. President Nvotny is now the Elder quorums president and is in search of reactivating men for counselors. It is so neat to see the work moving forward. During a conference President McConkie announced that within 5 years we will have a stake and a temple! A while back Elder Holland said that we would have a temple here at some point, but President put a time limit on it that I have never heard of before!!! He said in order for this to happen the home teaching and visiting teaching programs need to be fixed. He has really been emphasizing that with us and we have started some programs and stuff with that. It is really neat to see all these changes happening and all these Czech people getting these leadership callings and taking over their branches. It sounds like CBud will soon have a Czech branch president. At the moment it is still a missionary, but they now have a branch presidency and elder's quorum presidency. I love this work, it is so amazing!

So we taught our Priest (Jaroslaw) on Thursday, it was amazing! I love that man, he is so nice! We were waiting for our member to show up so we were chatting with Jaroslaw trying to get to know him better. So as we were sitting there I asked, "So how did you decide you wanted to be a priest?" (I should have stopped there but I didn't) I continued, "Is it something your dad did or..." and then he went on to explain that as a priest you can't be married (which I knew, I had earlier in the week explained that to my companion) and so he said, there would be a huge problem if it was something my dad did. It was really funny. He told us he saw infant baptism and really wanted to help people in that way since he was a teenager. So now he does, he baptizes children in incubators. ha ha anyway. We felt like we needed to teach the priesthood. So we did. It was crazy scary since he is a priest and thinks way differently than we do about what happened after Christ's death. He didn't necessarily accept what we taught but he was open to it and said that he would pray about it. Brother Prazak (at the time) was there and was answering questions. Jaroslaw asked about the bishop. Brother Prazak said that any man can be the bishop and then said, "I could be." At the time I was like yeah, that is true, you have only been a member for like 4 years or so but yeah you totally could. Little did I know that he had already been called to that and it would be announced in Sacrament the next Sunday! ha ha it was hilarious! As soon as I heard it announced I was like, Brother Prazak, you are such a funny man! ha ha So it is an exciting time around here. At the end of our lesson with Jaroslaw we asked him if he would read in the Book of Mormon and pray about it and the priesthood and he said he would. We then asked him how much he thought he could read before our next meeting in a week. He opened the book and was like, I could probably read through 1 Nephi, it is like 50 pages. Is that enough? ha ah so that was awesome! I am really excited to see how that goes for him. I wonder what kind of questions he is going to bring us.

Sunday we sang "I Am a Child of God" as the missionaries for a musical number and it was wonderful! We brought tears to eyes, they claimed it was because it was so good, I sure hope that is why! ha ha sacrament meeting was amazing. The topic was basically I can do all things with God. He doesn't set us up for failure. It was just really good and I loved it! President McConkie shared an awesome scripture story in Lukas 11:13-30 and I just loved his insight on it! I was really impressed with verse 30 I think it was. He talked about how Jesus could do all things because he had the help of God. I think I would have just missed that in my readings. Basically Jesus escaped all these angry people and headed to another city to teach. I don't think I have ever noticed the miracle and blessing there. I simply look past it. I think that happens a lot in our every day lives. That is why I strive to review my day and find at least 3 instances where I saw the Lords hand, saw Him blessing me.

Kat'ka is amazing. She is our baptismal date. I am a little nervous as we have a lot to teach her still before the 22 of November. But she is amazing. She reads a chapter every night before she goes to bed. She then talked about an experience she had where she was reading and praying about everything in her life, baptism, work, her family and everything else and she closed her eyes to think when she heard or saw, I don't remember which, from someone with a LOT more wisdom than she has and she said I just know this is right and that everything is going to work out. She was really excited about it. I just love Kat'ka, she is working hard and moving forward. I am excited for her. She truly is prepared, we just need her to realize the importance of meeting with us a little more frequently. We really didn't think she would be at church this week as she said she couldn't. We told her we would pray and that it was really important. She wasn't convinced. Saturday night we felt like we should have Sister Prazakova text her and so we asked her to and then Sunday morning Sister McConkie came and asked about Kat'ka so we asked her to text Kat'ka too. A little into the sacrament she showed up! It was so neat! It is amazing how much support from the branch and others that love you help. After sacrament she had to go because her little girl was sick, but it was so wonderful to see that she made it a priority.

We met with Lukas after church and that was neat. He was the one that last week came to church for the first time ever. We talked to him and he shared his two spiritual experiences of when he received revelation in his life. He then said I have never shared my testimony with anyone, that was a first time! It is so neat to hear people share these amazing experiences and when they receive revelation from the Lord about how life will be OK when you are going through something hard to not give up and how he will help you if you have questions and ask. We asked him how much he could read before our next lesson and he said 5 chapters. I love having them give themselves assignments of how much to read, it is wonderful! I love this work! And he told us he would come to church next week. I told him how it is the primary program and all the little kids share their testimonies and sing, He is really excited and so am I! I love it!!!!

Lots more happened and it was really a great week. I love this work and I love you! Have a wonderful week!

Love you tons,

Sestra Hicken