I would like to start my email by a text we received from an investigator who was cancelling our program last week. (They are trying to learn English)
It reads: "Please no wait on me today! I am sick 3 day since. I cannot still to talk. Me pain throat. I cold and feel myself unwell. I need puke. Sorry! I lies in the bed. I need fast recovery because tomorrow begin school. Next occaission you will be correct my mistake if this free ask for you. Have nice day! Bless God!"
I'm pretty sure my favorite part is "Bless God!" Elder Christensen and I had a good laugh about it until we realized that this is probably what WE sound like to everyone... It was a funny, yet very humbling experience.
Other than that, this last Friday was "Women's Day"! It's another day to celebrate the existence of women besides on Mother's Day. It was cool to see that a lot of the women out on the street had a flower or two in their hand. The branch put on an activity where all the men read poems to the women and the Elders sang some special numbers in between. It was a nice program!
Yesterday was our Branch Conference so we had President Smith there. He and his wife gave great talks and it was a swell meeting. Our investigator (now member) received the Aaronic Priesthood yesterday. That was such an amazing experience. He's excited to pass the sacrament next week.
The weather here has been SO nice lately. It's been sunny and in the 70's. How perfect! There is supposed to be a really big holiday on Friday this week to celebrate the soldiers and heroes in the past. Everyone gets out of school and work and there's going to be some really cool celebrations going on! I'm really excited to see it.
A nice old lady let us into her house this week while we were tracting. After a short lesson, she gave us some egg decoration things that have a cool Hungarian tradition behind them. They hang decorated eggs on trees and plants here for Easter. It's quite interesting!
Something really interesting happened on Saturday. Two of our programs were with new men who we found the week before. In our first encounter, we only introduced The Book of Mormon and suggested 3 Nephi 11 to read. They both invited us back. The first man yelled at us for a good 45 minutes about how it's impossible that Jesus appeared to ancient America and how there should not be ANYthing more than the Bible. He was getting super heated and we calmly addressed all of his concerns but he wasn't having any of it. Before we left, we gave him 2 Nephi 29 to read... I find it hilarious because the chapter is about people like him. So great. Anywho, the NEXT guy was SO cool. He was saying, "why wouldn't Christ appear to those people in America too?? God loves everyone! It only makes sense!" His program went super well and we anticipate a great progression from him.
We also jumped off of a wall this week. We saw an a apartment building that looked perfect for tracting. The only problem was that there was a little fence with a little wall to get to it from the street we were on. We decided just to jump down off of the wall to save time instead of going all the way around. It was dark and we figured the drop to be about 3 feet. Nope. It was about 6.5 feet. I watched Elder Christensen jump down and I just about died when he disappeared into the darkness. He managed to stick the landing. I however, was not so lucky. I ended up doing some sort of ninja roll... Or ninja somersault... Okay I just ate it pretty hard. Happy now? If it looked as funny as it felt, I really wish I could've seen it. Elder Christensen got a good kick out of it though. Oh and don't worry, I'm fine. I just got some dirt on my shoulder. Brushed it right off.
Cool. Well don't jump off of surprisingly high walls and read from The Book of Mormon. That's my advice for the week.
Sok Szeretettel,
Alldredge Elder
This is Elder Christensen on the ground from the wall we jumped off. It was a LOT taller than we thought...
Who wouldn't want to graffiti a fat blue cat!?
Beautiful weather we've been having.
All of the women in the branch on Women's Day!