July 30 : Weekend Edition

Friday: Today was a training day! we had the Assistants and the zone leaders and Prezident as our guests here in Brno. minus the zone leaders they're here normally. And we had our "specialized Training." don't know where the name came from, but they are awesome!! just about the entire MTC group was there becuase it was for Brno Zone (brno and bratislava) and Olomouc Zone (olomouc, ostrava, and zlin). one of the trainings was about studying more effectively, which i'm pretty excited to start applying. We also learned about the Book of Mormon, and the role that it plays in our work. The leadership we have here is just stacked. they're like an allstar team! later in the day we were out talking to people and ran into one guy who had seen the south park episode about Mormons (an amazing number of younger people have!) He had no idea that we were a real religion; we showed him the book of mormon, and he said, "oh wow! it's real!" :) we talked more about it and why we went on missions. He had a beatles shirt on, so i told him that the gospel was like a really good song. In that, we heard this wonderful music and now we want to share it with everybody!

Saturday: Wow saturdays. every saturday i ask myself where the week has gone, today being no exception. we had our massive planning session (we tried a wild new way that was passed down from elder stradling's follow up trainer) it was nice! I'm always a fan of trying new things to figure out what is nice and efficient. needless to say the rest of saturday was amazing. exciting things that happened: elder stradling and i contacted forrest gump. but seriously. it was forrest gump after running accross america. hair, beard, look. everything. we saw him the first time far away from us going in another direction, and i told elder stradling that my eyes were deceiving me... then about 20 min later our paths crossed! destiny! haha we, later, had dinner at a really tasty hotel restaurant where some pretty stinking amazing svickova is sold. is it on par with sister renata's... of course not. but was it terribly tasty, ano! :)  tonight was our czech learning class, quite enjoyable. czech is stinking tough. that's all i've got to say about that.

Sunday: whoaaaaaa. today was great! great morning! talked with a guy from armenia on the bus (how often can one say that?). church was fantastic! funny story: last week it was brought up that any elder in the church should be able to, whenever called upon, to give a solid talk on a gospel topic for 10 minutes. well... i got called upon. haha for some reason or another there was some open time in sacrament meeting. the weird part was that the new missionaries also introduced themselves today... so they all went up. and then i went up (not to introduce myself, but to bear testimony, being called upon to do so) and have a lil testimony that was all over the place. :) i read moroni 6:4-6, 8. i love those verses. needless to say they wont call on me to go up and speak anytime soon :) he he he. just playing it wasn't a complete plane wreck... more like a nice tumble down a mountain. something that is thrilling at the time but nothing that you would like to repeat anytime soon. otherwise church was fantastic! a  guy who we've been teaching was able to come (he's a doctor and doing post-grad work so time is a huge factor), and he really enjoyed it! stayed for the entire time and even at the end said, "you know, 3 hours isn't enough time for this kinda stuff." :) he's great. on the tram back from church i talked with a guy who came to believe in God becuase he had hit rock bottom in life. Which brings me to another thing i really enjoy about our relationship with God, we can be in any walk of life, and still have an incredibly strong relationship with him. the rest of the day was nice. i really love studies on sunday. a nice chance to look back at the week and see the progress made. it's just fun. and then call ins! it's a real pleasure to be able to talk to the companionships every week. i just love em! goodness.


love ya tons momma!!!
elder stimpson