Elder Felipe Gonzalez's Missionary Blog: Week 2 in Buda

Hello!

It was another busy week at the office. We had zone training, so for three days every missionary in Hungary came up to Budapest. Elder Nordberg gave an excellent presentation about our work in the office. There will be a Book of Mormon challenge for the members in Hungary. This will help the missionary efforts in the country a lot. There is a member here in the Buda ward who is a great example to all. He always carries a copy of the Book of Mormon so that he can share the message of the Restoration with others.

I met my friend Dallas (aka Elder Leavitt) at the conference and he's doing great. It was really cool to see him. A police officer came to zone training and talked about bicycle safety. He made it a really entertaining presentation, especially when talking about all the exceptions and how Hungarians don't follow the traffic rules.

Elder Olsen left to work in Pécs and President Szabadkai made me district leader. The interesting thing is that my district has the APs, STLs, senior office couple, and my companion is at 23 months. So if you add up how long everyone has left, it's still less than what I have haha. This is the list of those serving in my district:

Elders Gonzalez and Nordberg: office secretaries
Elders Evans and Heaps: Assistants to the President
Sisters Giullian and Withers: Sister Training Leaders
Elder and Sister Simkins: Senior office couple

So on Friday I held a district meeting. I have to admit that I was a bit nervous since I haven't been in the mission for too long and everybody else in my district has much more experience than me. But I prepared and planned well. After the usual assignments (spiritual thought, language tip, etc.) we reviewed the zone conference and read from Preach My Gospel. Then we discussed King Benjamin's speech and compared it to General Conference to prepare everyone for conference. It went really well and the participation was great. We talked about our investigators and about the Book of Mormon challenge. I have a testimony that Heavenly Father helps us, and even when we feel that we are not fully capable to do our task, He makes up for the rest.

Other than that, we had splits with the APs twice (one of them was sick), so we tracted together and taught some lessons. One of the interesting people we met was a man from Sri Lanka who requested a copy of the Book of Mormon in English. We also helped the assistants move to their new apartment which luckily was just around the block.

So here in the office I have to handle a ton of things like contract negotiations with landlords, translating bills for the senior office couple, preparing welcome packets for incoming missionaries, and tons of random tasks, plus some regular missionary work. So it's a lot of fun with something new happening every day.

Have a great week everyone!

Elder Gonzalez