Week 4

Hey!

Time flies! I can't believe I'm in the middle of week 5 in my daily planner (which is the best thing ever, in case anyone was wondering) already! We only have 32 days left! This friday marks our halfway point! We'll have been here for 31 days and have 31 days left! Also, this Saturday is the 23rd of February, which means it'll have been a month since I came in here. Weird to think that I have less than 17 months left on my mission!! (My proselyting card for Hungary expires on July 1st, 2014, which means that I'll have to come home sometime in June, unless they renew it or something).

How is everything going there?? I hope everyone is doing well! Thanks for all the letters!

Mom, to answer some of your questions: Yes, I do send individual letters to people, as long as they write me. haha but I also include things in here for other people. No, no one has sent me any of those cin. rolls yet. haha. Thanks for the conference talks! You sent me two of the same one, so I gave one of them to another sister in my room. I always let her read mine too during gym time and at night and stuff. We were both so excited when you sent more haha. OH! Thanks for the new shoes!!! They haven't gotten here yet, but that made my day after an awful weekend! and the fact that you're sending a blanket, because the ones that they have here are all static-y and gross. hm. I really need Jenny and Scott's new address! asap! I have aletter that's just been sitting in my bag for like a week because I don't know where to send it. I don't even remember what I wrote in it, that's how long I've had it hahah. Also, Mom, don't ever feel bad about writing me so much or think that you can't write me because you already wrote me.

 Letters are the best things ever, that's why this weekend was so awful. We don't usually get mail on Saturday's and we obviously don't on Sunday, and then Monday was a holiday, so we didn't get mail for a long time. Also, our osi left on Monday morning. :( On the plus side, we found out that our kicsi gets here next wednesday!!! So we're all stoked. We've decided that we're going to call her The Chosen One in Hungarian, instead of the Kicsi, since there's one girl coming all by herself. We're excited to see what district they put her in and who her comps will be.

Mom, this might not be possible, but... is there any way that you could send me the blog posts that people have been writing since I left? On google chrome on my computer taht you're using, I favorited a few Hungarian blogs and I would usually check them on Mondays/tuesdays for their weekly letters. I really want to know what's going on over there and which new areas are being opened and if any of the sisters are training my osi. Anyway, i haven't read any of them since the week of jan. 23rd, obviously. So if there's any way that you have any extra time and could do that, I'd love it!

So, question. Everyone keeps sending me letters telling me that they can already tell how much I've changed since i've been here.... What does that mean?!? I don't feel like my personality or anything has changed. And I'm sure everyone meant that I've changed in a good way (hopefully), but please explain! haha

hm.. I can't think of what else to say. most things stay the same here. I guess I can tell you some interesting things I'velearned in the past couple days... In Hungarian you never say I'm cold, because that means I'm sterile. and you can't say I'm hot, because that means I'm gay. You always have to say It's cold or It's hot... actually the direct translation would be to either say: The cold/hot exists, or you possess it, you can say My cold/hot exists. Also, the word for frog and peace is almost the exact same... so you have to be really careful when you're talking about the Spirit in a lesson, to say that you feel peace inside, NOT frogs. not that I did that or anything..... ;) haha there's more to that story, but it's too long. either way, it was funny. I got my teacher (my invesitgator) to crack his facade for a second and smile. hahah Speaking of breaking out of character... We have this investigator that we've been teaching (one of our teachers), and he refused to pray in front of us for a long time. Anyway, we kept coming with more tactics each lesson. Like we would teach our lesson and ask him to say a prayer for us to close and when he refused, we'd talk to him again about praying and questions he had. Anyway, one day as I was sitting in class the scripture D&C 19:28 popped into my head, so I showed it to my comp and we both decided it was perfect for the concerns he was having and we had run out of all other alternatives that we could think of to get him to pray. Anyway, the next day at the end of our lesson, I nonchalantly pulled out my scriptures when he refuesd to pray and I was like, in hungarian: "you know, the other day I was readying my scriptures and I found a verse that I thought was really interesting. Would you read this aloud for us?" So he took my scripture, read it to himself before reading it to us. I looked up and he just had this huge smile. He couldn't even make it through the scripture without laughing a couple times. This of course made my companion and I, who hadn't even thought that it would be humourous, laugh. When he finished reading, none of us could talk. I was literally just sitting there shaking from laughing so hard silently with tears streaming down my face. My companion was trying to regain composure so that she could talk about the scri[ture and he was just sitting there laughing. Anyway, I just started down at my scriptures praying that I would stop laughing and get refocused. He still didn't pray!! But he said he would the next lesson, and he did yesterday. so, that was a funny lesson. We've never done that before, but it was much needed.

This might be crazy, but for some reason I feel like the fourth of July is right around the corner. For everyone in the real world, that probably seems so far away, but time is so weird in the MTC. Every day feels liek an eternity and you usually can't even remember what you did in the morning, but each week seems SO short when you look back and realize that somehow you're at another P-day.

Yesterday, Craig C. Christensen came and spoke to us for the devotional. My comp met him before when he toured her dad's mission, so she wanted to go talk to him after the talk, which would mean that we would need seats near the front. We thought he was speaking next week though, so we just sat in the bleachers. Then when we heard it was him, she freaked out, so we tried to go down and see if somehow there were two seats available, which we knew wouldn't be likely. Finally we found two along the edge of the room. Right as we were sitting down, we heard this usher/branch president tell someone that he probably needed our whole row of seats. Then he came over and pointed to my comp and I and told us to follow him. We were super confused and had no idea where he was going. He walked us right over to the stand, picked up a sign that said reserved seating and told us to sit down. We were literally in the two seats directly in front of the pulpit on the very front row! Soo cool, in a room filled with thousands of missionaries, all I could see was the pulpit and no distractions of missionaries doing dumb things or tlaking to being distracting, all I had to focus on was the stand. Both of the talks were AWESOME. I felt like Heavenly Father was like, "you need to hear this, sit right here and listen," like he had figuratively(?) picked me up and set me down right in front so that I would pay attention. It was so great.

I think my time is about up, but I just wanted to share a quote that I heard this Sunday in Music and the Spoken Word before RS, this is paraphrased: "Change and growth only come when we lengthen our stride, stretch ourselves and leave our comfort zone. Take that step into the unknown, even if it'sjust a small step. When we do, we find that our comfort zone was actually holding us back. Life begins where your comfort zone ends." I love that because I can relate to it so much. We do so many things here that are totally out of our comfort zones, sometimes they turn out well and sometimes they don't the first time, but either way, we always learn something or understand something or someone that we didn't before. I know that this is what I'm supposed to be doing and that God has a plan for each of us. It's up to us to have enough faith to take a step into the unknown and trust that He knows what's best for us. Pray for help with whatever you need and I know that he will help you in some way or other, even if it's not in the way that you expect, His way will always be better. Life is hard, no one can deny that. But if we just put our trust in Him, we'll end up somewhere even better than we could have planned for ourselves. I love you all and I'm praying for everyone back home! Send me letters and I promise I'll answer them asap!

Sok szeretettel,

Butterfield nover