Iowa to Romania

In 2018 Elder Bowen’s dad started asking a set of questions.   First it was “What is an interesting word or phrase you have learned in Romanian?”   Later, was added, “How have you seed God’s hand in your life or the life of your friends?”   Lastly, the question, “What is something interesting you have learned about Romania?”.   These are all compiled below. 6/25/2018 A freca menta - literally means rub the mint but it's a phrase that means to waste time 7/2/2018 Mi-am dat seama – I realized 7/16/2018 A supraviețui – to survive I have definitely seen God's hand in my life every time I study in the morning, because it seems like every time I do it, it leads to something that I really needed to study for the rest of the day. 7/23/2018 A infaptui – to accomplish I saw God's hand when he touched our man Felix at church. He told me he really enjoyed church and I can tell he is really progressing. He's read up to Alma 50!!!!! 7/30/2018 a ...

Hello all you people! For those playing at home, this is my final email that I will send as a missionary. So this email will definitely be a good one! We had a solid week here in Pitesti. We had a really good lesson with Tata Sandu where we read from Alma 7, which testifies of Jesus Christ and the importance of faith and repentance and being baptized. His health keeps him from coming to church, but he really is interested and wants to hear our message. It seems that right when we arrive, he wants to read from the Book of Mormon, which is a sign of eagerness to learn and feast upon the words of Christ. Hopefully Elder Rawhouser can continue to help his desire grow and maybe help him enter the waters of baptism. We made it a priority this week to work with members, especially to strenghten up Mihai the recent convert. This week we focused on temples on watched some videos on what goes on in the temple and what all of it means. He liked it and now we want that to be his goal to go...

Hey everyone, this one a pretty good week for us in Pitesti! First off, we had a super awesome lesson with Erika, a returning member, and her boyfriend Peli. We've been pushing for something like this for a while and we finally got it! We taught the Restoration and Peli really liked it. He agreed to read the Book of Mormon and seems like a really sincere guy. And it also helped out Erika to have a greater desire to come back to church, especially since she'll be the example for Peli. I really think this is the best way for people to come unto the church and i think we'll see some huge success with this couple! We also had a really cool lesson with Amber! We've been following up with her about reading the Book of Mormon and we finally had a Restoration lesson. It was really cool to teach her and ask questions because she answered them in such simple ways that the Spirit was helping testify of everything! We also watched the Restoration video and just to sit and w...

Hey everyone, it was a pretty interesting week for me over here! First off, thank you all for the birthday wishes! Entering a new decade is weird but it's going to be a fun one! It was definitely a wild week for us here in Pitesti. We had a really good start to the week with meeting with Dragos and Zone Conference, but something happened in the middle of the week that caused the good start to end roughly. Dragos stopped responding to calls and texts, even though he was reading them just fine. In the end, he didn't get baptized and didn't come to church. But we might have some hope because he texted this morning saying that he was in the hospital again and didn't have access to his telephone. Apparently his mother had his phone the entire time he was in the hospital. We're not 100% sure if that's the truth so we are going to try and meet with him and figure out what's going on. It's kinda sad but we are working hard to try and get him back. But at the...

Hey everyone, this was a pretty fun week for us! First off, crazy awesome miracle!!! So for the past couple weeks, we haven't been able to get in contact with our good friend Dragoș. But we found him on the street and we invited him to church and the most amazing thing happened. He told us that these past weeks he had been in the hospital because of something with his head. But while in the hospital, he had a dream with an angelic person telling him that he needed to be baptized in the church of Jesus Christ. So on Sunday he told us he wants to be baptized as soon as possible, which leads to us having a baptismal date with him for the 3rd of August. God works in marvelous ways because he truly loves us. Another cool miracle this week was our friend Amber. She's from China and is doing volunteer work here in Romania. This week we started teaching her Romanian/Gospel and its been really great! She also loves the piano so she played the piano for us at church! She loved ch...

Hey everyone, all is well here in Pitesti! This was a good week here in Pitesti and I think we are starting to get things going. We focused a lot on members this week and to strengthen them. We have been working with Erika, a young returning member, to get her to be a friend to our people in lessons and at church. It was really cool this week with her because out of the blue she asked if she could be apart of a lesson or pass our pamphlets while she was in Pitesti. That was really cool and she is so close to coming back. She just needs to put church as a priority and then she's in. She's going to be the big support for Rahela to have a desire to come to church. We then started some ministering efforts as we talked with some members about who to visit and then going to visit those people with Marius. It didn't go as well as hoped, but we took a step in the right direction and I think this next week will be better. We also are continuing to try and strengthen Mihai and Ma...