Iowa to Romania

Hey everyone this was a pretty good week!! First off, transfers happened and I am going to kick it up here in Cluj for yet another transfer, but this time with an old buddy of mine. If you have been following my past emails, you would know that Alaska Fighting Palm Trees was a thing with my good friend Elder Kemeny. Well, we are going at it again for a 3rd transfer and this time it's gonna be even better!!! I also want to apologize to everyone for the lack of an email last week. We actually had MLC up in Budapest yesterday and was not able to email anyone until today, so here we are!!! We made sure to not let Easter take the most of us and we still worked hard to get the work going. Probably the biggest success was with Robert. It took great planning, prayer to God, and in depth study to know what we needed to do with him to help him get on the path towards baptism. Now, because of all that, he has a baptismal date for May 25th and Elder Kemeny and I are super excited t...

Hey everyone, this was a great week and I hope you all enjoyed Easter!! Sadly I didn't, but I will this upcoming week (we celebrate it on Orthodox Easter, which is next week...) But that doesn't mean that this week wasn't awesome!! This was a super week for us in Cluj. It felt like a super slow week with finding people, but we were able to have some great lessons with people and saw the progression in many people. We succeeded in having a great Easter lesson with a guy named Catalin, the same guy that was in McDonald's the week before. He was so into the message and he really wanted to share the message with his friends. He's still trying to find a person to share it with, but it's super cool to see that he actually wants to share it with people. And he wants to meet as well this week so I'm excited to see his progression moving forward. We also had a great lesson with a guy named Tudor. He came to church a few weeks ago and we finally had our schedules ...

This was a great week for me. In a nutshell, the week can be described as one word: Always. Always be ready to share your testimony, always be positive and cheerful, always have a prayer in your heart, always see the good in the world, let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly (always), always be a disciple of Jesus Christ. I saw this week as I did these things, miracles happened and many great and marvelous things came to pass. One of the great ones was our English student Bogdan. He expressed a desire to learn more about our church so we met with him after English Tuesday. We taught a short Restoration with a focus on Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. It wasn't anything complicated, but we testified that it will bless his life and help him find purpose as well. He loved it, accepted a Book of Mormon and then proceeded to come to church on Sunday. He really enjoyed it and now we have a good relationship. We then had a couple miracles on Saturday while doing our regular missio...

Hey everybody, awesome week, full week, happy Elder Bowen :) We have had some great lessons and moments while helping our friends come closer to Christ. Gabriel is back on his high point and watched General Conference even though he was sick and he absolutely loved it. He watched the Sunday Morning Session when President Nelson spoke and he absolutely was touched. He truly felt the Spirit and we let him know that those good, peaceful feelings were from the Spirit. He has a testimony of the prophet and I think this will be a stable part of his progression and his desire to be baptized. But we really want to let him know that he must be in this for the long haul, not just to say he was baptized. That will really be the kicker and we will see how that goes when we meet with him this week. We also had another great General Conference experience with Robert. We had a lesson actually today and we watched President Nelson's talk as well and it was so perfect for him. He is starting to...

We have been trying hard to get lessons with our friends, but it's been hard with all the meetings going on. It was great to have Gabriel at Zone Conference and I know the Spirit touched his heart about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But he has been stubborn with us and is not trusting in God and saying that God does not love him, which is making his progression kind of stagnant. We have a very roller coaster relationship and it's been really hard to keep the Spirit a constant in his life. It's really hard and we are hoping to have him be the one choosing his path instead of just us telling him what to do. We are keeping the Spirit in our preparation with him and we're going to make sure this week to continue to bring him closer to Christ. He has been our most progressing friend at the moment because inability to meet with people, but we are going to get lessons set up and continue to get people to come unto Christ. We got this great guy to church this week named Tudor and...