Skip to main content

Alaska Fighting Palm Trees: Round 3

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 to work hard with him to get him baptized on that date. There will be struggles for sure, he has his problems and concerns, and we definitely need to help him be prepared even more than he is now; but he has a great desire to be baptized and really wants to follow God and even with his concerns, he is on the right path and it's exciting! He's a great guy and I think he will be the baptism that sparks the flame here in the west!!

We did a lot of member work this week, including active members and returning members. We met with Emil again and we shared with him the talk from Elder Holland about the importance of the sacrament. We're really trying to make the sacrament an important feature in his life and he's starting to really understand that. He went to Arad this week to visit some friends and he went to church over there which made us pretty happy. Now we really want to focus on setting weekly goals for him to continue to improve on a weekly basis, not just a once in a while basis. We also had a missionary meeting with Vasile and talked about what we could do to improve the missionary work here in Cluj and we had some good discussions. We still want to continue to meet at a more consistent basis with him to help him feel more involved in the branch and in the work. He's another one of those members we want to have a weekly plan for to continue the growth process at a weekly basis. It should be good in the future as we try better to have weekly goals for our members, just like we do with the people we are teaching.

I have recently been loving the verse Moroni 8:16..."Behold, I speak with boldness, having authority from God; and I fear not what man can do for perfect love casteth out all fear." We should not be afraid of what man can do to us, because we are stronger than the natural man if we turn to Christ and look unto Him. If we do so, we will doubt not and we will fear not. I know God loves us and He wants us to overcome the adversary, that's why he gave us the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the fullness of truth. It is our part to use that to our advantage and to destroy the adversary as a lion devours beasts of the fields. So let us wield the sword of the Spirit and vanquish the foe! I love you all and I hope that this week is a great one!!

Va iubesc,
Elder Bowen



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

With Every Hardship, There is Ease

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...

El Ultimo, Sfârşitul, My Final Curtain

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...

Dust of a Joke

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...