Iowa to Romania

Elders Dahl, Stark, Bowen, Landon Hey everyone!! This was one of those awesome weeks for us here in Cluj-Napoca! We were able to have many lessons with people and when we didn't have lessons, we had great finding activities and that led to finding more and more friends. Probably the best part of this week was that we had a lesson with a great guy named Alexandru. We met him while walking on the street and doing contacting by the way towards the church. We stopped him and he expressed how he loved singing at church so we invited him to church. Unfortunately, he was out of town but we eventually set up a lesson with him and it was super awesome! We were teaching the Restoration and that led to a super spiritual discussion with him. He discussed how he got on the path towards God and everything he was sharing was something that related to our lives and we shared our experiences with the Gospel blessing us and helping us know of God's love for us. That brought the Spirit...

This week was a really interesting, but great week. For me, it was spent mostly outside of Cluj, but we still did great work wherever we were. We've still been working hard to work with Gabriel, our man on baptismal date, and it's been good/bad. He is continuing to read the Book of Mormon and a Gospel Principles book and is really liking it, but he has been pretty flaky as well. He's been making excuses to not come to lessons or to church and when we asked him if we could visit him at his place, he was very against the idea. We hope that this week is better and that we can sit down with him and reset our expectations, especially with coming to church. He has good desires, but I don't know if he is looking for the eternal perspective. We also are working with Robert, the miracle man. He is a very open person, and he is willing to pray to find the truth. We hope that this week we can continue to help grow his faith and trust in God. Other than that, we haven'...

Hey everyone this was an AWESOME week!!!!!!!! Splits in Sibiu! Even with some lessons falling through, we worked hard and we were able to see the fruits of our labors and those fruits were the greatest things I have ever tasted. What was great was that we continued our hot streak of talking to people and yet again, we didn't have a single day under 10 conversations. We just talked with everyone and we were persistent as well with these people. That lead to us finding 7 new friends this week, and at least one new person every single day. Needless to say, the Spirit was strong with us and that led to so many miracles and fire moments for us. I would like to share a few of those with you. The first that I want to share is about a man named Robert. I met Robert on Friday on our exchange with Sibiu while we were walking to the church building. I saw him in the distance and felt a strong prompting to talk to him. So I did and we starting having a really good conversation. He was ...

Salut tuturor copiilor porumbului! First off, I now know my new companion!! He is an awesome guy named Elder Stark from American Fork, Utah and let me tell you, we are going to have a great time!! We are both super excited to get to work with him in this awesome city! This was an amazing week for us here in Cluj!I think the coolest thing about this week was not only that we hit the standards of excellence every day, but we exceeded them everyday! Elder Stark and I have been trying our best to talk to everyone, contacting by the way, and trying new everything. Because of that, we had an average of around 15-20 conversations each day. It felt super good just to talk to people and bring souls unto Christ! Now we have more people in our teaching pool and we are ready to set up many more lessons. We also found some referrals for missionaries in Turkey and Italy so great things are happening for all nations! We have also been trying to set up more lessons with people, but everyone has ...

Hey everyone! This was a crazy week for sure! So transfers happened and good news, I am not leaving Cluj!! But I will not be with Elder Dahl because we are both training new elders up here!! I'm still a Zone Leader, but I am on double duty now which is pretty crazy, but I am super excited! This next transfer will be a great one!! On the train. We truly finished the transfer strong, both as a companionship and as a zone. This week we really wanted to find people and teach lessons, getting back to the basics of everything. We had a companionship study and focused on improving our finding so we can have more people taking the lessons and coming to church. We focused on finding new areas of contacting, better teaching in finding situations, and varying our finding methods. We found great success this week with varying our methods, as we found 3 new people from the Area Book that we had not tried yet. One of those was a man named Florin, who came to church and really wants to le...

Hey y'all hope you haven't been consumed by copiii porumbului because this was a great week! We have been continuing to work with the people we have already and while it's been going well, it's a very slow process. We had a lesson with a guy named Andrei and that went super well! He likes meeting with us and wants to read the Book of Mormon and pray, but now the problem is his desire to come to church. So we have decided to start slow with simple doctrinal points to help grow his testimony and desire to come to church. So we started with faith and just discussed the importance of faith and how we can grow our faith. We invited him to read Ether 12 on faith and we'll meet up with him again this week to follow up. We wanted to meet up with Elisei this week, but he always had things come up so he couldn't meet or come to church. He's our closest to baptism and we know we will set a baptismal date with him once he comes to church. We didn't do as much as...

Hey Fam and Friends and Copiii Porumbului!! This was a very solid week and we feel really good heading into this new week. Probably the greatest thing that happened this week was that we starting teaching this younger guy named Elisei. He's in his early 20s and was found from our English classes. He was pretty excited to meet with us and we managed to have 2 great lessons with him. The first was on the Restoration and he really seemed to enjoy it. We gave him a Book of Mormon and he was willing to read it to find the truth. We then had a follow-up lesson to see how everything was going. He unfortunately did not read the assigned passage, so we read with him. It was only the introduction, but he really liked what it was about and felt good about that. Afterwards, we went into the Plan of Salvation and that was pretty awesome. He was asking great questions and he was reiterating what we taught in his own understanding and he loved it. He prayed at the end of the lesson thanking G...