Hungary for the Gospel: Heaven Is Cheering You On

Hello everyone!!

I'm really starting to love the MTC! Everyone is so awesome and my district and zone are fantastic!! Hungarian is coming along and my comp and I are practically SYLing (Speak Your Language) at every chance we get!

Tuesday we had a devotional by Elder Neilson of the Seventy and he talked about how to measure success as a missionary! It was super cool listening to the stories of his three sons and how all had successful missions even though each had a different amount of baptisms! It was really cool getting to meet him and his wife later on in the week while me and my companion were walking to our class!

Our lessons went really well with our investigator! We struggled on our second and third lesson but we prayed really hard to be able to have a good last couple of lessons. We ended up getting a commitment from her to be baptized from our last scheduled lesson! However, it turns out that she was a returned missionary from Hungary (who my comp knew beforehand and didn't tell me haha oh well). She told us after the lessons that the reason why she committed to baptism was because she felt the spirit in what we told her was true! It's weird but I'm actually starting to teach better in Hungarian than I am in English. I feel that with Hungarian I can keep things simple and rely on the spirit more because I don't know too much. After all it is by simple things that great things come to pass! On the other hand, with English, I feel that I complicate things too much!

Another plus: I'm actually starting to understand at least 50% of what my teacher is saying! It's so cool being able to understand and feel that the gift of tongues is at work everyday!

On Wednesday, a bunch of new missionaries came in (around 750) and my companion kept greeting everyone by yelling in the most cheerful voice possible: "Sziasztok Elderek! Örömell fogatok a MTC!" (translation: Hello Elders! Welcome to the MTC!) It was so funny seeing the missionary's reactions! I almost felt bad for them because it did sound a little intimidating lol

We had a mission president seminar this week and 171 new mission presidents and their wives came in for training from Wednesday through Thursday. The whole quorum of the twelve apostles and President Eyring and President Uchdorf all came but unfortunately we didn't see them. However, you could definitely tell that there was a powerful spirit on campus!

Yesterday we got to go to BYU and get some lunch at the Morris Center because the gym and the cafeteria were getting set up for the week after the seminar! It was glorious eating real food for once after a week of fast food haha (The MTC staff provided us with fast food because of the seminar).

Now for the title. I was on LDS.org and I came across Elder Holland's talk from the last General Conference called "Tomorrow the Lord Will do Wonders Among You." After watching it I felt a spirit of confirmation that what he said was true. Heaven is cheering us all on in all that we do!

Keep trying and never give up!

Szeret (love),

Elder Ballard