Hungary for the Gospel: Teaching a Native!

Hey Everyone!

This week was super cool! On Monday we got to work in the Provo Temple by helping tear apart the carpet and such. Oh, I forgot to tell you about one of the elders in my district! His name is Elder Gentry and he is committed to playing BYU football once he gets back! He's super huge! He was the elder in the middle in the picture I took on the first week! While we were working on the temple, he literally by himself like ripped apart the entire carpet in one of the rooms! It was insane! Needless to say without him we probably wouldn't even get half of what we did that day!

On Tuesday we had our first lesson with a new fake investigator (my teacher) and it didn't go as well as I hoped. But I did get to sing in the largest choir in the world on Tuesday! The MTC choir had almost a thousand missionaries singing for the Tuesday Devotional and it was fantastic! We sang "Hurrah to Israel" to Elder Arnold of the Seventy! He gave a great talk about the Godhead and forgetting past sins and transgressions!

On Wednesday I got to host the new missionaries! I don't know why but I felt super happy! I guess just two weeks ago I was going through what they were going through so I just tried to help them in any way I could!

We had a lot better lesson with our investigator on Thursday on Friday! I felt the spirit a lot stronger in the lesson and we helped her commit to reading the Mormon Könyve (Book of Mormon)! Cool thing that happened on Thursday was that I ran into Elder Reis from The District!! He looked a lot older than he was in the videos but he was super nice!

We had our first TRC lessons on Friday! TRC is when we teach lessons to actual members in Hungarian! The first lesson we taught was super spiritual! The member was a student at BYU and we taught about prophets and revelation! I was super nervous at first to just express my feelings without looking at my notes but as the lesson went on I got enough courage to just say what I felt was right! The lesson went a whole lot better! Sometimes we just need to just forget how scared we are to do something and do what Nike and Shia Labeouf say: "Just Do It!"

The second lesson is where the title comes in. We got to teach a Hungarian Native who was also a student at BYU. I'm telling you, she spoke the fastest Hungarian I have ever heard! I did pick out several words and phrases but it was so intense! The lesson wasn't as spiritual as the first but I learned a lot from it! It turns out that Hungarian people express what they like by expressing how they feel when they do it instead of just labeling it like how we do it in English. Instead of saying "it was fun" they say "I was happy doing it!" Fun fact haha.

On Saturday we had a special July 4th devotional and we got to watch the fireworks from the Stadium of Fire! We got to stay up until 11:30 which felt really weird.

Yesterday we had fast Sunday! Me and my comp are becoming zone leaders this next Sunday so my branch president instructed me and my comp as to what our responsibilities are! I'm super excited to welcome all the new missionaries in our district next week! All the Albanians, Dutch, and Turks will be gone by next week so we'll be the vets!

Cool/spiritual thing of this week: I found out from the Turks and other missionaries that the Istanbol aiport was bombed last week which was super sad!! There are only three missionaries in the MTC that are going to Turkey and as I mentioned earlier they are in my zone! (Elder Grover is one of them) What was incredible to me was seeing how unshaken they were when they found out! Next week they are heading to that same Istanbol airport and going out to preach the word of God to those people! They mentioned to me that just as long as they remain obedient they will be safe! Obedience after all is the first law of heaven and as we all stay obedient the Lord will bless us and be by our left and our right!

Sziasztok,

Elder Ballard