Week 66 - Szczecin

Hello all!

   Hope this last week was a good one for you all.  It was good over here for sure.  We didn't have too much in the way of lessons this week, we just had one meeting with K., our investigator.  We read Alma 32 with him and discussed faith.  He wasn't extremely open to the idea of faith, so we'll have to figure out what to do from here.  He's not progressing at the moment, so we'll have to find a way to help him make that progress and gain a testimony as he reads the scriptures and prays.  Other than that, it was a week full of finding and stuff like that.  

On Thursday, we went to a city about an hour and a half north of Szczecin called Świnoujście to visit referrals.  It's right along the German border, and also pretty close to the Baltic Sea.  Unfortunately, all of the people we tried to visit either didn't live there anymore, or they weren't home.  So that was a little disappointing.  The city was super cool.  We also had a little bit of a snowstorm while we were there, so that made things interesting as well. 

It's kind of funny as far as weather goes.  I was also assuming that it was going to be a lot colder here in Szczecin than either Łódź or Kraków.  But so far here, I think the coldest it has gotten is about -3 Celsius.  So like not even worse than Utah haha.  I'm not really sure why that is, maybe it has something to do with the Baltic Sea or something.  Last year in Kraków, it was consistently in the negative teens, and it got all the way down to -25 Celsius.  So I'm pretty lucky I think.  I keep wondering when it will actually get really cold, we'll see if it does. 

On Saturday, there's a park run of some kind we go to every week as a finding idea, and we went there and I decided to run.  It's a 5K, and that was pretty fun.  I think my time was around 26 minutes, which is probably pretty slow, but I'm out of shape, so yea.  I probably haven't run that much since the golf class and going on those 3 mile runs with the baseball team.  Haha those were good times.  I'm still a little sore from that, so we'll see if I do it again this week.  

Sundays, are pretty good.  We only have two hour of church here, probably because of the lack of members to fill different callings, so that's interesting.  I'm actually lined up to give my second talk in sacrament meeting on my mission in about a month, so we'll see how that goes.  Sister Poff and I switch off weeks for playing the piano in sacrament meeting, so yea I'm still playing.  I still only know I think 22 hymns, so I'll have to keep learning new ones.  It looks like Elder Lange and I will generally bless or pass the sacrament, unless I'm playing the piano, then President Trukszyn (branch president) will help out, because we are generally the only 3 priesthood holders in church regularly.  That was probably my favorite spiritual experience from this week, though, I got to bless the sacrament.  I haven't done that in sacrament meeting since Kraków because the members in Łódź would always take care of it, and I love doing that.  I have a spiritually powerful experience participating in the ordinance of the sacrament.  I miss being able to do that every week as a deacon, teacher, and priest. 

This week will hopefully be a good one.  From Tuesday to Thursday, we'll be in a city called Gdańsk on exchanges with the zone leaders.  So that should be interesting, we'll see how it goes.  Our English class is going pretty well, we have about 7 people every time, and most of them stay for the religious discussion afterwards.  So hopefully we can turn some of those people into investigators here soon. We're looking forward to this week and hoping to accomplish some things.  We'll work hard and see how it goes.  Hope you all have a great week!

-Elder Hadfield