Mark your calanders!

Mark your calendars so you can be at Sky Harbor Airport to welcome Jordan home. He will arrive:

Tuesday June 15th
, 2010
at 5:30 pm

on British Airways to Phoenix.

Everyone is invited to welcome him off the plane!

Monday, June 15, 2009

Monday June 15th, 2009

Hello family from Plzen

This past week has been full of many adventures and experiences from saying goodbye in Trebic to getting to know Plzen. So I guess I can start off from Trebic, Tuesday we had like 6 meetings with investigators to say goodbye so we made the best out of the situation and had some good meetings to help our investigators progress. Marcella our librarian friend it turns out has been talking to her son and daughter quite a bit about us. We went over to her apartment for the first time and she had probably a good thousand books but the one lying on her night stand was the Book of Mormon which is always a good sign. She told us that she just feels the spirit radiating off of us which is always good.

Tomas Kouptik we were teaching him and we weren't planning on giving him a baptisimal date but i was feeling the spirit so i popped it out on him and he accepted, he will be getting baptized in 4 weeks and Vojtak is doing awesome he will be getting baptized this Saturday.

My 5 1/2 hour train ride went well, as luck would have it I got on the same train as another missionary from Brno so we were together for about 3 hours talking about how the work is going and what ideas we had for our new areas and districts. Elder Graham was waiting for me at the train station with the rest of the district we dropped my stuff off and headed off to teach a lesson to a investigator and get all settled in.

My first district meeting went well I focused it on helping our investigators have spiritual experiences and had it 2 parts the first part on them having spiritual experiences in our meetings with three points of emphasis to help us accomplish that.

1. Love in the companionship so we can have the spirit with us and so that our investigators can tell that we are completely unified.

2. Testifying and about how that brings the spirit

3. Working from PMG to help improve our teaching skills. The second part was on teaching our investigators how to have spiritual experiences on their own away from our meetings. It went really well and I was pretty happy with how it went. We have a good district here, there is my companion Elder Graham from Oregon, Elder Mcfarland from Utah he grew up on a dairy farm and is a real nice guy and Elder Lance a wrestler from California it makes for a good mix.

Thursday after district meeting we were in this park contacting and there was nobody there and we were like dang there is no body here this is a waste of time we should leave, but then we were like well we put down that we would be here so we will give it a shot. As we continue walking we see this young man walking towards us and we start talking with him and then sit down on a bench and he starts sharing with me about how he wants to become clean and feel good so we taught him about Christ and repentance and then gave him a chapter to read in the Book of Mormon about repentance we set up another meeting for Saturday.

Well Saturday comes along and we are there and here comes Vratislav (thats his name) we sit down and he tells us about how he has been wanting to control his thoughts and lately he has had a lot of bad thoughts even though he wants to have good thoughts. He goes on to explain that while reading in the Book of Mormon he had no problem controlling his thoughts, he read the chapter and quite a bit more. As we started talking with him more it came up that he has never been baptized and as we talked about that he expressed a desire that it would be something he would like. So we set up a date and talked with him about how it would go and now he is working to get baptized on July 18th. I felt like i was in South America with him, find somebody and than two days later commit to baptism.

Saturday we had a service project for the branch. There is a big backyard behind the church and they had all this brush they need to get rid of so we were helping them burn it for about 3 hours, haha it seemed way too fun to be service just throwing wood in a fire it was a good way to start getting to know some members in the branch. Church went well there is a very nice medium size branch here in Plzen. There are a lot of older people who were baptized during communism and are way strong plus two families with young kids. There were 36 people at church on Sunday. I was asked to give a talk about how members can help us missionaries progress the work, which is always a great opportunity and I think the members took my talk pretty well.

Today we decided to start off the transfer with a district trip to get unity going strong so we headed off to Karlovy Vary. Its this town famous for its spas and natural springs and famous for guys for the fact that the hotel from casino royal (James Bond) with the poker game is in this town. Its probably the most beautiful town I have been in and we met up there with Elder Andersen and his family since he is with them here touring around. You buy these little cups and you walk through the town drinking water from the fountains its pretty fun except for the fact the water doesnt taste good. I guess what you are supposed to do is go see a doctor and he tells you what is wrong and he assigns a certain fountain from you to drink from. They say if you drink from too many different fountains you might get diarrhea but i couldn't resist trying all of them and so far i am fine but i guess we shall see :)

Well that is about all from me this week, I am working hard over here in the Czech Republic and loving every minute of it. Here is my new address for here in Plzen

Jordan Hatch
Elisky Krasnohorske 20
301 00 Plzen
Czech Republic

Have a great week I love you all

Love,
Elder Hatch

No comments: