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, July 27, 2009

Monday July 27th, 2009

Hey family

Another week has come and gone in plzen and it has been another busy week of teaching and finding like always.

I finally got that christmas in July package thankyou so much for sending that it was great to get from you and i wore the tie to church and everybody loved it. It was quiet the adventure to get the package so it was sent to plzen but the slip never showed up in the mailbox so they sent it back to prague and put a paper in saying i would have to go to prague to get it. Luckily we had zone conference so we were going to be in prague so i could get it we got to prague early to find the postal office but after that everything went downhill, i had called up some missionaries to get directions but they were bad so we ended up lost in this section of prague but i was able to talk to some people on the street and get directions, we got the package but since we had bad directions we ended up being 10 minutes late to zone conference which is always embarrassing and on the subway to zone conference we got seperated- elder lance didnt get on the subway we did but luckily we both had phones so we were able to get back together at the next stop but than our tickets expired by 3 minutes on the subway and we got busted and had to pay 700 krowns. But we got to zone conference safely and even though i was pretty upset about the morning i got in a good mood again from the great conference and everything turned around into an awesome day.

Little did i know but when i had gotten busted on the subway i had to show my passport and i put it back in my pocket or so i thought but i must of missed the pocket because after lunch a missionary came up to me with my passport and handed it to me and said somebody had found it in the metro and brought it to the building and dropped it off because my visa had the address on it i wasnt even able to thank the guy but lets just say my day quickly turned into why are all these bad things happening to me to wow i am so blessed and then after conference we had some great meetings in plzen.

We have this investigator pepa who is a 19 year old electrical engineer student and he lives in a little village and for the summer doesnt every come to plzen but he had to go there for an emergency at work and afterwards he had an hour to kill before his train left so he decided to go check the town square to see if by chance we would be there cuz he wanted to talk to us and sure enough we had gotten to the town square only 10 minutes before hand from prague. we sat down and answered a lot of his questions and taught him from the book of mormon.

a funny note while we were running around prague all morning we had a box full of samurai swords we had to lug around with us because a missionary had left them in our apartment but had suddenly decided he couldn't live without them, we were going to walk into zone conference with them tied to our backs as a joke but since we were late we decided that wouldn't be the best idea.

So we have this investigator named vaclav who is in love with the bible and also the apocrypha and psedouphigira (which luckily kamille's grandpa had explained to me). So at one of our meetings this week he shows up with 2 pages of notes and gave them to us, we look at them and he is like you can use this to show people the book of mormon is true. It was all taken from king benjamins talk and had cross reference with a million bible and other scriptures showing how it agreed with everything from the bible and nothing contradicted it and also all the questions it answers. We gave him the conference magazine and he ate it up, in another meeting this week he started talking and was like "your church... i mean our church explains this really well". Hopefully we will get him a baptismal date soon, we are trying to get him to church before hand because that makes it alot firmer.

Vratislav is doing great he will be baptized in 2 weeks which is the weekend before elder graham goes home. We taught him about fasting this last week and he decided to fast this last weekend for strength to make his baptism.

Our vietnamese hopes got killed off a little bit this week, the two vietnamese woman were transferred by their factory to a little town in the middle of nowhere, so we are going to have to try and figure out where that is and go visit them.

The ptakovi the family from brno were in plzen again visiting family so we met with them and taught them, they want to be baptized but they keep on putting it off so hopefully one of these days they will take the step. Well that is about all for this week family, the threesome is going strong and we are working hard. Have a great week everyone

Love
Elder Hatch

Monday, July 20, 2009

Monday July 20th, 2009

Hey everybody sounds like the beach went well and everybody enjoyed the cool weather and are not burning to death at home. Life is going well here in the threesome we are working hard and having some good success. This week everybody and their dog gave us a referral which was sweet, we got 4 new investigators from referrals. Our investigator hoa the vietnamese guy brought his girlfriend and girlfriends sister and we were teaching them english and then after a little while of that they were like ok thats enough english teach us about Jesus and God so we started teaching them and neither of them understand english too much so we just show them stuff to read in the vietnamese book of mormon and they soak it all in. Hoa transtlates for us so we might be having a little vietnamese section of the branch here, sacrament meeting will consist of a speaker in czech me translating to english and Hoa translating to vietnamese hopefully too much isnt lost in translation.

Another one of our investigators Pepa the one whose testimony of the book of mormon was strengthened by albert einstein gave us his girlfriend as a referral so we are teaching both of them together.

Vratislav is still doing great we are looking for him to be baptized in the next couple of weeks. I slipped playing soccer on saturday and twisted my ankle so i have been limping around a little bit but its fine, not broken or anything just a little swollen.

I taught the priesthood lesson yesterday in Church and it went really well, its from the Joseph Smith manual and was on prayer and personal revelation which is super important and needs to be how everybody gains their testimony. That's the thing we hit on big time with talking to people on the street that we aren't here to persuade them to believe like us, but we are here to show them how they can find out these things for themselves.

I got a haircut again from a czech haircutter and luckily i didn't get a fohawk like last time, this time she was czech and not ukrainian so we were able to communicate just fine. The zone leaders came down to vist us this last week which is always a fun time to go out and work with them.

I think that is about all for this week sorry nothing too exciting we are just keeping real busy with teaching and finding people. I hope everybody has a great week and remember to choose the right. And thanks for all the cards from everybody I got those today.

Love
Elder Hatch

Sunday, July 12, 2009

group picture!

A picture of the Prague Zone missionaries.





Jordan is in the top row, 4th from the left.

Monday, July 6, 2009

Monday June 6th, 2009

Hey family

It sounds like you all had a great week with your different adventures of Havasuipi, Colorado, life guarding and dentistry. It sounds like dad had a great birthday. I got the packages you sent thank you for that, the pink cookies are delicious, there is an awesome article in that church news you sent me about the senior couple who got sent to Turks and Caicos- that is crazy the amount of success they are having. And now I can up my morning workouts another notch with the new cord. Every night after nightly planning my companion and I have a pull up contest which pushes both of us.

We had a big 4th of July branch party on saturday which was a good time, we made hot dogs and pancakes and the Branch President cooked up a big pot of chili and it was a good time to mingle with members and investigators. We were a little worried that nobody might show up but we had 30 people there and everybody had a good time, we played jeopardy with questions about America. Sad to say but this geography bee winner is getting a little rusty on his American geography. For longest river in America I was like oh piece of cake mississippi but its missouri incase you didnt know. Must of had to get rid of that for there to be room for all the czech i am learning.

We taught vratislav about tithing and the 10 commandments and he is still excepting everything like a champ, the branch did a good job of including him in sunday school and making him feel welcome which was good.

So I don't know if i had said this earlier but there are quite a few older women in this branch and we go visit them for home teaching and they love to feed us and tell us all of their stories since they get pretty lonely sometimes. One of the women we visited this week was baptized in 1948 and was the first person baptized in plzen, she basically ran the branch during communism and translated for the first missionaries she is like 85 but speaks English perfectly.

There are university dorms at the same tram stop as us and there is this big music camp going on here for the summer, one day on the tram a group of 3 came up to us and asked us if we know english. It turns out they are from BYU and one of the guys roommates was my first roommate at BYU Blake the super tall viola player, so it is a pretty small world. They came to church on sunday and the branch loved having them there.

It was a little rough of a weekend for us, my companion recieved news saturday that his grandfather died and it was pretty rough on him. But he got up in church yesterday and bore a beautiful testimony about the plan of salvation and that he will see his grandfather again, it was very touching.

Congratulations Jenni and Mason on passing the Dental exam that is great. Safe travels to the beach everyone and i look forward to hearing from you next week. Thank you for all of your prayers and support on my behalf it is very appreciated. I love this work I am doing here and there is no better feeling than serving the Lord.

Love
Elder Hatch

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Monday June 29th, 2009

hello family.

well i just wrote a super long email and lost it for the first time on my mission because the computer froze up which i am pretty upset about but i will try and rewrite everything quickly.

So we just got back from Prague where we were renewing visa work, it used to be a big hassle for visa work you would have to be in line at 2 in the morning and fight with the Ukrainian mafia for spots in the line and then you were there until 4 in the afternoon, but about 3 months ago they changed it so Americans are away from the Ukrainians so now we just went in at 10 in the morning and then we were done an hour later so we lost the adventure but gained the sleep. We had to do the visa work because next month my group will have been in the country for a year which is pretty crazy, it was cool to see my whole MTC group all at once again though it is great to see how we have all grown.

So this last Monday we had zone conference which is always a strong spiritual boost being around the other missionaries and President Slovacek. So we took that spiritual boost with us out onto the streets of Plzen right afterwords and found a sweet 19 year old electrical engineer. We talked with him about the purpose of life and than sat down with him on a bench to talk about the Book of Mormon, we gave him a BOM and recommended Alma 40-42 because he was interested in what happens after death. So at our next meeting on Wednesday he was like well i know the BOM is true, i was like wow how do you know that and he starts talking about how it says in there that for God time doesn't exist and that Einstein discovered some time thing that says the same thing (it is pretty difficult to follow Einsteins time theory in czech by the way) but that the BOM was translated 100 years before Einstein discovered that so the only way the Nephites could of gotten that knowledge is from God. We then shared the Joseph smith story with him and he agreed with it, he left out of town the next day for a week but he sent us a text on friday that he has been talking to his girlfriend about the BOM and now she is interested and wants her own copy.

Other good news is we have another baptismal date her name is veronika and she was at church for the 2nd time yesterday. And it turns out that she and the branch presidents wife were best friends in elementary school and junior high (the branch president was out of town the first time she was there) so there is an automatic member friend. One of the hardest things about the missionary work here I would say is finding a good member friend for our investigators and than lining their schedules up so we can meet with them.

Vratislav was at church as well so that made for a successful week having both of our baptismal dates there. A good experience that taught me a lesson I had last night. We were walking home for the night from our tramstop and it was getting later and I had to do call ins, and we saw this old guy sitting on a bench and I had a thought that I should contact him but I kind of fought it because I hate talking to old guys, they are so stubborn and just want to tell you how you know nothing because you are young and haven't experienced life. But I have been talking a lot about going the extra mile in district meeting so I was like well guess I better not be a hypocrite and I started talking to him. It turns out he is really religious which is unusual for a czech guy he has 16 different bibles and we introduced the Book of Mormon to him. It started pouring at that point so we set up a lesson for tonight to teach him more. So just another lesson of go the extra mile and follow those little promptings.

Sad news vojta didn't get baptized, a couple days before the baptism his parents withdrew their consent to be baptize and since he is 17 he needs that, so now they need to get their consent again. Well that is about all for this week i love you and i am glad Alyssa enjoyed EFY and that Ian enjoyed the economics camp for leaders i had that same leader and that is great a professor was from liberec. Have a good birthday on Sunday dad you will have something coming in the mail but it may be a little late.

Love
Elder Hatch

Saturday June 20th, 2009

Hello everybody

This email will probably be quitw the surprise for you all, we have zone conference next monday and they moved p-day to saturday and didnt tell us until after last P-day but it is ok you can still write me tomorrow and next sunday.

It has been a pretty packed week for us here in Plzen, the zone leaders came down on Tuesday for district meeting and went on splits with us and spent the night, and then the whole Prague district came down wednesday morning and we had a big flood and street display here in plzen which worked out really good we were able to find alot of good people to work with and teach. We have some really good zone leaders and it was great going out and finding with them and learning new things to advance the work.

Elder Price (Zone Leader) and i had a good experience of not judging people and talking to everybody. We were in a park talking to people and we were about to leave and there was one woman left she was about 30 something and dressed like she wanted to be 18 and had a piercing in her chin, as we were leaving the park we were like what the heck we will give it a shot and go talk to her. As we were talking to her she started opening up about how she has a 12 year old daughter and a boyfriend and they are the most important things in her life but they dont give her any time because all they do is sit on the computer and watch tv. So we talked to her about how she has a heavenly father who always loves her and wants a relationship with her and she just broke down crying and we talked with her about how she could gain that knowledge for herself. We set up to go teach her and her family so we shall see how that goes.

Thursday we were running around all day teaching people who were found the day before and then Thursday night we caught a bus to Prague, i stayed in the office elders apartment and got up early the next morning to head to brno with the AP's for leadership conference while my companion stayed in Prague with the other missionaries there. After a full day in brno learning a bunch of good stuff we headed back to Prague where my companion and i caught the last bus to plzen and got home at 9:30 needless to say it was a very long day of traveling but well worth it from all that was learned there.

I was able to see Lenka in Brno and she got the CTR ring that you sent her and she loved it. It was a good one you sent her it actually said choose the right, its funny because for a long time it was translated wrong and was translated as vote correctly.

I am going back to prague on monday for zone conference and then i have to go back in a week to get my visa renewed, i never thought that i would travel around so much as a missionary.

Vratislav is doing good in our meeting last week he started telling us about how when he met us in the park that he never goes home that way but that when the bus came to his stop a women came in with a stroller and blocked the exit so he wasn't able to get off in time and had to wait until the next stop to get off so he went a different way and met us. He told us that he knew that happened for a reason so he could meet us and get the Book of Mormon, which is music to every missionaries ears.

My companion and I are getting along great he is a great elder and has a good desire to work hard as a missionary. That is about all for this week i hope everybody has a great week and be smart and do good stuff.

Love
Elder Hatch