Monday August 10th, 2009

Hello family and friends

It has been another busy and crazy week here in plzen, you may be wondering if i am staying here in plzen or leaving and who will be my companion. I got a call from president this morning telling me i am staying here in plzen as district leader and asking me to train this next transfer, so i have no idea who my new companion is but i am going to go to prague on wednesday to pick him. I am excited for the new adventure of training but also a little nervous because i dont want to screw up but i know the lord will help me. Also i get to help Elder Graham take all his stuff in to prague for his trip home and i will get to see elder chambers before he goes home as well.

So i have good news and bad news this week about vratislav, the bad news is that he had his baptismal interview on tuesday and we felt like he was so close but just not quite there so we decided to push his baptism back by two weeks to prepare for it more. I was scared how he was going to take it but the good news is it gave him even more motivation and he is even more dedicated to being a life time member of the church and helping it grow. He was there at church again on sunday 10 minutes early for the full three hours i think it was his 7th week in a row being at church.

We gave a baptismal date to our vietnamese investigator hoa this week we read a scripture with him where we are commanded to be baptized and recieve the holy ghost and we said hoa will you keep this commandment and follow Jesus Christ to be baptized he thought about it and was like yeah i want to be baptized, so he is comitted to coming to church every week to be prepared for his baptisim on september 12th.

I was asked this last week to give a talk again, and they must of liked my first talk because they asked me to talk on the same topic again on how the members can help the missionary work. After wards one of the members came up and asked us for a book of mormon so she could give it to her friend who she has been thinking about sharing the gospel with so I guess the Lord helped at least one person understand my talk well.

John is doing well he had to go to Germany for his uncles funeral but we were still able to meet with him, he wasnt able to make it to church which he was dissapointed about but said he will be there next week.

We worked really hard this last week to finish off the transfer strong we were 1 new investigator away from accomplishing our weekly goals so we set the goal we werent going to go home sunday until we found that new investigator and at about 7 oclock last night we found him, a guy from bulgaria that we are meeting with again tonight so with persaverence and help from the lord anything is possible.

Haha alyssa kindly informed me that my sunglasses are pretty girly but dont worry i knew that myself it was kind of a running joke but i found some new ones in the apartment so no worries i now have some cheap aviators which hopefully are less girly looking.

Our man who loves the bible and pseudophriagaia (as you can see my spelling skills have not improved) asked us this week if we could baptized him. He had been baptized before but was reading in the book of mormon about how we need to be baptized by proper authority and he was like i believe that your church has that authority which was a shock for us because when we first met him he thought as long as you have faith God gives you authority by the spirit. Now the next step is we need to help him see the importance of church he thinks he can just take the sacrament on his own but he has already come so far I am sure the Lord will help him conqure this concern.

well that is about all for this week oh and we are back up to 4 missionaries here in plzen Elder Kartchner from snowflake arizona will be training a missionary here too, he is from the Kartchner caves family that is his grandpa or great grandpa i think.

Love
Elder Hatch