November 24th, 2008

Hello Family

I just got back from an exciting day in Prague, we had a zone vs zone turkey bowl today with Prague zone vs my zone Hradec Kralova and then afterwards we headed over to the Mission home for some kfc fried chicken and some pie provided by sister slovacek. It was a good time to catch up with all the different missionaries, have some fun and eat some good food. We lost 14=7 in the snow but it was still good. Liberec has gotten about 6 inches of snow in the last two days and it is still coming down slowly, it is a little difficult walking down steep icy cobblestone streets in dress shoes but i am starting to master that ability.

We had an awesome week here and were able to see some really cool things happen with the work here. The members in this branch are awesome we taught with every single member multiple times this last week they are always so willing to help us with the work.

Something amazing happened on tuesday, we had 4 meetings set up with investigators and we worked the phones and were able to set up to get a member to be at every single one but every single invistigator cancled on us which was very unusual since these were 4 of our most reliable so elder nowland and i were pretty discourage but we decided to keep on keepin on and went tracting instead. And it payed off we found a sweet family, we were in this pannalok and saw this massive double wide stroller sitting outside one of the doors we knocked on it and this guy came and answered and started talking to us, he apologised and said he couldnt invite us in because his wife was gone and his daughter was sick but he would stand and talk with us there so we were talking with him for a couple of minutes and then his wife showed up which we thought would end the contact because that is what usually happended but she went in dropped off her grocerys and than was like honey why dont you invite them in to talk? So we sat and talked with them they have a 4 year old daughter and 4 month old twins a boy and girl. I taught him about the BoM and showed him moroni's promise while she was changing diapers and than he called his wife over and started teaching her about the BoM how it goes along with the bible as another testament of Christ and than he asked me to find that verse again so she could read it. They are about 30 and he used to be a priest but than met his wife and decided he would much rather have a family. We are going to go visit them this week we were supposed to go again on friday but the wife got really sick and had to go to the hospital, it was just a really cool experience to see that the blessings come after the trials.

Lukas hasnt smoked a cigarette in over a week and now has a baptismal date for January 3rd, Zemon also has accepted the invitation to be baptized January 3rd he is the man, there was a huge snowstorm sunday morning and he was still at church 20 minutes early. The other lukas is still on for this saturday being baptized so we are being very blessed up here in liberec with the work.

Thursday i had to teach a lesson by myself which was quite the experience, we had a new investigator show up right after we found somebody on the street so i taught the one we just found for about 10 minutes and than a member came in and helped me but it was nice to see how far along my czech skills had come to where i could speak and teach. People say that the Czech Republic is the 3rd most atheist country in the world and the pope said it is the most abominable country in the world but we are finding plenty of prepared people to hear the good word. I hope everybody has a great week next week i will let you know if i am staying or going i personally think i am staying but we shall see what happens.

Love
Elder Hatch