Monday, August 18, 2014

Week 20 - Gent

Hoi familie!
This week has taught me a lot, and I've experienced a range of emotions. Some funny things were: a young Belgian teenage girl at a bus stop overheard me saying that I am from America and grabbed my arm and asked if she could touch me and said she's always wanted to go there; after explaining about and giving out a BoM to middle-aged Mr. Witz (means joke in German) he planted a kiss on my cheek instead of shaking my hand (apparently that's a lot more common here than, say, Niceville, Florida); Z. Schwab and I (on exchanges) were running late to our next appt.= literally, we ran barefoot across a neighborhood in Antwerpen to make it there on time.

That night, Z. Schwab and I met this miracle young Dutchman (he actually looks exactly like the blonde kind of bad guy from Saratov Approach) new onderzoeker, Egbert, sitting on a bench outside of the station- we were supposed to be meeting someone who never ended up showing, which was okay because we ended up having an hour lesson on a bench with Egbert. He's obviously been prepared throughout his life for the gospel including multiple running into missionaries all over Europe, and had come up with lots of similar ideas on his own, and was so cool.

Yesterday, we taught an hour-long doorstep lesson (actually more like lessons 1 and 2) to Ruth and it was really neat teaching/ bearing testimony and answering her questions.. even though she still has an attitude of being wary from searching and switching churches for so long and some things sound too good to be true and she is skeptical of the Book of Mormon because BoM prophets aren't mentioned by name in the Bible and knows she wouldn't have chosen to come to this crazy world if she existed before and had the choice, etc.

It turns out we got bad info from two very promising potentials which of course was disappointing, but they know how to get a hold of us if they need to. A cool tradition that the sisters in the mission do is to write down a "wonder" and a "grapje" (“joke”, according to Google Translate) every night in our planners, and it's neat taking a minute to recognize the daily miracles and Lord's hand in our lives- I encourage you to write down a wonder and a grapje every night this week. I'm going to attach some pictures of this beautiful city now! Love you!

Zuster Riley

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