Week 13: Exchanges and R & R

Hey everybody! I'm totally short on time today, so this has to be brief.

Notable events for the week: exchanges on Thursday, and our R & R meeting on Friday. And no, R & R doesn't stand for Rest and Relaxation. :) It stands for Return and Report.

On Thursday, I temporarily got to be companions with Elder Mangeris, who is awesome. He is a wizard at these languages. People argue with him when he says he's not native. He can speak with their accent. Awesome guy. While we were on the street, we actually stopped someone who listened and talked with us. He essentially had the same question as Joseph Smith, "Why are there so many churches with different doctrines, if there's only one truth?" We talked about the apostasy shortly and went into the first vision and The Book of Mormon. That was really cool to get to do. 

It is notably cold here as of this week, especially in the mornings and at night, of course. Last p-day we went shopping, and I got a big black missionary-ly coat. It has fur a bit on the inside and is really nice. I also got a hat and some gloves.

Here's me in my new coat I bought in Serbia

On Friday we had Return & Report in Beograd/Belgrade. That's basically a meeting to check on how new missionaries (such as myself) are doing. Really good stuff. I got to see 4 of the other Elders from our MTC district. It was really good to get to see them as well as President Grant, who we each had personal interviews with. We also got to listen to him and the APs talk to us about goal setting and stuff like that.We each went up in front of the whole group with someone else role-playing as an investigator, and had 5 minutes to briefly teach one of the 3 main missionary lessons, or about the Book of Mormon. We've been practicing that of course, since we knew it was coming. I thought it went pretty well. Got good feedback. I got a lot out of it.

This week's homework is 2 Nephi 32 and 33. They are short chapters, but they talk about how we can learn from the Spirit.

Have a great week!

--

Elder Ryan Echols
Adriatic North Mission
Svačićev Trg 3/1
HR-10000 Zagreb
Croatia

Serbian Waffle Fries!