WEEK 34: Uneventful Riot

This was a pretty nice week. I translated at church again. This sacrament I also spoke which means Elder Peck helped me translating.  He did great and we talked about humility. I shared the scripture story about the apostles saying "Lord, is it I?" It was a good lesson for me as well to remember that we need to look inwardly. That is a problem I have had with the Slovak people here. I always choose to see their mistakes and shortcomings and it is pretty hard for me to see the good in them. It is hard for me to get past their culture which is very different than ours. It is been something that has held me back from helping them. It's something I have been working on for a while, but I haven't been too successful. This week I was praying really hard to be able to get over this. As I read from the Book of Enos in the Book of Mormon, I was inspired by his dedication and earnestness in prayer for those people who hated him. I decided to keep going in my prayers. After a while I felt like no one was listening and nothing would happen. But later that day, I realized how my attitude and thoughts had slowly been changing that week and I realized that God had helped me so much in little ways over time and I just hadn't see it. I think I needed to hear about humility this week as well to help me see what He has done for me.

Other than that, our week was pretty uneventful. We did have a riot against the European immigrants. The Slovak have been warning us for weeks since it is supposed to be pretty big. We were severely disappointed in the riot. There was a total of about 15-20 people and only one bloke raised his sign. On top of that they stood in one part of the center and were surrounded by a solid 30+ cops. Nothing went down.

Julia is still doing well and seems excited for baptism. She wasn't at church because her son was sick. We are hoping things go well.

I had a good long talk with Dezider and I found out more about his life story. He used to train dogs for the police, he also used to be a welder with the highest level of certification available in Slovakia.  He said he would have welded here if England recognized his license.  He also was a metal worker and made very specifically sized gears for machines heat had to be within 0.002mm of precision. He made some really nice money doing these jobs. He also used to own a little mini-market with foodstuffs. It was quite interesting to hear all of this. It took a while for him to explain what all the words meant so that I could understand because here are pretty scattered topics.

Love you all, I know that this gospel changes lives and that it will lift us up in our trials.

Elder Pace

P.S.  He sent a recording of 1 Nephi 3:7 that he sung in Slovak to the tune of Called to Serve.  It was pretty impressive!  BUT, no pictures!