WATCHING CONFERENCE IN CZECH

 Hey everyone, happy Conference weekend! It's been another fantastic week here in Pardubice, this week has been both incredibly busy and really slow. We've had a lot to do between service projects, finding, zone conference and General Conference. But as far as our friends progressing, unfortunately little has happened. With the weather getting colder, a lot of our friends have gotten sick and couldn't meet with us. We've been praying for them and we are hopeful that we can continue working with them soon.

As far as highlights of the week go, service was really good, zone conference was awesome and General Conference was amazing. For service this week we helped a family in the ward pack up their stuff so that they can move. We also helped do renovation work on the house of another member in our ward again this week. I always love service, renovation work is especially fun, we've had to do a fair amount of demolition work to prepare the house for its new additions. This week we removed bricks from the floor, chiseled cement off of them and stacked them in a big pile, it was a lot of fun. 

Zone conference was really good this week, though it was sad, our new zone is a lot smaller now. We had zone conference in Czech for the first time this week, I was happy to discover that I understood everything that was said, though I have to say that understanding missionaries speaking Czech and understanding Czechs speaking Czech are two very different things. Haha. We had some really great trainings about the Book of Mormon, and holding onto faith in the midst of trials. There was also a big emphasis on including the ward in missionary work. We took a look at some statistics from European missions and it turns out that people who are introduced to the missionaries by a member are about 18 times more likely to be baptized, so that's pretty crazy. I kind of feel bad for my time before my mission, missionary work wasn't even on my radar and I can't say that I ever really knew or worked with the missionaries that served in my home ward. I guess I know now for when I come back home. Haha. We're trying to work on a new ward mission plan that will help the members here get more involved with the missionary work here, so I'm really excited about that. 

General Conference was amazing, I can't say that I've ever looked forward to conference so much as I do now as a missionary. Conference is such an amazing time and opportunity for revelation and guidance, I'm so grateful for our living prophet and apostles. Watching conference is interesting here in Czechia because of the time difference, we watched the Saturday morning session live on Saturday night, and then we watched the Saturday afternoon session Sunday morning. We went to the Hradec Králové ward building to watch Conference on Sunday and we invited our friends to watch with us. We had one friend show up which was awesome, but that also meant that we had to watch conference in Czech. Haha. I was able to understand quite a bit from most of the talks, I could get at least the main topic from each one, but the amazing part was that even the language barrier could not keep me from learning from the spirit. Don't get me wrong, I'll definitely be listening to those talks again in English, but my experience really strengthened my testimony of the communicative power of the spirit. 

Well, that's about it for this week. I hope that you are all doing great and that you have enjoyed conference! Have a great week! Until next time, čau!