Hristos a Inviat! (Christ is Risen)

Traditional Romanian Easter eggs

Happy Easter everyone! I saw that you made your own email account mom, so I hope you don't mind me still writing one big letter and sending it to dad's account. Or I could sent it to yours, it doesn't matter. And don't worry mom, you can call me whatever you want. :) Well, I just read the transfer board and I'm staying in Bacau with Elder Schanck. One of the zone leaders here, Elder Toronto is being transferred to Cluj, where he'll be training a boboc. I'm not going to lie, I would have liked to go to a new city, but at the same time I've put a lot of work in here and hopefully this new transfer we will see some fruits of that work; and it's kind of nice not having to pack.


 So far we still don't have any investigators, pretty much all our time has been spent contacting and trying not to go insane haha. However, we do have some potential investigators, one that told us to call him after Easter, one who was out of town for a few weeks, and a couple we've just met on the streets. I'm really hoping that something good will come out of all those high school kids we met in the park that I played the guitar for them. We met up a couple times since that and told them about the Book of Mormon, a little about the restoration. They're pretty much all Orthodox, but some of them seem kinda interested in our church. Then this morning on our way to the grocery store this man stopped us and talked to us. He said that he sees us all the time walking around, wanted to know who we were, where we were from, and a copy of the Book of Mormon! So we gave him one, took his name and number, and I guess we'll see what comes out of that! So that's the dealio here on my side.


 The weathers been warming up a bit, it's been nice and sunny, but still windy. I've never been in a place that was as windy as it is here! I think there's been 2 or 3 days in this entire transfer where there hasn't been any wind. And I'm not talking about little light breezes, I'm talking about gusting wind! It's crazy to think that I'll bee here until mid June! You have such a weird concept of time out here as a missionary. It just kinda goes. Some days are slow, others are really fast and by the end of the transfer your just like woah, really? That was six weeks? 

Easter eve was pretty awesome! President Lundberg gave all the missionaries permission to go to the midnight Orthodox Easter service, and it was super cool. At 11:30 we bought some candles and went down into the basement of the Orthodox cathedral here in the center of town (it's still under construction so they hold services in the basement). The basement was full of people, and there were priests sitting at this reading chair type thing singing these super cool Orthodox gregorian sounding chants, then at midnight the high priest comes out from this back room where the altar is with a lit candle and lights everybody's candles. The tradition is that the high priest's candle gets lit by the flame from Jerusalem which is lit by God, then everybody's candle gets lit from the priest, and the whole crowd turns around lighting each other's candles and if your candle stays light through the whole service and until you get back home, all your sins are forgiven for that year. So then priest walked through the basement, out of the church, lighting people's candles and chanting as he went and then he and all the other high priests stand up in front of this big old statue of Stefan Cel Mare (Stephen the Great, who is some important guy in old Romanian history, don't really know his story) that's in the middle of this big round-about in the middle of Centru. So all the high priests stood up there, and sang more Orthodox worship songs. At certain intervals one of the priests would walk in front of the other priests waving around the holy smoke thing (I don't really know what those are called) and calling out the crowd "Hristos a inviat" to which the crowd replies "Adevarat a inviat." The whole plaza area around the Orthodox Cathedral and the statue was filled with people, it was pretty crazy! The only other place I've seen so many people standing in one place is for a rock concert, there were easily at least 500 people gathered there! So that was a really cool experience, and now for the next week or so you greet everyone by saying "Hristos a inviat," its so cool! 

Haha oh yeah, we also went to the Adventist Easter service and sang in the choir again. Normally, the choir sings in these pews that are up at the front of the chapel, but tucked back in the sides facing each other so the congregation doesn't really see them, but for the Easter service they had the choir stand up in front of the whole congregation. So there me and Elder Schanck are, standing in front of the whole Seventh Day Adventist congregation in our white shirts and black nametags with the Adventist youth! The church even had a professional photographer there taking pictures of the service, so we've gone down in Bacau Adventist history! The head of the LDS church in Bacau and his companion, singing in the Seventh Day Adventist choir haha! 

So that was my Romanian Easter experience! I'd say it was pretty memorable. Sounds like you all had a really nice Easter and spring break. Those pictures of Bidwell park are so beautiful! So incredible that all that is just a 15-20 minute drive away from our house! I'm glad to hear that Erik's doing well too. Everyone looks so happy in that picture! Oh and Happy birthday to Erik as well! I know it's a little early, but I figure it's either early or late in my case! And now, the start of a new transfer, a whole new six weeks to improve on the last six, and I'm hoping to make the best of it! I love you all and wish you a happy Easter!

Love, Elder Myers

Transferul Nebuniilor

Transfer of the Crazies. 

So it's named, and so it is. It seems like the majority of the people we attract, are not all entirely there! I do believe you will all recall my experience with good old Gheorghe, who now thinks this is the devil's church, well I would now like to introduce you to Mihael. Random fact, Mihael is the Romanian equivilant of Michael. Anyways. This is the man that last week we had traveled to the ends of the earth to try to find. Well, last Monday evening we actually found his house, and we had a lesson with him! He lives in this little neighborhood of little government-built cement houses on the outskirts of Bacau with his wife, mother, and 4 kids. His wife works in the city, and Mihael just recently got out of prison. The trip down to his house was surreal, I wish I had taken some pictures to show you. It felt like I was in book or a movie about soldiers or humanitarian workers going out to some remote little 3rd world town or villiage. Mihael met us out on the main road in Bacau and we kept going south until we turned onto this dirt road, a good little ways outside the actual city where there's all these little cement houses, a group of like 15 kids all playing in the road, and dogs running around, it was crazy! We go into his house which is just a little 3 room thing with all there stuff crammed in. They used these stone blocks with grooves etched into the top in which lay red hot heated metal coils to heat the house. He pulled up a little table and told his wife to bring us out some chicken and potatoes, and fed us dinner! I felt really bad eating there food, and later that night Elder Schanck said he had heard Mihael's wife saying that was all the food they had, but that's how Romanians are. They can be some of the nicest most hospitable people in the world, even if it means making their family go hungry. We taught a lesson that over all, went ok. I felt the Spirit while we taught and testified of the resored gospel. Mihael's mom seemed to be getting it better than he did! I felt this odd connection and feeling of familiarality as I talked with this family and sat in their small home.

Sounding pretty great right? Granted, that was probably a night I'll never forget, but what comes after I probably won't forget either. The next day Mihael called me asking for money for food, saying that he had no food to give his family and his wife wouldn't be getting payed for the next couple days. I told him that we couldn't give him money (It is illegal in this country to give money to beggers and as part of being a missionary here the government does not allow us to give out money to anyone who is not a member of the church) and gave him the number of the Humanitarian missionaries here. So he called them, and basically, long story short after I had many phone calls and some heated conversation with him, Mihael now also thinks that we are the church of the devil because our church is not able to help him financially in this situation. It was really sad and a bit shocking to see someone go from a really nice person, friendly and generous to being desperate, illogical, impatient, and extremely close- minded and hearted. The worst part for me is realizing that most likely the only reason he listened to us in the first place was because he thought our church would give him money. Granted, maybe he did actually feel something, and was genuinely interested in the church doctrinally, but something else just completely took over. 

On the bright side, this week, yesterday in fact, we met up with our park/guitar friends again! That was super fun. I played some more guitar for them, and we talked to them about our church. They're all Orthodox, and pretty active by the way it sounds, but some of them seem pretty interested in our church, and they all said they'd come to our English classes. This is some of the best contacting I've done so far, and the best thing about it is that our missionary work with them is based off of a friendship. We didn't meet them by walking up and telling them that the Book of Mormon was true. They heard us speaking English in the park, we saw they had a guitar, and BAM, missionary work commenced. "Preach the gospel at all times, and when necessary, use words." And something else interesting that happened yesterday was that while I was playing the guitar, and we were all just talking, these three pentacostal guys came up and literally just started preaching to these kids. The only way I can really describe it is that it was priestcraft. The main guy just walked up, his too little buddies kinda hung back trying to be cool, and this guy just starts going on and on about how close he is to God, about how well he knows the scriptures, and on and on. You could tell he was only doing it for the attention. He wouldn't even answer Elder Schanck when he asked him where he learned English (he spoke a little bit to us when he walked up). It was just weird, I don't really know what he was trying to get out of coming up and talking in front of everybody, but he was just downright obnoxious. 

On the other hand on Saturday we contacted this Seventh Day Adventist man, who was on his way to church and invited us to go with him. So, we went! He's a super friendly older man, took us to his church, introduced us to one of his friends, and everyone in the church was really friendly and inviting. The choir director even came up and asked us if we wanted to sing in the youth choir next week! The service was nice, it was super interesting to see how their church was. The way their service went, it was all organized almost exactly the way our sacrament meetings go. Afterwards we exchanged phone numbers with the man, he invited us to their Easter service the next week, and we invited him to ours, to which he cordially accepted. Then later in the evening we met up with him at a little cafe and he gave us a bunch of Ellen White books, and we gave him a Book of Mormon and a bunch of brochures. It was a really good atmosphered, friendly, brotherly exchange of beliefs. Quite refreshing from the usual shutdowns we get from people on the street. I've always had a lot of respect for people of other Christian faiths who strive to live their religion. Being a Christian meens that you follow Christ's example, and if everyone did that who claimed to be a Christian, the world would be a much better place.

Also this week we had some branch activities. We had a big clean up on Thursday, which ended up bing in the rain haha. It's been raining all week up until a couple days ago. Then on Saturday we had an Easter activity! It started with a couple quick talks, the four of us missionaries singing a hymn, and then food! There was salata de beuf which is like a potato salad with chicken, bell peppers, pickles, onions, carrots, olives, eggs, and you eat it with bread. Super dilicious! Then, of course we had saormale, which is really good. And to finish off we had cosonak which is kinda like a cross between fruit cake and cinnamin bread. it's  a sweet bread that has swirls of this nutty, cinnaminny-chocolaty-raisiney spread. And hard boiled eggs. The Romanain tradition for easter is to die hard boiled eggs all red which symbolizes the blood of Christ when he died on the cross, then two different people take their eggs, one says "Hristos a inviat" (Christ resurrected) and the other says "Adevarat, a inviat" (truly, he resurrected) and they smash their eggs together. the person who's egg shell doesn't break then goes on to do it with someone else until their egg cracks. The member who made all the food made the missionaries these special eggs that had these orthodox-style paintings of saings somehow printied on the egg, like a lick on tattoo I think. 

Traditional Romanian Easter eggs

So that was the week! Pretty crazy! It was good though. Also, on Friday we had interviews with President Lundberg and the Asssistants to the President. Mine was good, I got a lot of really good advice from President Lundberg about doing missionary work. So now, to answer questions before I forget, about the music, I would just like the songs from my CD sent through an email, if that's possible. Then I can just burn them onto cd's here easy enough. What else? I know I'm forgetting something........oh well. Oh, also, could you send me recipes for Cafe Rio Burritos and for surprise hamburgers? I was wanting to make the burritos for P-day or something, and I've allways loved surprise hamburgers! It was great, as usual, hearing about your weeek! That go carting sounds really fun! apparantly there's a go-carting place somewhere here in bacau, but we haven't gone. I'll try to send you some pictures next week. I love you all!!! Oh yeah, and April 27 is transfers, so a week from today I'll find out where I'm going!

Love, Elder Myers

WOW!!!

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I don't even know what to say right now, I just got done reading all the emails from you all, Mom, Dad, Heather, and one from Aunt Coralie, and I can't even express the incredible peace, joy, comfort, and strength I've received from reading them all! I love you all sooooo much!!! I feel sooo blessed to have such amazing wonderful people in my life, I cant even find enough words to express what I'm feeling right now. Thank you. Thank you so much for the advice, support, wisdom, love si asa mai departe! Hahaha man, I've been late on writing my letter to Heather because she keeps sending me these incredible letters, and I keep having more things to talk about in my letter, and I barely find time to write them as it is between all the craziness that's been going on. So, first off, wow, I had no idea that my last email would have such an impact! Here I was sitting at this computer in a dusty cold internet cafe in Bacau Romania unloading the contents of my heart that had accumulated over the past week, and then today it all just comes back in 50 billion fold! And thank you so much for sending that letter from Adam, I loved reading it! I wonder, if its possible, do you think you could forward his weekly emails to me? That would be awesome! Man, it seems like he's grown and changed a lot! Thats right and Avery came home! I got a Dear Elder from Janelle a couple weeks ago and she told me that he was coming home soon. That's so crazy! 


Oh, and I was wondering if you could email me my music in an attachment or something. There's beginning to be a demand among missionaries to hear it haha. This mission has a lot of musical talent! There was one missionary who was in a band, and before he left on his mission they had gotten an offer for a record deal from Universal Studios! Then there's missionaries who are really good at the piano, one missionary who is really good at composing and wants to write movie sountracks and stuff like that for his career. It's super cool! It makes me sad that missionaries in the past probably abused their privileges of having musical instruments and hence made President Lundberg enforce a no musical instrument rule. We're getting a new Mission President in June, and I really hope that us missionaries who are here now will gain the trust and respect of the new mission president so that stuff like that doesn't happen again. 

As for writing music and finding the time for it, I've been thinking about that one haha. There really isn't much time at all. Unless you count the minutes when we are walking to church or going here or there and there's no one to contact. Actually, this week I wrote a haiku while walking the streets of Bacaue. Here's how it goes. Hopefully I'm remembering it right....

Sowers of the Word
An empty field full of souls
The harvest will come

Anyways, it's not much, but it gave me a certain amount of satisfaction to excercise my artistic muscles haha. So this week hasn't been too much different. The weather's been psychotic, super windy all the time and within one day it rained, hailed, gusted, cleared up and got sunny, then overcast again. Ridiculous!! I've had a few cool experiences though. We had a lesson with this college aged kid named Octaven, who we contacted just on the street. It was actually pretty cool, a couple weeks ago Elder Schanck and I had finished up doing some Branch treaba at the church and were heading to the park to contact. Just outside the park, I saw this kid walking towards us, and I was just like, lets contact this guy. So I did. He was super nice, I gave him a BoM and a Restoration brochure. Then this week we had a lesson with him. It went really well, he even prayed at the end! He's Orthodox, but is open to different religions and committed to reading the Book of Mormon and praying about it. It was so good to actually teach a lesson and I felt the Spirit really strong the whole time. Even if the lesson was a bit choppy cuz both me and Elder Schanck have been out of teaching practice for a while, and I'm actually the better Romanian speaker between us, and I was kinda jumbling through hoping I was making sense. But it went well. 

Then a couple days ago we were walking down to the South part of town, trying to find this guy named Mihael we had met in the park. It was ridiculously windy, and I was making/receiving bajillions of phone calls with this guy trying to figure out how the heck to get there and I could barely understand what he was saying because he was talking really fast and it was really windy. Needless to say, my patience was running thin. I may or may not have gone on a good 30 second rant in mixed English and Romanian at my companion while making wild hand/limb gestures. By this time we were on the outskirts of town in this random little neighborhood next to an energy plant and industrial buildings. It was actually really beautiful out there, we were practically in the countryside. And after I had finished venting, this older looking fellow called up to us and asked us about our church. He invited us down onto his property, brought out a bench, and we sat down and talked for a good 40 minutes or so. He brought us out some bread with this liver paste he had made which was .......interesting. It didn't taste too bad, but it did not look pleasant and neither was the texture. I wish I could have taken a picture of this stuff to show you. But anyways, he was a little drunk so we couldn't really teach him much doctrine-wise so we just listened to him tell us about his life. It was really interesting, and he was a really nice guy. He even told us not to teach him anything because he'd been drinking. He said we could talk more after he came to church! Sadly, he didn't come to church, but we've got his number so we're for sure going to be seeing him again!

Then last of all, I gave a talk in Sacrament meeting, and it went really well! I couldn't believe I gave a good 15 almost 20 minute talk all in Romanian! I'm feeling myself get more and more comfortable with this language, but I'm nowhere near perfect at it. But everyone said I did a good job, and I felt like I was able to express myself almost as well as if I were speaking English. So, these have all definitely been experiences in which I've seen God's hand extended to lift me up as I'm in the process of climbing up this steep, slippery rocky mountainside. I'm not really sure when I'll reach the top, but that's not really the point is it? I'll get there when I get there, if I ever get there in this life, and now's the time to make the best of what I've got. I'm so incredibly thankful for this gospel and how it is changing my life. And I'm so incredibly thankful for all of you and everything you give me. I love you all so much!!!

Love, Elder Myers

The Week of 1 and 0

Hey all! .....meaning dad probably right now haha. Mom's still in Pahrump with Nana right? I hope they're having a good time. Eli sent me pictures of when Heather went up to visit you guys, and she wrote me an email today and talked a little bit about it, she said she had a really really good time! She absolutely loves all of you and has so much respect for you. I just want to say thank you for being the amazing family that you are. I know you've all been a huge support for Heather, and I'm so grateful for that.

 I got the package from you all a couple days ago, thanks a bunch! Elder Schank and I have been enjoying the Ghiradelli (I'm not even going to try on the spelling for that one) chocolate veeeeeeerrry much. Especially me. And I looooove all the pictures you sent me!!! I love pictures haha! I wish I had taken more before I left my mission and all throughout highschool and stuff because they're such great little memories to carry around! So, as I said this week our numbers have been all zeros and ones haha! It's been a bit of a rough week for us, more for Elder Schank than me. Mainly because literally our entire days we have nothing to do except contact. We had one lesson with our one investigator, who technically isn't even progressing yet, and we had one lesson with a less active man. Sooooo its been contacting, contacting, contacting. And for me, that's not exactly an easy thing to do. Walking down the street and talking to everyone I see is not exactly on my list of favorite or natural things to do, so this week has been a real stretch for me. I can't say that I succeeded in talking to everyone, and each day I think of all these ways I could have used my time more effectively, or how I could have talked to more people, or how I could have been more tactful with my contacting. But I guess that's how you progress right? You recognize your weaknesses and mistakes, and you work on improving them. I'm just trying really hard not to be hard on myself. You know me, I can be pretty self critical. In my patriarchal blessing it counsels me to be obedient with exactness, and at the end of the day I allways think of that, and I think of all these ways I could have done better. Hindsight is allways 20/20. That's probably one of the most frustrating truths about life that I have come to find, knowing that no matter what, there's always something I could have done better on. I always think back to when I was in sports and scouts, and in school I always worked really hard, and did my best in whatever it was, and it allways paid off. Out here on a mission I'm finding it harder to gauge whether I'm putting my all into the work, and whether I'm making the right decisions or the best decisions.

Anyways, sorry, I don't want you to think that I'm getting depressed or anything, these are just things that have been on my mind, and it just kind of started to all come out while I was typing. This week has proven to porvide some really awesome experiences! Last week, we had just walked into the main park when this group of high school kids started calling out at us saying stuff like "You speak English?" Usually kids will do this a lot to missionaries just to be punks, and we ignore stuff like that most of the time. But Elder Schank looked over and saw that one of them had a guitar, and he turned to me and said, "Hey, you wanna play guitar?" I was a little hestitant at first, but then was just like "what the heck, of course I want to play guitar" so we went over there and started talking to them, haha and once we spoke Romanian, the girl who had called out to us got super embarrassed and was just like "oh man they speak Romanian!?!?!?" So we just made some small talk, and then I asked the kid who had the guitar if I could play, he was like, "Can you play? " and I was just like, " Yeah." So I started playing some random songs, ended up playing them some of my songs too. I played Flipside, A Foolhardy Son, then Hotel California, and You and Your Heart by Jack Johnson, and the loved it!! I'm pretty sure they all liked Flipside the best. It felt so good to be playing the guitar, and to finally be sharing that talent with other people. We handed out a Book of Mormon, and got several phone numbers from those kids, and even while I was playing, at certain points, people walking by would stop and listen so there was a good-sized crowd of people around the bench where I was playing! That experience really made me want to write some music, songs that would be all about the gospel in my life, so that I can have an effective way of contacting that will touch people's hearts in ways that just talking can't. I also want to write them in Romanian as I get better at the language.

So that was probably the highlight of this week. That, and the past two nights we've been able to go over to the senior missionary couple's apartment to watch the first session of Saturday's and Sunday's General Conference on their laptop! It was sooooo good! I've never been so excited about coneference haha! I realy got alot out of the talks, and it really gave me a spiritual boost that I've been needing! I love how in Sundays first session, all the apostles were putting in little jokes here and there. If I got anything out of that session, it was beeing able to see that the leaders of our church are real people too, which might sound kind of weird, but I sometimes think what they're like in just everyday life. What kind of people they are, and what kind of personalities they have. And hearing President Monson talk about the Rome temple!! Wow, that will be so amazing when that temple is finsished! Elder Toronto told us that Great Grandpa or something like that was the first Italian convert to the church, and had pretty much given up everything he had to travel to America and go to the Nauvoo Temple, and now, over a hundred years later, a temple is being built in the most historical cities in Italy!

Oh yeah, and also, on Saturday we did district contacting with the zone leaders in the park, and we drew up a big daigram of the Plan of salvation in chalk on the sidewalk with our phone numbers and handed out Plan of Salvation brochures. It was really fun! I'm not too sure how many investigators we'll get out of it, but hopefully it won't have been completely in vain! 

Well, that's about it for this week. Hope everything's going good over there! Have a great week everyone!

Love, Elder Myers