A great week ( Week 5 in Olomouc, Week 40 in Czech )

Hey Everyone,

It's been a great week. I've sent home some pictures from the baptism we had last weekend. It's pretty exciting. Josef Baliar was pretty excited. He's the son of a recent convert family who didn't have a whole lot of interest last week, but found testimony and interest with us. He's 11, so he'll be becoming a deacon pretty soon. It's pretty exciting. We're really happy that everything has worked out as it has with him.

I'm really happy with this week, too. I'm much happier, much more satisified with how things are going, and have found a lot more peace and joy from the work. We found all 7 of our investigators from referall work this week, taught 18 lessons, and spoke 80 hours of czech. We've dropped down a bit because we're working on getting to know each other a bit better, and to be honest, it's still hard to express things sometimes as we'd like to.

In other news, I got to confirm little Josef on sunday. I love giving blessings. It's one of the best feelings ever. It's always interesting giving out a blessing in Czech, because you don't know how it will go out, but it's the same as in english. The Lord never seems to use particularly complicated language in blessing his children. If you think about it, scripture is in most instances very literal and very clear, and our personal difficulties in understanding how simple the message is confuse it sometimes.

Hmm....Not sure what else I had to say this week. Sorry about last week. We had to help one of our members get a new apartment in order. He's been homeless for a while, but he's found a place for him, his estranged children, and he might be getting married sometime soon. We'll see. In the mean time, it's incredible seeing the blessings that come from establishing and maintaining a connection with the Savior. I have to say that is the most important thing. If you don't feel different when you're done praying or reading the scriptures, you need to find out why and fix it. That's the secret to success. If you are aligned with the Lord and what he wants, then you've got all of his capacity behind you, which is a lot.

And a quick parable: A SCUBA tank has a ton of pressure in it, enough to sustain a diver as he goes down to depth. A secret of diving, however, is that the pressure of the water presses onto the diver the farther down he goes. The pressure we don't notice on the ground from the atmosphere increases to 2 atmospheres at 10 m, 3 atm at 20, and so on. Consequently, your lungs also feel the pressure and start to collapse if you don't have balanced pressure. That's why, when you breathe in at depth, you breathe in normally, but your lungs have denser breaths. at 10 m, you have 2 atm, 20 you have 3, and so on. You don't notice it, but that pressure building inside keeps you from collapsing on the outside.

Isn't it neat how, when the Lord asks us to do something hard, when the pressure builds up and we can't seem to do anything but collapse, that the Lord says "breathe - take in the Light that I have to give you" and his Light fills us up, countering the exterior pressure, and we stay afloat. Prayer, scripture reading, it's just breaths of air keeping ourselves from suffocating and from collapsing. Do the little things, and the big pressure will suddenly not even be noticable. Amazing.

Love you all, thanks for the letters everybody! We're going to Brno for a conference on Friday and we'll be in Ostrava on Saturday as well. Lots to do, not much time. I'll write more next week, really!

Elder Brent Anderson