A Strong Testimony

Sziasztok!

Well, a new transfer starts today! Time just keeps on flying by.

Everything is going well over here. Fast and testimony meeting was great yesterday! A super cute little kid, who is about eight to ten years old, bore a wonderful testimony! He told about preparing a talk for a special sacrament meeting a few weeks ago when the kids gave talks and sang songs. He had been having a hard time writing his talk when he remembered that he could pray for help. So he prayed to God that he could write a good talk. After that, he said that the words just came really fast. He really got into writing the talk and it ended up being really good! He said that he knows that God helped him and that his testimony was strengthened a ton! How cool is that?! The Spirit was really strong during that meeting – it was really neat to hear such uplifting testimonies.

I had another interesting experience yesterday. My companion and I were going to meet a member of the church who hasn’t been coming to meetings all that regularly. I wasn’t looking forward to talking to another person I was sure was just going to throw out a bunch of excuses for not coming to church. It’s so easy to assume that less-active members are just using lame excuses to justify not coming to church – so I judged this man pretty harshly. I was really surprised when I actually talked to him and was able to hear and see and feel his testimony. I came to understand his work situation better and see that it really is difficult for him and he really does come whenever possible. He told me that one week he gave a talk in sacrament meeting and taught both the Sunday school lesson and priesthood lesson all on the same day because he didn’t want to turn anyone down since he can’t help out as much as he would like. He said that the lessons went well and he loved it. He is coming to church next week and will be teaching the Sunday school lesson and the priesthood lesson again because people had to cover for him yesterday. That’s real effort. The members here in Hungary are amazing!

As I was thinking about this experience, it popped into my head that if I choose medicine as a career I too will probably have to miss church a few times because of circumstances that are out of my hands. So I learned a good lesson about judging people because I completely misjudged this awesome member. Improving and becoming more Christlike is a long and hard but wonderful process! So let’s all do a little self-examination right now and commit ourselves to be more forgiving, loving, kind, humble, and Christlike! Changing bad habits is always worth the effort!

~Anderson elder