Once you hit your year and a half mark, there's no time to waste when it comes to getting into shape, which for me means eating a ton of meat and lots of push ups. The "Hassle Zone" group chat was finally renamed to "Sme na objemovke", which means, being interpreted, "It's bulking season".
A very nice lady whom we've been teaching for a few months recently invited us over for lunch at her place! Then she told us that she's a vegetarian. That's fine, but what about bulking season?
We strategically set the appointment for 1 pm so I could bulk up with leftovers beforehand. With one hour until the meeting, I began throwing together what I had: beef, lettuce, tomato, pasta, sunflower seeds, soy sauce; it didn't need to look pretty, it just needed the right stuff. My companion seemed worried that I would overeat and not have room for our lunch with the lady. "Don't worry," I told him. "Vegetarian doesn't fill me up, anyway."
And guess who was right? We enjoyed some deep-fried mushrooms with cabbage soup. I ended up taking a second helping and eating more than my companion. Felt like an appetizer.
***
Imagine being a missionary in a city where you either have to assign talks for church in advance or give them yourself, sometimes last-minute. Even if you're on top of giving assignments, only a handful of members regularly attend church anyway, so either way everyone speaks a lot at church.
So Elder Dransfield, the branch president of the Žilina branch, suggested that we could lighten the burden on everyone by broadcasting talks from Žilina to us one week, and then we would broadcast from Bystrica to them the next. Sounds good to me! For now, that would mean I wouldn't have to worry about giving or assigning talks for the coming Sunday, because Žilina would take care of it, or for the following Sunday, as we would be in Bratislava for a conference, or for the next one, because it would be fast Sunday, and no one should prepare talks for fast Sunday.
On Sunday morning, I called President Dransfield to make sure everything was going smoothly:
Starší Dransfield: "Starší Dransfield."
Me: "Hey, President Dransfield. How's Skyping going to work?"
Him: "We're going to start that in three weeks, after fast Sunday."
Me: ...
Him: "Will that be okay?"
Me: "Yeah."
Him: "Okay, see you at conference."
I turned to Elder Abbott, who has been in Slovakia for a month now: "Can you give a talk?"
Elder Abbott: "I can try, for how long?"
Me: "The longer, the better."
Long story short, you know I survived because I am writing this email today.
***
You know there had to be a story from trivia night! Elder Abbott and I were on a team with two of our friends and one more whom we didn't know quite as well. Suddenly, one of them broke a candle and began trying to put it back together. I said, "Hm, this reminds me of when Christ's church fell apart after the death of His apostles." We watched as he hopelessly tried to squish all the pieces back together. "If you succeed," I continued, "I will join your church and attend with you every day."
"NO, not every day," he said. It looked like he was about to succeed in putting the candle back to the way it was.
"Welcome, brother!" said the other one with a big smile on his face as he put his arm around my shoulder.
Elder Abbott, it looks like you're on your own.
No comments:
Post a Comment