Highlight of the week: I gave an old man water.

                                                                                                               June 10, 2013
Dear family,

Let us start with the fun stuff!  Baptism.  We had two cities together for two baptisms!  Fun stuff.  It was held at the Seventh Day Adventist church (so, that was kind of fun and different!) and it was really cool.  I love baptisms!  True it is evidence of us fulfilling our purpose and such, but really I just love their reaction as soon as they come out of the water...  Everyone is always so different, but it is just pure joy right in that moment.  Yeah.  I didn't actually teach anyone that was baptized yesterday... but it was still super great to support our new branch members!!

So, we went to a program this week.  I pulled out the map and saw the street we were going to Petőfi Sándor sugárút and that is was in a suburban area and we would need to take a long bus ride, and we were a little bit late, so we just grabbed our stuff and bailed!!  And we got lost, and I forgot the map, and so we prayed that we could make our way to this house.  So, I talk to one lady, she's not from Szeged, next guy tells us where we need to go to find the bus.  Next lady points us exactly to the bus stop.  I ask the guy on the bus which stop will get us closest to this street, he is actually getting off at that same bus stop!  Miracles?  Oh yeah!  So we get off, and I look at the street sign.  Petőfi utca.  NOOO!!  It was the wrong street all along.  The street that we needed was only like a ten minute walk from our apartment...  But I talked to this great old bácsi for a while.  He was really funny.  No teeth.  Super hard to understand.  He just sits outside and watches a couple of cars drive by every hour and says hi to them.  He was really thirsty so I gave him my water bottle and we talked to him a little bit while we waited for the next bus.  We hurried a long way to give an old guy a drink, but it was really nice to talk with him.  This picture is us waiting at the bus stop.

Wow.  Looking back at this past week was super crazy!!  I got a fine for riding with an expired bus pass (Turns out month passes are literally only good for the month that they were purchased...), so that was exciting.  We had a program with this lady and her cute little girls--we colored the plan of salvation with chalk and then this lady told me about how I was too white--so she got some bronzer out from her house and kept spraying my arm...  She then said how brown I was and that it looked better.  I could see no difference other than the fact that my arm was so saturated with this spray... of course it was a different color.  She can't wait for me to be brown like her :)

The Lord blesses us when we do what we need to.  Countless times he has commanded us to obey the commandments... and he always promises that we will prosper in the land.  I can see the Lord help us, and the land is really prospering.  So cool.  It is hard work, it is different than I thought it would be, but it is super worth it.  I love it.  I am so glad to be here and to be a missionary!!

Yesterday I realized something, and I thought it was really cool.  As missionaries we work a lot with numbers, and it is a big goal for us to work with people not numbers.  We teach people, not lessons.  And so I was thinking about names.  And then I realized, even the names aren't important.  It is the person behind the name.  And even more than that--It's not the person behind the name, but it is who this person can really become.  I think it is so true--All of us have the opportunity to become more than ourselves, to really take our name and become something.  We also have the opportunity to hide behind our name.  It really is just up to all of us.  We do what we want.  If we have no desires to change, to become, we won't.  So... what do you want to become?

Keep on living the life!  I know that I am.

Sok szeretettel,
Kennedy nővér