Lifting Where I Stand

Starsi Shirley in Cesky Krumlov 

So this happened this last week on the town square. These guys marched onto the square from all four directions wearing black clothing and white masks. This is an Easter tradition, but still a little creepy haha. They pushed these cart things that make a really loud sound and they were synchronized with it. I wish I could send the video, but I'm sure you could find something online. **I researched this online and found that this is typical of the Masopust Easter carnival, an Easter tradition in Southern Bohemia. I found some good YouTube videos of this as well. If you're interested, here's a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oXhFt5i14U

April 18, 2017

This last week was really interesting for us! Sorry that the email came today and not yesterday. The Monday after Easter Sunday is still a holiday and everything is closed. So P-day was moved to today. It was an interesting Easter weekend for us. From Friday until today everything, literally everything was closed. People weren't really out and about so finding was a little difficult. Plus, we didn't have hardly any lessons set up so we were searching for the few people that were outside. It was nice though in the fact that the people that were out had a little more time to talk because they weren't in a hurry anywhere. We got to show the Easter video to quite a few people, which was great!

Last Wednesday, we had an exchange with the zone leaders in Plzen. It was cool to see the great city of Plzen that I have heard so much about. Our exchange ended a little early though because the APs wanted us to come to Prague with them and have interviews with President. So we traveled there that night, had a mini exchange with the APs, and then had interviews with President which are always the best. We woke up and traveled back the next morning. It was a great week! 

My knee by the way, I thought was all the way healed after 2 weeks without running. But it still hurt a little after our run yesterday. I thought buying new shoes would fix it, but not completely. I'm doing just great though. Don't worry about it :)

Your Easter dinner sounds like it was great. Easter dinner is always super good! Mom's potato salad is super good. For Easter dinner, we had rice with some hamburger or something like that. Maybe it was noodles haha. We didn't have a whole lot of food left in the house by Sunday since we buy food on Mondays. Quite a different experience than you guys right?

Our question for the week: What has been your biggest surprise about being a missionary? We know you have nothing to compare this with but your own mission, but have you been surprised how hard the Czech mission has been? Or has it been to you?

Answer:  My biggest surprise from the mission? Probably the amount of hard work. It's hard to explain or even prepare for what missionary work is like. I've also found out that I am not the greatest at planning! So I guess yeah, I was surprised at how "hard" the mission was but I wouldn't want to trade it for anything. I really enjoyed Elder Bednar's talk from conference. He voiced a few things that I have had thoughts about. A missionary is first called to the work, and then to an area. So whether or not a missionary is in a place with a million investigators or none, we are all of the same team. We are all working together for the salvation of souls. And if working my head off every day and street contacting is what I have to do without seeing a lot come from it, that's what I'll do. Why? Because in Elder Uchtdorf's words, we lift where we stand. So I, even though I haven't seen a whole lot of "success" as some people see it in baptisms, I am proud to be called to the Lord's work serving in the Czech Republic.

-Elder Shirley