July 20, 2015 - In which I eat coffee (oops)

Dear family,

Last week went pretty well. Some funny things happened! When we were a visiting a less-active member with another member during the week, we got fed a cake full of coffee. We had no idea that there was coffee in it until we, of course, took huge bites, when we definitely knew. We weren't quite certain what to do with the remainder of the cake, and after a series of irrational thoughts the first idea that seemed good was to hide it down my sock. Which was also irrational. The second idea that I had was to eat the rest all in one bite as fast as possible, which is what I did. (I think that was also a rash decision because I spent the rest of the lesson freaking out that I ate coffee!) President McConkie assured us that we didn't sin, but it was a pretty funny experience :))

We had a pretty good meeting with J again after church yesterday. J and M invited us over for lunch and we talked about how despite the fact that the individual members of the Church aren't perfect, we can still know that we're led by a prophet with priesthood keys. It ended being pretty difficult for me, at least, to teach well but it was good because the Spirit was definitely present when we bore testimony and J said that the discussion helped him a lot. We also decided with him and M that we could pray every day together so that their daughter will be more tolerant of their decision to be a part of a church. We looked at each other's family photos and it was a nice visit.

We met with both Sister D and D V during the week, also. Those meetings went pretty well, though I won't go into detail at the moment.

We had some good experiences finding people that our branch needs. We've been dedicating days to finding particular people (for example on Wednesday we focused on finding a young man our age or so the whole day) and had some success. We tried some early-morning contacting and found a Catholic dad that is pretty eager for us to come over to his home and talk about the Book of Mormon and on the Wednesday when we were looking for a student-age man at the very end of the day we taught a group of five of them that are all friends a first lesson (three are interested in learning more, though we didn't get to set up a specific return appointment).

Things are going pretty well, overall. On the 24th of July we're all going up to Karlštejn like last year to commemorate the dedication of the Czech land for the preaching of the gospel. We're pretty excited, because it was really fun and uplifting last year! We'll get some good pictures :)

Thanks for all the support, help, and prayers!

Love,

Elder Boyce