This week was pretty rocking. On Wednesday we had a big training meeting with Elder Kearon, from the 70, and his wife. It was totally awesome. It was super spiritual and super motivational and everything. We talked a lot about a lot of stuff, including using the Book of Mormon better, and thinking about our relationships with Christ and stuff like that. I think it was the European area presidency who said that June will be the month of inviting. Especially with a big emphasis on getting people to sacrament meeting. So, Elder Širković and I decided to make some goals about sacrament meeting. We decided that we want to about double our sacrament meeting attendance. We want to have 30 people in sacrament (not including missionaries). In order to do that we are going to need the members to start inviting their family members and friends to church, family nights, and Friday night activities. We want to commit every member to bring at least one person to the new building open house (which will hopefully be next month some time). We are also trying to get each member to take a Book of Mormon, write their testimony in it, and then give it to someone. We also need to start fellowshipping less active and non-active members. So, being kind of cheeky, we typed up all of our goals and stuff and printed them off and left them laying around the church and put one on the church bulleten board. Whenever we just try bringing stuff like this up in branch presidency meeting, or for just for spiritual thought at Aktivnost, it isn't always terribly effective, and doesn't get out as well as we want. We figured by just printing it off everyone will see it and they will just get naturally curious about it, and, sure enough, we think it's starting to work. It may sound kind of weird, but here, sometimes you just have to do stuff without telling people or waiting for their opinions on your plan or whatever. Their is a little Croatian phrase "ide po malo", which means "it's goes by little". And that is the mentality that a lot of people have here. People know that there are lot of problems here, and that things really need to change, they even complain about how people need to start thinking differently, and that they really need a big change to pull Croatia out of all the financial problems and political problems they have. But still they are scared to do something that isn't normal, or that other people might not like. Sometimes, we've realized, you just have to take things into your own hands, and try to just shove people out of their comfort zones. People here say that "they believe that one day we will have a ward here" but then you ask if they would invite one of their friends to church and they say "oh, well I don't think they are quite ready yet, we need to take things a little slower". By being bold, and still be loving and with the spirit, but being blunt and direct, we can get people out of that.

    Tell Jessica that I can kind of understand her problems with writing. Having taught English classes to non English speakers, I now realize how hard doing all of the past, future, and present tenses in English are (we do have quite a few of them), and knowing when to add -ing or -ed and stuff is the hardest thing by far for people learning English here. I guess Croatian is a lot like sign language in that they don't have articles ( a and the) and the word order in sentence structure is pretty loose. Maybe I could help her better with writing when I get back. It's really not to hard for me to understand what she writes because I'm used to hearing people speak not to good English. 

    The picture is of us teaching this guy, who we had just tracted into, pretty much the whole gospel (and he wanted his roommate to take a picture of us). He just kept asking questions about really good stuff (obviously he'd done some research already on the internet) and we went as far as teaching about temple marriage, baptisms for the dead, how the church feels about gay marriage, missionary work in the spirit world, word of wisdom, law of chastity, and pretty much the entire first, and second lessons. You can see in the picture a Mormonova Knjiga, a restoration pamphlet, and a cute little laminated plan of salvation diagram that one of our members made for us. Also, by profession this guy is a ridiculously good leather worker (maybe I'll get some pictures next week) and he said he would help us make our own custom scripture cases.
I hope you all just keep being awesome the most awesome of the families.

Schyler