April 16

Përshëndetje familja!

Another good week here in Shkoder! It's starting to get hot here, which is a big change from all the snow just a couple weeks ago. But in even better news, the work is going great here.

To start out with Pali. We weren't able to have a lesson with him this week because whenever his phone wasn't working for most of the week and then when it was either he was busy or we were. But he did come to church and brought his little sister too, and he had a great time. Now we have a lesson set with him for tomorrow so all's well that ends well. It's awesome whenever we run into him because he always gets so happy whenever he sees us.

We met with Arben again this week after a long time not seeing him and had a great lesson about the Plan of Salvation. He got super surprised when we taught the part about the premortal life, because no other religion teaches that, but he got a strong witness that it's true. He said he knows that our church is the truth now. We invited him to be baptized, but he said he's way too busy now so maybe in the summer.

Then to make things even better we have an awesome investigator in Lezhe. His name is Julian, he's in his twenties and he works for the military. He's disappointed with way young people act here in Albania and says that it's because they don't believe in God. He said God has blessed him and protected him a ton of times in his life and when he saw us he was very happy to meet and talk about God. We met with him for the second time this Friday and the lesson was super powerful, he looked like he really felt the spirit. And then to cap it all off, he even came to church on Sunday! He walked to all the way to church even though he had badly hurt his foot at work that morning. And he said we can keep meeting whenever we want. That's the first time we've had an investigator in church in Lezhe since I got here over two months ago, so that's a very welcome change.

Another cool experience. Last Friday a group of girls asked if we could help them with English, but said they couldn't come to our scheduled English Course because it was too late. At first I was just going to say no, but I felt like we needed to do it, so we set it up for this Friday. About 15 minutes into the class they asked us why we were here and what we do, so we explained that we're here to serve people and God and teach people about Jesus Christ. They liked that because they're catholic and then they started just asking a whole bunch of questions that they've had about religion recently like "how can I know if God exists?" "is there life after death?" "do we know what God looks like?", which of course are all answered through the Book of Mormon and the message of the Restoration. So we taught them a quick lesson and gave them a book and they said they'll read it all this weekend.

Then yesterday we had to come to a choir practice for the 25 year anniversary of the church in Albania this Saturday, so we ended up staying the night and playing some frisbee and soccer with the Tirana missionaries this morning. And on our way back we decided to stop in a city called Laç which is technically in our area(it's like 25 minutes away from Lezhe) and do some tabling. People basically flocked to us and were so interested to see what we were doing, and I ended up getting more people's numbers in those two hours than I had in the past week in a half. So hopefully there's some potential there.

Lastly, we had another temple prep class this week with the Pali's(a member couple here). They're super amazing, and they're so excited to go to the temple either in May or the next temple trip after that. Being here has definitely made me understand what a blessing it is to have the temple 15 minutes away from my house instead of 20 hours away. Also the Rome Italy temple is going to be such a blessing for the Albanian members, can't wait for that to open next March.

To put it shortly, I'm doing well and still loving things here. Albania is such an amazing special place.
Have a great week! Zoti ju bekoftë!
Elder Gardiner