working hard in Sibiu

Dearest family and everyone,

Hello! How are you? I'm doing well...Sibiu is still gorgeous and we are working hard.

This week was a week full of lessons - though it wasn't with other people, but I sure learned a lot. Even though it was a hard week, it was a good one. I learned tons from our lessons with Casia - she's the 8 1/2 yr old that got baptized on Saturday and the service went great. There were small amounts of people there, but it was good - Sora Staley and I had 2 investigators there and the Elders had one of their investigators that came, and the Spirit was soooo strong.

And teaching her this past week to make sure she was ready was amazing. We would teach her a lesson and the things that she comprehended amazed me. We taught her the Plan of Salvation with a semne (puzzle), and after we went through the whole thing her mom suggested that Casia put the semne together herself to see if she understood. So we mixed it up, and she cleared her throat and began to teach us what we had just taught her starting at the Premortal life and all the way to where we want to be with God in the Celestial Kingdom. She had all the information right and it was stated so simply as if it were fact - she has great faith. It just proves that the gospel of Jesus Christ is simple enough in it's truth that even a child can understand and believe. It was wonderful.

As for everything else, we had a couple of lessons with our other investigators, and they are doing well...not quite understanding everything enough to come to church or commit to baptism, but they are keeping their commitments and we had good lessons there. We found a lot of good potential investigators this week, but all of the lessons that we had set up fell through unfortunately, but we are still trying to find in the situations in which we find ourselves and are begining to understand what more we can do in order to do all that we can do for the Lord to help us with this work.

One thing I learned this week is how pride really does become a stumbling block to the road of happiness in your living. I have been studying a lot about faith, and how pride is what gets in the way of our faith. Ultimately, it gets in the way of us being able to have a good relationship with our Heavenly Father. This was a good week for me to get back in line with the expectations of the Lord and to remember why I wanted to be here, why I am doing what I am doing. It is because I love the Lord, and I have a desire to love His children enough to share with them the knowledge that I have about their salvation. In short anyways, that's what it is.

This branch is really disfunctional and Sundays are more of a day of stress than a day of rest for us missionaries - Relief Society consisted of me and my companion because no one is used to staying for all 3 hours - including the RS president, and we were joined by Serban who is 13 and is in the young mens program, who didn't want to be in Priesthood, and so he came up with us and we had a lesson on Christ-like attributes. It was good, but the whole thing is crazy. But hopefully it will get better each week.

Other than that, I don't have too much to say. I got jenna's letter and I loved it! Thanks love. I will be getting my package probably at this zone conference which is on October 10th. Which reminds me, Mom, can you please call Brianne for me to tell her I wish her a happy birthday on Thursday? That would be awesome. Tell her I love her! And no I don't get to see the RS broadcast, but it sounded good by the notes you sent me. I'll be able to read it in the Liahona that I will get of the conference session in a couple of months. And thanks for taping conference for me again - this time I'm not even going to be able to listen to it in Romanian unless we get the dvd's from the headquarters in germany soon after. But it will be good. Take good notes for me ;}

Anyways, I hope that you are having a good week, I am excited to tell you more things that I learn about the Lord's hand in His work next week, and until then, smile lots! I love you all so so so much!

Love Always, --Sora Karina

Jenna and Shaley and Tamara - congrats on your matches/meets. It sounds like you are doing great! And I love hearing about it. I love you three soooo much. And of course tell Cherisse and Allen that I love them too :D ttyl