Sister Brylee Lewis: "Wait. It Can Get Colder Than 60 Degrees?!"

Dobrý den! Ahoj! Nazdar!

This week was so long, but pretty good. It was super busy.

We've been looking for a lot of service opportunities lately. Specifically we wanted to find a charity, but Jičín is tiny, so we weren't having much luck. But then we were walking down the street in some random part of town, and I saw a charity bin on the side of the rode. We looked it up on Facebook and sent them a message, and they asked to meet with us. We're gonna start teaching their workers English and maybe help them with their beehives/honey business. Seems pretty chill. I'm super stoked. It was definitely a small miracle from this week.

The people here are my favorite part about serving so far. They're incredible. They're always giving us food, and they're so willing to help us out when we need it. We have one investigator that is so cool. He always brings us food, and he basically stocked our fridge this week. He also came into our lesson the other day with an English Scripture quad (Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price). He bought it himself and is using it to try and learn more English. He's so chill.

The highlight of the week was Saturday. We had the Wallace Toronto Project. Wallace Toronto was an old mission president in this mission. He's a huge part of the history of the mission. There's a foundation called the Wallace Toronto Foundation, and every year they plan a huge service project in the Czech Republic or Slovakia. All the missionaries in the zone, former missionaries from this mission, former mission presidents of this mission, members, investigators and a ton of other random people from the states come to it every year. It's such a cool experience. This year it was in Liberec. We woke up at 4:30am, and went to catch a train. There was a mix up, so we missed our train. We ended up running to catch another one, and 3 trains and 3 hours later we got to Liberec at 8. I officially feel like a Czech/Slovak missionary cause I had to run for a train haha. For our part of the project we scrubbed and painted a fence at some museum. It was so cool to get to hang out with some of the missionaries in the zone and get to know everyone. It was freezing though. It started raining halfway through, so we were all super cold and wet. It made for some good memories though.

It's been super cold and wet the past few days. I love the rain, but I'm not a big fan of the cold. It's only September. It should be at least 95 degrees outside, not 55. My Arizona blood was not made for this. I might not survive the winter.

We went on a výlet today to this huge estate/mansion. So much fun and so surreal. The weather was gorgeous
and it was just a perfect day. I've decided that my new favorite thing is riding trains through the Czech countryside while it's raining. I can't even describe how insanely gorgeous it is. I miss the smell of AZ rain, but man...the Czech Republic is 10 times more gorgeous during rainy weather.

Now that you made it through my random thoughts about this week, let's get spiritual.

We had progressive training this week in Prague. It's basically just a training for all the new missionaries that talks about the mission and what to expect. During the training Sister Gehring gave a super cool lesson about the power of our thoughts. She talked about how our circumstance doesn't change, however, we can change our thoughts. She gave the example of learning Czech. Our circumstance is learning Czech. If our thought about it is that we can't learn Czech, then we're gonna start feeling discouraged and unmotivated. Feelings lead to actions. Those feelings lead to not studying, slacking off, etc. That then leads to the result of not learning Czech. However, if our thought is that with God we can learn Czech, then that leads to feelings of motivation and excitement. Those feelings lead to more studying and immersing yourself in the language, which leads to learning Czech. The circumstance didn't change. In both situations there's the problem of learning Czech. However, the thought can change, and your thoughts correlate directly with the result you get. It reminded me of a talk, "Grateful In Any Circumstance," that President Uchtdorf gave in April 2014 General Conference.

"Could I suggest that we see gratitude as a disposition, a way of life that stands independent of our current situation? In other words, I’m suggesting that instead of being thankful for things, we focus on being thankful in our circumstances—whatever they may be...Being grateful in times of distress does not mean that we are pleased with our circumstances. It does mean that through the eyes of faith we look beyond our present-day challenges." -Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Sorry for the super long and not too exciting email. Hopefully they'll get more exciting as time goes on haha. I hope you all have a great week! Love you all!

Sestra Lewis