perfection.

BUNA!  

Another week in the life here in beautiful Sibiu.

The weather was amazing this week️ and basically all the snow melted! We have been going outside a lot which has been nice. Our new favorite thing to do is to go to a cute little cafe or restaurant and get some hot chocolate and then just sit for a couple hours and do our work. 

Rajiraj our friend from sri Lanka is doing well and we met with him a couple times this week and he came to church. The language barrier is slightly hard, but we got in contact with a missionary that speaks Tamil from India that we've been able to video call in.

Viorcia, is still on date for February 6 which is awesome and now her son who us 12 wants to be baptized too!!?! Yay we were really psyched. He'll probably be baptized in a couple more weeks because we still have to teach him a lot.

We have been doing a lot of work with the ward to try to reactivate members this week and set up our first ward council with our 2 active members! It actually went pretty well. We are still trying to build up good relationships with them, but it is coming. 

We had Mission Leadership council this week which was AMAZING. president Rucker talked a little bit about this verse in Matthew which says this:

48 "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."

Not gonna lie, this verse gave me some anxiety in the past... I mean, I feel like I try to do everything perfectly and have a standard for myself to do things perfectly and let me tell you I fall short every time! 

Butttt news flash... we aren't going to be perfect in this life, and if we expect ourselves to be perfect we are just gonna be disappointed all the time!! 

I do know though that as we rely on Christ and His atonement and His grace, we can be the best person we can be in this life. 

Don't be too hard on yourself! Just try your best:)) 

(Wow that sounds like a cheesy bumper sticker or something lol) but it's true.

Vă pup 

Sora Tobler 

mission impossible

Hm ok yeah this week was a lot. Just a lot haha. By sunday night I think my mind was about ready to stop working. 

We've just been so busy and there has been SO MUCH for us to do everyday that my brain was slightly scattered.

-for various reasons, we have been all over the city this week... luckily that leads to random interactions with people on the street. Met Mr. 007 James Bond yesterday on our walk to church. While we were walking on this kinda boujee street, this random guy peels out in this super nice car and pulls up next to us. After explaining that he needed to urgently leave the country for an unknown reason, he asked us if we could bring his old man neighbor some food this week, because the man is old and can't go to the store himself. We were like, "umm sure" and then he just sped away lol

-visited our girl, Viorica. She has a baptism for later in February and this was the first time that we were able to visit her at her house. She lives outside the city in kinda the middle of nowhere and we had a nice chat with our taxi driver about the book of Mormon on the way to her house. She has such a strong faith and is so so sweet. She also took us around the little village she lives in and pretty much introduced us to the whole town! We found a lot of new people through her that way 

-we did a lot of member work this week. While only 4 ppl come to church, we actually have a decent amount of members in the area, they are just not very active. We visited camelia and it was a really cool experience. She doesn't have very much, and the room that she rents out is super super small with just a small couch and a cupboard with like half a loaf of bread. She told us that sometimes she goes days without eating, because she just doesn't have any money and it was like way sad. I was starting to say that life seems really hard for some people in romania, but every time I said that, she corrected me, saying that her life wasn't hard, and it was really beautiful, still. Despite her literally having nothing, she was still so optimistic and happy and thankful for the beautiful life that she has.

-we have access to instagram, google, and uber now on our phones! 

so excited to use these tools to further the work! 

Like I said at the start, this week was a lot, and I was just really hard on myself this week when things didn't go the way we planned, or didn't happen like I thought they would. And not gonna lie, I found it really hard to get up in the morning knowing that we had so much to do! It was just overwhelming! But this scripture has given me a lot of hope this week:

20 Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life

I have really had to press forward this past week and rely on my savior Jesus Christ! Through Him we are able to keep moving forward, one day at a time! 

Love u all:)))

Sora T 

Fairytale Land

hey yo

Wow was it a busy week here in my new area, sibiu. It's only been a week and I already love it here. It's a lot different here than buchurest and I'm still getting used to the fact that it is a single companionship city and sora anderson and I our just kinda out here by ourselves in the middle of nowhere trying to get work done & share the gospel, where as in Bucharest there were a couple other companionships and lots of people always. But other than that, this week has been so so good. 

It has been a week of meeting random people when we leave our apartment, which has been way cool. Met Greta, a cool volunteer from Sweden that is our age, at the bus stop after I told her that i liked her backpack. She did not understand my romanian and I was like, "wow, my Romanian must be worse than I expected," but then we found out that she doesn't speak Romanian haha. Our friend Petro, an old grandpa, started talking to us while we were outside. He is already convinced this church is true even though we haven't had a legit lesson with him yet! 

Church was a little bit of a different experience here... I'm not joking when I say that we only have 4 active members. The branch president and his wife, and 2 kids, Cosmin, who is 13 and his sister Maria, who is 16. Cosmin and maria are awesome and want to hang out with us all the time. Maria likes to make us crepes and cosmin calls us everyday asking if we can play basketball with him at the courts. He has also been getting into american rap music lately and doesn't understand that lots of the words are not good for him to say and don't mean good things in english hahah...

The church building is an old cottage house thing and we just have church in one of the rooms on the second floor. Sora Anderson and I will probably be giving lots of talks in church this transfer considering there are like 3 people to choose from.

This week has been an adventure and every single day I have truly been able to see God working miracles right in front of us! 

God is a God of miracles and he has not ceased to do miracles in these days, in our days, in our lives!! We just need to have the faith and be ready to see them. Look for the hand of God in your everyday life this week. I promise as you look, you will see!:)

Sibiu literally looks like a town out of a fairytale book with cobblestone streets and cute colorful buildings and massive churches. I'm so so lucky to be here in Transylvania and so happy:)

Sora T 

Sibiu, schimb, SAINTS

happy new year! 

to start the year off on an exciting note-- I am leaving buchurest! I found out on friday night that I won't be in buchurest any more... kinda sad because I was really enjoying the city life there. I am getting transferred to sibiu! Sibiu is a really small town in central western buchurest in transylvania:))) i have heard it is one of the prettiest places in all of romania and am so excited serve there. I'm also gonna be the STL and am excited.

My new comp is sora anderson, and she is seriously so sweet! She just finished her training in sibiu and I'm so psyched to be comps with her. 

Earlier this week, sora Gunn and I really learned a lesson about not procrastinating.... the office elders in Hungary have been wanting for us to send them a scan of our new friend Gabi's baptism certificate for awhile now. We finally got around to it on the 31st, New Year's Eve, the last possible day that we could get it to them. While scanning it, we realized we actually didn't have gabi's signature on the paper. We called them and they said they absolutely needed her signature... soooo we basically dropped all our plans for the rest of the day and headed over to the bus station to where Gabi lives. Good thing she lives about 2 hrs by bus outside of buchurest hahaha. after spending the whole afternoon with Gabi in her town, missing the bus back to bucuruest, waiting for a couple hours, and finally catching another bus back, we accomplished the mission lol. 

Let me just say God really helped us out to get that signature haha

I am almost done with the first volume of the book Saints, and all I can say is it is SO GOOD. I'm so so thankful for everything that the early members of the church went through so that I can continue to share this truth with others. Thankful for Jospeh Smith and the restoration! Go give Saints a read if you haven't yet!

I am so so grateful for the new year and christmas that I have been able to spend in romania <3

Ciao ciao 

Sora Tobler