a dog bite and a baptism

Buna buna dragi frati și surori:) happy august! Where does the time go?

just a quick rundown:

-while closing the church building after sacrament last week we accidently locked someone in the building! We thought everyone had left as we locked and set the alarm on the building. As we were walking away, the alarm started blaring and one of our members was trying to leave from one of the side doors. We felt very bad at first, but luckily we all got a good laugh out of it.

-our 9-year old friend Alex got baptized!! It was the sweetest. He was baptized by his dad who is a convert of a couple years now, and it was the sweetest thing to see their family so happy at the baptism. We also had a good number of our members show up, which was amazing.  It is such a big sacrifice for them, considering it is pretty hard for them to travel to church just for sunday, let alone for the baptism on Saturday. 

-sora anderson was bit by a dog on one of our morning runs. Before you get too worried, she is fine, and it was nothing serious, but we were slightly freaked out by it. 

- 2 past missionaries from the US (moms from Utah) who served here in 1994 were at church this week and it was so fun and interesting to talk to them! They gave us some contacts of people they worked with and baptized all the way back then 27 years ago, and we are excited to be busy this week contacting them. 

- I will never be taking the air-conditioning in buildings back home for granted ever again. 

- our friend Florea is still progressing and came to church again yesterday! 

The power of prayer is real. We were teaching our friend the basics of praying and it was amazing to see how he came to the knowledge that he was able to talk to his Heavenly Father through prayer. Sometimes I take prayer for granted, but the knowledge that we have that we can have a conversation with our Father in Heaven through prayer is amazing. Take the time to say more meaningful prayers this week! 

O săptămână foarte bună! :)

sora tobler 

ROAD TRIP!

life is good:):):) 

this week was another crazy one, but when has any week not been??

-we had so many member visits this week!! on tuesday, we went over to the Mușats house for lunch and it was a good time. We maybe kind of invited ourselves over, but we had a good time. They are a very fun family, and have 2 daughters who are the exact same age as my sisters, Ellison and Charlotte. Sora Șimon, had us over well!! She is an ORIGINAL member of the branch and one of the first and remaining members of the church! She fed us a 5-course meal (which consisted of some very good, but also very skeptical dishes). Lastly we headed over to Fratele Baluțăs house on the outskirts of town. He pulled out some very old photos of him and took us through his whole life story as we drank the orange Fanta (a Romanian classic) that he provided for us. 

-alex is getting baptized this saturday!!! We met with him 2x this week, of course coming prepared to his lessons with some sort of game or object lesson to keep his 9 year old attention span focused on what we were teaching. Our repentance object lesson that we did with him as we were teaching the gospel of jesus christ epically failed, and left us kind of floundering, but we were still able to get him to understand repentance.

 (note- test object lesson/experiments beforehand to make sure they actually work)

-Mission Conference!!! As i am sure i have explained before, as a mission we all get together once a transfer over Zoom to do a mission conference with some trainings, get counsel from President Rucker and his wife, and some other activities. As social media leaders now, sora anderson and I had the privlege of giving a training with the other social media sisters in Hungary. We had a very good presentation planned out, until we all had a very strong feeling to change it the day before. All of us were kind of scrambling with our last-second 180 on our presentation, but we pulled it together pretty well, and it was excatly what we needed to speak on.

 It definitely was an inspired switch!!

-ROAD TRIP! Ok not actually, but kind of. A couple weeks ago a couple elders and I recorded a song for our facebook page. On saturday, we all got together to film the "music video" and put the whole thing together. The place we decided to film was quite a ways away from all of us, and took some travel time, but it was GORGEOUS. Like i actually don't know if I have ever been to a prettier place. 

-our friend Florea is praying about baptism!! He came to church this sunday and last Sunday and is slowly but surely progressing! Little request to keep him, Alex, and Diana (my friend from my last area who is still on date there for the 20th of august) in your prayers!

We pass fields upon fields of sunflowers when we are traveling in trains, and I love looking out the window and seeing them. As you all probably know, they always are facing the sun, that is where they turn. Now what if we were also facing the Son of God?!  Always turning towards him, the light and life of the world! Life is so much better as we turn ourselves towards christ and focus on him. How you can center yourselves more on christ this week? 

Castle and a Talent Show

Bună bună bună. 

Can't believe I am writing yet another email. The weeks are seriously flying by so so fast. Some great little memories from this week:

-on p-day we went to a castle. An actual princess castle and I seriously felt like I was in one of the Princess Diary movies. It was a very good time, and a p-day very well spent.

-our 9 year old friend Alex is still so excited to be baptized and we love our lessons with him. We played a very riveting board game about the plan of salvation with him and his family in our last lesson and it was quite fun.

-a random lady reached out to me on facebook asking if someone named Ryan Tobler was my uncle. He had served in on of the US military bases here in Romania with his family and had apparently made a very good impression on this one lady. And while I can confidently tell you that I don't have any uncles named Ryan Tobler, through him I have started talking to this cute little Romanian lady! 

-since my new calling as media leader, we are in lots of meetings. And this past week we met with someone in salt lake who was giving us a nice rundown on some of our media stats. We have received over 3,000 referrals through just some of the stuff we have been posting on Facebook and instagram the past couple of months and we are one of the leading missions! The work just keeps moving forward.

-we had a fun district activity this week at an assisted living home. We put on a cute little music talent show for them and it was actually kind of the best. They started singing and clapping, and some of them even started crying and it was so sweet. They also served us a great big Romanian lunch afterwards and it was a good day. 

-went to bucuresti for an exchange and to also to record a song!! Two other Elders and I have a music project in the works and it is some pretty exciting stuff. 

One of my favorite questions that I have been asking myself lately is, "what would I do if I had more faith?" 

It has totally changed how I have been going about every day, and how I have been doing the work. I have seen MIRACLES as I exercise more faith in everything I do. 

Ask yourself this question this week and see how much more you can do as you exercise faith and have more faith! 

Vă iubim!!

Sora Tobler