a good week

This week was quite another good one if I do say so myself:)

-tuesday: as media leaders in the mission we have a meeting with our Mission President and his wife every week! It has been so amazing working and counseling about the direction of the mission and trouble shooting everything together. The Ruckers are so inspired when it comes to leading the mission, and because of their diligence and faith, we have seen so much success as a mission! We are still currently one of the leading missions worldwide for generating media referrals, and Sora Anderson and I now have the privilege of working with a professional from Salt Lake in further developing our ads and media! It has been a little hard adjusting to being more of a "behind the scenes" person in this new media calling, as we mediate things for the whole mission, and don't have a lot of time to have our own teaching pool, but i have came to love it. 

The miracles that I have been able to see through the work we are doing makes it all worth it!!

- Sora Anderson and I were quite bored with our "sister missionary outfits" and decided to try and put together outfits that matched for the whole week just to change things up. Of course this meant we had to take pictures of every outfit. One day while taking our daily self-timer picture (which we had set up at a tram station), Sora Anderson was quite literally almost hit by the tram. Good thing we captured part of the incident on picture! We are glad Sora Anderson is still with us today.

- friday: for our district activity this transfer, the Elders from Craiova and Pitesti traveled over to us sisters in Ploiesti so that we could have district council in person and bake some goodies, and then deliver them to some of our members. It was fun to meet our district members IN PERSON for the first time this transfer, and we had a good time baking batches upon batches of brownies and then delivering them. 

- Our old member, Mihai, showed up to the church one day with a bunch of old photos of him and his family and it was quite fascinating to hear about his story (apparently he was quite a Heartbreaker), and more about the history of Romania, it was quite a good time. 

- Florea is looking to be baptized at the end of this month maybe!!! 

We are aiming to set a solid date with him this week! 

- Got up and gave a good Lil testimony about general conference and the prophet and his apostles in testimony meeting yesterday! I still get a bit nervous speaking in church in Romanian, but it went well! I am thankful for a living prophet, and the fact that Jesus Christ directs his church in these days!! Is that not the coolest??!

I challenge you all to prepare for general conference this next up coming month! 

Take time to prepare with questions, an open mind, and a prayer in your heart, and I can promise you that you will be able to find answers to your questions!

Love you all:)

Sora Tobler

 

a very riveting round of bingo

Hello hello! I apologize for the missing email from last week.... I just never got around to writing one.

to fill you all in on what you have missed these past 2 weeks, here is the highlight reel:

- our friend Florea is still progressing lots! He came to our ward activity on Wednesday, we had a lesson with him on Saturday, and he came to church on Sunday! 

- The ward activity was actually a major success. 

We "hired" elder and sisters Matthews (a senior couple in bucuresti) to be our party planners, and they did a great job. Sora Matthews came prepared with games, snacks, prizes, and we basically didn't have to do any work. We also played some bingo which was quite exciting. Lots of our members ended up showing up and while the power in the chapel went out half way through, it was a good time.

-we helped our sweet members order some garments. The church website still isn't translated into Romanian, so to order things from the church website, a lot of the members need our help.

-we love the Ruckers!!! The mission president and his wife are the actual best, and I am constantly amazed at the sacrifices that they make for us.

I am so very grateful for repentance! 

Daily repentance, hourly repentance, etc. 

Part of me falsely believed that by this point in my mission, I would be a "perfect" missionary, but that is not how life works. I am still messing up all the time, but through the atonement of Jesus Christ and through repentance, I am able to keep trying, get back up, and start again! 

Take the time to repent daily this week! 

Repentance is positive! 

Repentance is change! 

Love you all lots! 

Sora Tobler 

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?