happy valentine's day

Happy Valentine's Day week, or as we like to say over here in Romania, ziua Indragostitilor fericita:)

Lots of small miracles this week!

Our friend Virocia's phone broke at the start of this week, and we seriously had not been able to get ahold of her the whole week, which was kind of a problem. With a broken phone, and not having spoken to her the whole week, she miraculously appeared on zoom at church!

While we didn't have very many established lessons this week, we have been having lots of really good conversations on facebook and instagram.

I posted about the Book of Mormon on my story about 2 weeks ago, and we were able to find 2 new people in sibiu who were curious and wanted to learn more!

Met our cute friend Ava on Instagram and then visited her at work later this week. She works at a cute cafe library place and she gave us some hot chocolate for free when we visited her. She's the cutest, and I have lots of hope for her:)

We had media training from someone from the europe area presidency, and he showed us some cool stats and numbers, and all I can say that Media Missionary Work WORKS. The pandemic is not slowing down the Lord's work here, in fac,t I would say it's actually speeding up!!

A quick little classic valentine's scripture for your monday:

34 A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.

I love LOVE. Its kinda the best! And I think the world could use a little bit more love! I have truly grown to love the people here in Romania, and try every day to love like our savior Jesus Christ loved (which ngl is sometimes easier said then done).

Let's have more love, more kindness, more unity!

Go tell someone you love them right now!

Love you all

Sora Tobler 

member madness

Where did the week go?!?!! This week went by way fast and I honestly don't even know why! 

We had zone conference this week which was a real highlight and as always, amazing. We recently kinda switched up the way we do zone conferences, but zone conferences are online with the whole mission now. It's really fun because we usually don't get to interact with the missionaries on the Hungary side of the mission very often, but it is nice that we do our zone conferences once a transfer all together as a mission.

I probably sound like a broken record, but this week again we really focused on member work and working with our members because it is so so important! Especially since the ward is running on only a couple active members! 

Maria and Cosmin are the future of the branch here and we have been trying really hard to keep them active and coming to church, especially since they are the only members in their fam. We made pizza and crepes at the church with Maria earlier this week and meet at a park and play basketball with Cosmin at 7:00 in the morning for our sport hour. Considering basketball is really not one of our strong suits, it's a pretty fun time lol.

Had a nice chat with our branch president's wife in which we were able to start to mend the kind of broken member/missionary relationship in this branch and I am so happy about it, because it has honestly been something stressing me out since I arrived here in Sibiu! Member work is so important! 

For a couple reasons we changed Viorica and her son's baptismal date for the end of February, but other than that they are still doing good

For those of you who have been keeping up with Kardashians, we finally figured out the situation with the mission impossible guy from a couple weeks ago. Apparently he knew on of the other missionaries previously, so when he was leaving the country urgently a couple weeks ago and saw us with our name tags walking down the street, he thought he'd stop and ask him to help his old man neighbor out. We went 2 weeks ago, with some bread, but he didn't answer, so we tried again this week and came back with more bread. This time he answered but then proceeded to tell us he didn't have any teeth and couldn't eat the bread we brought him. We came back with some yogurt and hope it tides him over.

Ok sorry this was so long, but this week was just so good. Obviously filled with some lows, but some very good highs. 

God loves us.

He's there for us. 

Have a great week:)

peace in a perfect plan

Some of this weeks highlights:

-last p day we tried to leave the town and make our way over to this cool ski resort place. I have yet to master the art of public transportation and after about an hour of riding around in a circle on the bus, we gave up and just stayed in sibiu

-visited viorica again and she and her son are literally psyched to be baptized. It's kind of hard for them to get to church because they don't have a car and they live about 40 mins outside the town and the only bus to sibiu from where they live leaves at 5:00 in the morning, but I know the lord will provide a way. She made us some ciorba (a Romanian soup) which is a well-known infamous romanian dish here disliked by missionaries, but i managed to get down all of it! Oh and also her sister came in the middle of the lesson having contractions and about to give birth!! 

It was quite an eventful time and we gave our taxi driver a Book of Mormon on the way home.

Just want to bear my quick testimony of the plan of salvation! I am so so grateful for the knowledge that I have that there is more beyond this life and that we can see our loved ones again. God has a plan for all of us and it is a perfect plan centered around Jesus Christ:)

Love you all 

Sora Tobler:)

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