This week. What happened?

When a missionary picture looks a group of musicians… name the BAND and make an album cover!  (Thanks Rebecca Terry for the photo, Michelle Szczesny for the band name, and Heidi Van Woerkom for the album cover!)

Hello everyone! As is somewhat normal at this point in my mission, this past week flew by, and is kind of mixing with all the previous ones in my brain. But I will try to separate things out well enough to give some updates from this actual week. We'll see how it goes.

• Last Monday we drove into Prague to have an exchange with the Assistants. It was great fun. I was with Elder Hanis, who is one of the hardest working missionaries I have ever gotten to serve around. We had a great day, and met lots of fabulous people. I love doing missionary work in Prague, and it was fun to travel all over the place on trams talking to people. We also got to have a lesson with a recent convert family that got baptized while I was serving in Prague, and their friend, who also just got baptized a week or two ago. That was a great time.
• We also had a great chalk display this week in Plzen using the new Easter campaign, Prince of Peace. Sister Sadler is quite an artist, and chalked out the phrase in Czech in some fancy lettering, and then we all stopped people to talk about it. I got a picture because it is dang impressive. We met a lot of really cool people during that and set up with several of them and will be meeting with them next week. It should be a good week and we are looking forward to some new people to work with.

I only have two pictures for the week...Sorry. I promise I will do better next week!

• We also got, through our fabulous Bishop, a stand on the square. There are Easter markets up, and we have one to use. We are working on trying to improve it, and attract new and more people every day. We have other missionaries from other cities coming in to help up, because we have to have at least one companionship there, and it is open from 9-6 every day. It is a great opportunity, and we are hoping to really use it to meet some cool people.  From Sestra Sadler:  "We're showing the new Easter video there along with a couple of others centered on Christ. We have it all the way through Easter and we will be there pretty much all day, so we take shifts with the elders as we smell the amazing food all around and look at the donkeys, ponz, sheep, and goats that have a petting type of a stand right in front of ours! That means families are looking our way! Exciting stuff!"

Easter/Velikonočně market (Sestra Sadler photo)

• We watched all the sessions of LDS General Conference on Saturday and Sunday. I really loved Elder Holland's talk, Elder Sabin's (who visited our mission), Elder Christofferson's, and Elder Rasband's. Some others too, but those ones really stood out to me.
• Our sassy Czech man L. is not answering his phone, which is lame. But we are working on him and some other people who we met, hopefully we can get someone to start progressing. The work is going well. We are finding people, but having trouble getting them to stick around as investigators and progress towards baptism. The ward is helpful and supportive as well. That is our biggest challenge right now, getting people to actually show up at lessons.
• We usually don't have too much to do during Sunday meetings; sometimes a talk, or helping with the Sacrament, or teaching Gospel Principles, but we haven't had that for a while, because we are having trouble finding people and bringing them to church.

My spiritual thought is from conference, which we got to watch on Saturday and Sunday. I really liked everything, but I wanted to talk a little bit about Elder Rasband's talk on the Holy Ghost. He shared the importance of reacting to a first impression and not second or third guessing what we feel. He said that we can become spiritual "first responders" when we do this. It reminded me of a quote by Elder Maxwell, where he talks about how we often hesitate so much in becoming more obedient, or in yielding our hearts to God. It struck me that we have a tendency to sit back and hesitate sometimes, to make sure that what we are doing is a good idea or a safe option. While it is good to exercise our own judgement and make wise decisions, we also must recognize the importance of listening and immediately responding to a prompting from the Lord, because when it comes from Him, we can always trust it to be for our good. So my challenge this week is to listen and respond to the first prompting from the Lord. I will be working on it as well. Thanks for the prayers and support!

-Elder Pickett     

Caroline is awesome. She is going to do some great things in life, that is for sure. And it sounds like having Sadie and Lindsay visit is just awesome. Fun for the whole family! (except Alan, bummer for him)

I just saw today that Elder Anderson's family was a DeLange family. That's fun! And Rob and Shelley DeLanges brought me some sour patch jelly beans, and starburst jelly beans. Make sure to thank them for me please!