The Week of Cold

Pilsen (or Plzen)

You can probably guess how the weather was this week based on the title of my email. We have had snow on the ground that hasn't melted since last Sunday. So it hasn't exactly been warm. This week was good. A little odd, but still good.

• Tuesday we left for Prague at 12:30ish and were there for MLC until Wednesday afternoon. We had lots of good discussions and talked a lot about what we can do this year to improve as missionaries. We are going to be focusing a lot on working with members, which is the best way to be successful in missionary work. We slept over at the Assistants apartment, and that was a good time. Elder Page is from Elder Tingey's MTC group, and Elder Belshe and I know almost all the same people in the country, so we had a fun time there.  After we got home on Wednesday we went tracting. It was pretty cold.
• Thursday we had district meeting, and then a few lessons. We are also working on preparing a training, which we will give next week at Zone Training. We are excited about the stuff we have found and hope that it will really help the missionaries in our zone. It is already helping us.
• Other than that we have been looking for new people and meeting with a few others as well. We haven't seen a whole lot of progress this week, but we are looking forward to better things, and we found someone who came to church, so we are excited to start working with him.
• Plzen is a ward that is familiar with opposition and still going strong. The members here are awesome.
• We didn't end up having any exchanges, which was a bummer. It was a bit of an unorthodox missionary week. I have a lot of respect for Bishops after Thursday. We had a meeting with an awesome member who just needed a bit of spiritual up boost. Then a meeting with a member with challenging medical issues and that was an emotionally exhausting hour.  That was an emotionally draining day, we went contacting afterwards and our brains were pretty fried already. But it was good.
• I think that the "going all in" part of the gospel is what enduring to the end is all about. Sometimes it is really tough, but we can rely on the enabling power of Christ's Atonement to help us. That's a lesson I have learned on my mission.

Elder Tingey & Elder Pickett (this is a repeat picture)

• Elder Tingey and I are doing a good job of cleaning things up in our apartment and we are doing well. We get each other pretty well, and don't have any problems. We also can give each other a bit of a hard time, so that's been fun.
• Today for pday we are going to lunch together as a district and then we will look around the city some more and talk to some people. It should be good.
• Acquiring Spiritual Knowledge (ASK) is such a great seminary topic. People have an endless supply or questions, but if they don't look for answers in the right places they will never find them.

My spiritual thought this week is about the scriptures. There are sometimes when we read the scriptures just to check it off that we have done it. When we do this, we sometimes fall asleep reading, zone out and read a page without actually taking in a word, or just speed through it without gaining anything from it (I know all of these things from experience). I have found that the best way for me to study the scriptures is to get excited about a questions, or a topic, so that I am really studying with a purpose, not just reading to se that I have read. I challenge you all to prepare adequetely for your scripture study this week by figuring out what you want to study and why it is important to you. You'll have some great experiences. Thanks for the prayers and support!

-Elder Pickett

A delicious lunch. The nickname for the dish is a Moravian Sparrow, 

but there is actually no bird there at all.

This is a beautiful panini we made. We found out why the griller was left though. 

Because after our first use it died. But those were two really good sandwiches.

To Caroline:  They do have good hot chocolate in the Czech Republic, but not the good drink kind. Their hot chocolate is kind of like hot chocolate pudding. A good dessert, but not a good drink.