Birthday Blessings!

 Castle in Poznań

Dear Mom,

just got to emailing 

got a call that we have to go pick up an elder from the train station

i don't know if i will be able to come back

we'll see.  love you!

(Thankfully, he was able to come back and email about 2 hours later)

Dear Mom, 

So as you already know, I am going to Warsaw 2 to be with Elder Hubbard. I am sad to leave Poznań, but I am sure that Warsaw will be great. Also, the transition from trainer to second companion is THE hardest transition to make on your mission. Because you are only used to one way of doing missionary work, your trainer's. BUT Elder Hubbard had the same trainee as me, so it will be super awesome!

My birthday was pretty good. Reading all of the letters was amazing!!! It was so awesome and wonderful. I think that is probably the best present to give a missionary on their mission. I especially loved getting all of the letters from my uncles because they all gave me mission advice and stuff. It was really neat.

Taken in the mirror on my birthday

We had a pretty cool miracle happen this week!

On my birthday, we got a text from the office with a self-referral from Mormon.org.

So! We headed out to where this man lives. His name is Maciej. We actually WALKED all the way there. It was crazy far. We walked off of the map of Poznań and almost out of the city limits. Really far. I don't know why we walked. Probably silly idea. ANYWHO!  We got there, and we knocked on his door, and Maciej came out. 

We asked him if he had ordered a Book of Mormon. He said he did, because just 3 days earlier a missionary had handed him a pass-along card while walking through the city. He then pointed at me and said, "It was you! You gave it to me!" It was way cool. Then we taught him the first lesson right there at his door and he said he would come to church.

Then he showed up for church and I asked him if he had been reading the Book of Mormon since we met him. He then pulled out his Book of Mormon. There were bookmarks everywhere, and scriptures were marked and he even wrote his name inside the front cover. He then started sharing with me his favorite scriptures he had read so far. He told me that he really likes it and that it is having a positive effect on him. Sacrament Meeting went smoothly. But then in Sunday School a crazy lady came into the chapel who used to be an investigator and just started disrupting the whole lesson! It was chaos! But Maciej was super understanding about it and kind of just chuckled at her. 

Then we had a meeting with Maciej afterwards. We talked to him about how his reading has been going and about how he can find out for himself if it is true. He accepted the commitment to read and pray every day, and even said that he will get baptized when he gains his own testimony. Super cool! 

That kind of makes me sad that now I have to leave Poznań and won't be able to teach Maciej and help him progress, but we do have a meeting with him tonight at his house and that will be my last meeting with him. I really hope he gets baptized. That will be so cool! :)

The miracle of it all is that it all came from just one pass-along card. We probably give out 300 of those on average each day. We just hand them to EVERYBODY! It is so cool to know that wasn't just for nothing.

Alright
We don't have much time left. Got to go!

Love you!

-Starszy Drake Allen

Sitting with all of the balloons that the Fjerstads sent!