I got another mission story for you...

My sister Jess gets home from her mission April 14th and I get to go out to Oregon for a couple days after she gets back with my parents from Malaysia! Hooray! I'm so excited I keep thinking it's already March and have to stop and realize it's still February! (Luckily it's a short month!) Anyway, in Jess' letter this week she talks about Elder Nelson coming to East Malaysia where she's serving. She got to go down to the first city she served in where the conference was being held. This brought back a memory of Elder Holland coming to my mission in Poland.

I was serving in Warsaw at the time which meant that I got to go to both the meeting for the missionaries with Elder Holland, but if I had an investigator come, we got to go to the member meeting too. Two of our favorite investigators came: Kasia and Zbyszek (though two Elders asked if they could sit with us and our investigators since their investigator didn't come but they wanted to stay for the meeting and they didn't want to get in trouble for being there without an investigator, so they "borrowed" one of ours and I agreed because I felt bad for them).

Anyway, Zbyszek really liked us. He loved having us over. We always got fruit tea or some kind of compote when we visited. We had met him because I wanted to tract the street the American Branch President lived on in hopes that we could get to know them and maybe they would invite us in for dinner or something fantastic like that. (Oh the things you do when you never get dinner appointments or invitations to visit by members.) Actually, I really liked the name of the street: ul. Truskawska, or as I liked to call it by it's English name for some reason- actually, I probably thought it was funny- Strawberry Street. Well, we didn't know where the Branch President lived and if they had been home and we had found them, we never would have met Zbyszek. After ringing his gate bell and yelling from the street to the door (we were separated by a short brick wall, a gate and a small yard), Zbyszek realized that we weren't "JDubbs" and he talked to us for a while, still from door to sidewalk, but asked us back the next day.

Fast forward a few weeks Elder Holland is coming, Zbyszek has been making progress. We invite him to come and tell him it's a big deal. Zbyszek shows up all the way up in North Warsaw from his house down in South Warsaw (it was probably a pretty long drive, I know it took about an hour by public transportation so it was probably about 45 min for him). He wore a sport coat that was a too small to fit over his big belly. He joked about how long it had been since he wore it and that he had definitely gotten fat.

So today, as I read Jess' letter about Elder Nelson coming to visit, I couldn't help think of Zbyszek standing outside the chapel in Warsaw wearing his navy sport jacket with the gold buttons that was clearly tight on him, and remember the overwhelming happiness I felt seeing him there and seeing him in his jacket and knowing he took what we said seriously.

And clearly Poland missionaries get excited about the simplest things!

(PS: I know I already posted the picture HERE. Zbyszek is one of my favorite people I met in Poland. And, an unfortunate side note about him, I was transferred to Bydgoszcz and he stopped meeting with the missionaries shortly after. He didn't like the idea of paying tithing...)