Rainy Days and Mondays

How’s it Going Peeps?

Another week of rain which left us doing a whole lot of nothing!  We had zone training this week and that was pretty much all the big news.  Zone training was cool and they were pushing family history pretty hard again.  From the mission and Elder Bednar's talk, It sounds like family history is a big deal.  One cool thing I learned from training though was this challenge called "The Book of Mormon Challenge." Pretty interesting little article by Hugh Nibley showing the difficult circumstances that Joseph Smith found himself in. It’s kind’a long, so I will just put it at the bottom of this email and y’all can read it if you would like. 

We only met with one of our investigators this week.  Lonut is a young kid here who loves to dance and play soccer.  He is a pretty slow learner so we take our time.  We've been meeting with him for a while, but this was the first lesson in about three weeks. He was a little indifferent and not paying too much attention to us, so I told him we would play ping pong for a bit then start our lesson.  Romanians are usually pretty good at ping pong, so I expected a good game. Looking back, I kind’a feel bad for putting the hurt on the poor kid - score: 21-4. Turns out that I haven’t lost my ping pong skills.

Just to keep you guys informed on my every move and action. I made chicken tacos this week!  Doesn’t sound too interesting, but it’s super hard to find taco seasoning. Good food that reminds me of home! 


Things Romanians Say . . .
This week while walking down the street, a man came up from behind us and said, "can I ask you guys a question?"  Of course we stopped and talked with this dude. He asked if our church supported inter-racial relationships. Elder Dearden replied yes.  The guy went off on Dearden saying, in the Old Testament, God commands people to not marry outside their race. He then explained that Dearden shouldn’t exist as a blonde in Romania and just went all racist on us.  Watch out for the interesting people in life! :)

You guys are the best!

Elder Brown 


Book of Mormon Challenge

"Since Joseph Smith was younger than most of you and not nearly so experienced or well-educated as any of you at the time he copyrighted the Book of Mormon, it should not be too much to ask you to hand in by the end of the semester (which will give you more time than he had) a paper of, say, five to six hundred pages in length. Call it a sacred book if you will, and give it the form of a history. Tell of a community of wandering Jews in ancient times; have all sorts of characters in your story, and involve them in all sorts of public and private vicissitudes; give them names--hundreds of them--pretending that they are real Hebrew and Egyptian names of circa 600 B.C.; be lavish with cultural and technical details--manners and customs, arts and industries, political and religious institutions, rites, and traditions, include long and complicated military and economic histories; have your narrative cover a thousand years without any large gaps; keep a number of interrelated local histories going at once; feel free to introduce religious controversy and philosophical discussion, but always in a plausible setting; observe the appropriate literary conventions and explain the derivation and transmission of your varied historical materials.
"Above all, do not ever contradict yourself!  For now we come to the really hard part of this little assignment. You and I know that you are making this all up--we have our little joke--but just the same you are going to be required to have your paper published when you finish it, not as fiction or romance, but as a true history!  After you have handed it in you may make no changes in it (in this class we always use the first edition of the Book of Mormon); what is more, you are to invite any and all scholars to read and criticize your work freely, explaining to them that it is a sacred book on a par with the Bible. If they seem over-skeptical, you might tell them that you translated the book from original records by the aid of the Urim and Thummim--they will love that!  Further to allay their misgivings, you might tell them that the original manuscript was on golden plates, and that you got the plates from an angel. Now go to work and good luck!

"To date no student has carried out this assignment, which, of course, was not meant seriously. But why not?  If anybody could write the Book of Mormon, as we have been so often assured, it is high time that somebody, some devoted and learned minister of the gospel, let us say, performed the invaluable public service of showing the world that it can be done."