...No Title this week

Labas Visiems! (Hello to All)

The week just flew by, I feel like I just wrote like yesterday, crazy. I taught the piano lesson and taught another one this week. It's nice to have a zone leader for a companion, kinda odd, since he has a lot of leadership stuff he needs to do, that I don't, but it's good in that we talk to the other missionaries in Vilnius a fair amount. That's great about Porter, that will be excellent.

We cook our own food, except for Preparation days when we eat out with our district out somewhere, today we are going to eat some traditional Lithuanian food, should be delicious. Elder Cooke ran cross country in high school, but I don't think running is his favorite sport, he does enjoy volleyball. Yes we have taught people, we had 6 new investigators this week, hopefully we'll be able to meet with them again this coming week and we can start to have some progressing investigators.

It's been raining a ton, which is bizarre for me, since Idaho is not really a place where it rains, but it's good, harder to contact and teach people in the rain which is frustrating, but it's not terrible. This week we worked on bus contacting, where we usually start by finding a younger male, because they will probably speak English, and then asking either a question about Lithuanian, or asking if we could practice with them. This wasn't the most easy thing since I generally don't speak a lot in ENglish, let alone in Lithuanian, to people that I don't know at all, but it was good and most people are quite helpful. Although I was told 'I don't like talking to people' and 'Not really', which was kinda funny.

Had an exchange with Elder Warner this week, we went harvesting and a very drunk man wouldn't let us leave without coming in to his house, we said no about a bajillion times, but finally we walked in, he showed us his sick wife, who sucked on her gums, and then we walked out. Super weird, crazy how when people are drunk they just have so little control over themselves, which I quess is probably one of the main reasons God, doesn't want us to drink, we lose agency. We also 'taught', in quotations because I'm not sure if we taught anything or were spoken at by the people we contacted, a couple gentlemen who only wanted to share their ideas, which is interesting to a certain extent, but not the reason I came to Lithuania. Listening is important, but needs to happen on both sides the missionaries and the person being taught.

Oh, the majority of this week Elder Cooke only spoke Lithuanian, which was intense, but good. I feel like I usually understand most of what people say, but sometimes we talk to people who like to philosophize, which usually leads to me being confused and no headway, which is unfortunate because questioning things is really how we come to know truth and discover more things, but you need to involve God and be open to the possibility that what you think is wrong.

Lithuania is amazing, I already feel at home here. This week we had some 'zuko' a drink similar to Kool Aid, but you don't need to add sugar and it tastes better, it's miraculous. There is loads of different juices here, had some melon-apple juice, which tasted like I would imagine a drink made from Starbursts would taste- incredible.

Been thinking about time and what it's like for God, not a ton because it boggles my mind, but a bit, trying to understand a little better the nature of God's omniscience and omnipresence. But if you think about prophecy from God's perspective, it's really lame, like me saying that right now as you read this you are reading this, it's just a 'duh' statement, but because we have such a narrowed, constantly changing view of time prophecy is incredible. How can someone be able to predict what will happen in an hundred years? It's crazy, but time doesn't ever expand, it's like a giant ocean that God sees all of, we are just sailing through fog only able to see what happens immediately. Anyway, that's just my little thought provoking bit for the week.

Thanks to all of you, I pray for you daily and appreciate your prayers. I know that this is the same church that Christ established on the earth, and that we can be led to people, by ways we don't understand- while bus contacting we ended up far away from where we usually would be and then taught a lesson to a guy, who was very receptive and otherwise we never would've met. I know that we can be able to understand and increase our knowledge and meaning in life, by study and the help of the Holy Ghost.

Love to all of you,

Vyresnysis Conor Hilton

PS I am writing this from the US Embassy, which is pretty exciting. One of the phones went off and it sounds exactly like the ringing of phones at the site, weird. Also had to get a badge and walk through a metal detector, so really was reminiscent of working at the INL.