Sveiki Visiems!


Alistair and others- sounds like the concert was sweet. I'm pretty sure that was where I saw Jack's Mannequin, it was a pretty cool place if I remember. Glad to hear good things about Harry Potter, nice that it ended well, as it should be. Batman sounds fantastic, I just felt the energy and excitement when I read your little blip. Woohoo! Your costumes looked awesome! Alistair, I could picture the bass player in my head as you wrote, it was pretty funny. Oh- Elder Leishman and I were talking this morning and we had a random question, is the Asian pilot guy in Star Trek the same actor as the director "Kastang! You busted!" guy from Big Fat Liar? THey seem to look similar in my memory, but it's been hazed a bit with time and lack of exposure, so we weren't sure, just curious.

A funny occurrence. We were contacting and these two 17-18 yr old guys on bikes start following us, right behind us. They are talking to each other switching between English and Lithuanian, but don't say a word to us. We walked down Laisves Aleja, a walking street, through old town, and then around a park and back through part of old town, in total about 30-45 minutes or 2miles. They never said a word to us. Finally, I stop a guy and start talking to him for a bit and they stop waiting for us and Elder Leishman started talking to them. I finish my contact and go over and we talked a bit with the kids. They were atheist and didn't believe that we had actually got confirmation from God about the Church's truthfulness. They were rather respectful though, and calmly kindly expressed their disagree-ance. It was amusing.

A few miracles. First- Du Wei and his non-member wife came to Church on Sunday. It's been a month or longer since Du Wei came and months since his wife attended with him. It was great to see both of them there.

Second- the Kacerauskas family came as well. THey haven't been for three months or so. We had given them a call this past week and invited them to Church and asked if we could meet, they said we couldn't meet but that they might come to Church. They did!

Third- We had a meeting with Vygantas, another less-active, and he had a question of the soul about God allowing suffering and other seemingly unjust things and how He could judge people fairly accordingly. When Pres. Schwitzer came to our zone conferences last fall he promised us that if we would study the Questions of the Soul and how to answer them with the Book of Mormon and people would be put in our path that had those questions. I had been looking over them and then Vygantas was in our path and had a question we were able to help him answer, using the Book of Mormon and other scriptures. It was fantastic.

With Du Wei this week we discussed putting off the natural man. He had said that he was always tired in the morning and that that was why it was hard to come to Church, so we talked about the natural man in all of us. We acknowledged that it was hard and Elder Leishman testified from his personal experience that it is difficult, but possible, and that the blessings of obedience are incredible. The message must have connected because he was at Church.

We had another service opportunity this week with an investigator, who just moved to England, Orestas. We were helping organize some things at his house, where his mother will still live and finish up some jobs that she couldn't do on her own. It went very well and we offered our continued assistance to his mom, if she needed anything else.

Rumsiskes was also this weekend. THe celebration of friendship between all the members here in Lithuania. Where we all gather and dance and have skits. It's a blast.

Thanks for your thoughts on my law, Champion of Religious and Other Freedoms (I enjoyed your acronym Alistair, maybe I'll form an organization using it), impressions. Mom, that would be great if you sent those talks. I have one he gave in the winter at Chapman University about religious freedom and it was actually while reading and thinking about that that the idea first came to me.

Enjoy your week. Good luck Al, with your wisdom teeth, good thing you got all your fun in this past week. Thanks for your prayers, and know I pray for you. I love serving, Lithuania is the best.

Love you all,

Vyresnysis Kanoris Hiltonas