Watching Conference was an amazing spiritual boost, but it was a bit different from how it was back home. We watched the Saturday morning session live at the branch house as a district. The four of us sat around a computer and listened in English while some of the Hungarian members watched the broadcast in Hungarian in the chapel. It was really weird to be watching the Saturday morning session at 6 p.m. I felt a surprisingly powerful sense of unity as the session started, knowing that all around the world, members of our church were gathered together to listen to the words of the leaders of the church. I felt this unity especially as we bowed our heads and listened to the opening prayer. I knew that over 5 thousand miles away, my loved ones were doing the same thing at home. It was such a cool experience!
On Sunday morning, we watched the priesthood session with all of the other priesthood holders in the chapel. It was all in Hungarian, so I'll be honest... I didn't get the most out of it, but we downloaded the audio files for the talks and we are going to listen to them throughout the week. We also had some technical difficulties getting the videos to play smoothly. We were watching it on an ipad since we couldn't get the broadcast working on the computer. The wifi signal was fairly weak so every few minutes, the broadcast would skip back about 15 seconds and play the next 15 seconds on a loop for another minute. The session ended up being quite a bit longer than we had planned... Maybe all of that replaying would be an effective retention tool if you understand it, but it was more of a funny inconvenience for me. The final hymn was nearly 10 minutes long, but we endured it hahaha.
During the breaks between sessions, we did some family history work, played football (American football that is), and ate with the members of our branch.
We didn't get to finish the final talk by Henry B. Eyering because the internet stopped working. This experience has really helped me appreciate how easy it is to watch it in America!
Funny story: As we were locking up the gate to the branch house, I was trying to unlock the huge padlock when I noticed a gargantuan spider crawling across the gate, right next to my hand. I took a step back, processed the situation, and instincively screamed. I'm not even ashamed. That thing was big enough to beat me up and take my wallet! Someone else finished locking up while I recovered from my intense case of heeby jeebies. We all laughed pretty hard about it as we walked to the bus.
We had interivews with President Szabadkai in Dunaújváros on Friday. It was about a 3 hour bus ride. On our way back, we picked up the Duna elders, who are our zone leaders, for splits. I was with Elder McKim from Australia. While on splits, we taught Zsolti about the Restoration, tried to play fetch with a massive dog who brought us his ball and tried to push it through the fence (unsuccessfully) while we were tracting, and we set up a whiteboard in the city center and tried to get people to write what makes them happy on it. It was a great time and a fun week!
I am so grateful for the opportunity that we had to watch General Conference. I loved hearing the talks. I noticed themes of not being overly self-critical, serving others, steady progress, families, and studying the Book of Mormon. We are so blessed to be able to hear from leaders who are called of God to direct the restored church here on earth!
I love you all and I hope you have a great week!
Sok szeretettel,
Burnett Elder
The Hungarian word of the week will be "általános konferencia" which means general conference.
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