Trading places

Last Sunday, District President Geambasu came to present Sandu Craciun to be sustained as the new branch president.  Rand will now be the 1st counselor.  Rand has a lot of friends in the Branch.  One even voted not to sustain the change.  He is new to church policy and we had to explain to him afterward that this was a call from the Lord.  He thought if enough voted against the change it wouldn't happen.  Such a dear man.  We explained that Rand's job was to train a worthy Romanian to replace himself before we head home.  

Forgot to get a Sunday picture of the new presidency.  Here we were having a planning meeting on Friday.  Sandu Craciun on the left is the new Branch President, Elder Winder is the new Clerk, (replacing Sandu) Elder Dixon as 2nd counselor and Rand as 1st Counselor.  The missionaries are sustained into callings then they get transferred and are not replaced.  This happened before when Rand was sustained.  It's a 5 hour drive for the district president to come to make callings so that doesn't happen with every missionary transfer.  Soon it will probably just be Pres. Craciun and Rand.

 I finally got a picture of the new district with Elders Dixon and Winder, Soras Strader and Gubar along with Rand and I at FHE on Monday

Rand caught a cold a week ago and this week it caught up with me.  We spent more time than usual hunkering down in our apartment trying to get feeling better and watching it snow.

This afternoon we were finally feeling better so went for a walk to make up for no gym or swimming this week.  Found the sleigh hill that the neighborhood children use for fun. 

It was almost dark so tried another mode to get a better picture.  Didn't really work.  The children had fun asking us our names in English and trying to communicate.  A good time was had by all.

This is the tree we felt good enough to put up.  Sora Bair left it for us.  Below is the nativity that Sora Ivory gave us last year.  Lucky she left it as there were no walls to put the felt tree Natalie gave us that we put up last year in Iasi.  We also put up a Christmas tree at the church.  We found it in the basement last summer.  

Pretty sure this was the week with the least amount of photos taken.  There were two major holidays this past week and traffic was very busy.  It was too cold to go to centru so don't know anything about how they celebrated.  I just know that when I went to the printers yesterday both shops were closed for three days straight.  Glad we're feeling better cause now there is lots to do.

This week began the church's "Light the World" with a different service idea for each of the 25 days leading up to Christmas.  Kind of like an advent calendar to help us remember how Jesus served and reminder that we can serve too.  None of us are perfect - we just need to be good at getting better as we strive to keep Christmas the way Jesus Christ would have wanted us to.  We encourage you to step back and remember the reason for the season and do your best to lift the burdens of others.  That is our goal for the rest of the month.