Be careful what you wish for- you just might get it!

Hey all!

Well, this has been a pretty great week missionary-wise.  I'll start with the sad news and work my way up, so as to leave you all with good warm feelings at the end of the message.

Elder Hales is getting transferred this week.  This took us all by surprise.  He and I were absolutely sure that we were going to get to serve another one together, especially since we've been together in a threesome, which is totally different than working in a twosome.  I'm still holding out for a transfer with him in the future.  Elder Rooney will be staying with me, which is kind of funny since he was supposed to have left a month and a half ago.  Oh, craziness.  You probably don't appreciate how largely these changes impact my life.  Doesn't matter.  When I get home I won't care about that either.  Anyways.

As you know, we now hold English Conversation Nights here.  I had a pleasant surprise this last week when someone brought a guitar with them.  His name is T, and he looks like Justin Timberlake.  We talked for a bit about music, then he said, "Alright, you want to try it out. Let's go."  So we went to the next room and jammed for a bit.  People were in and out listening and singing along with us.  Moments like that so awesome.  I love jamming.  Little tender mercy for me!

We had a great lesson the other day, too.  It was with a man named R; 24 years old with a wife and small child.  He had a lot of deep questions for us about the nature of God, and he agreed to let us start our discussion off with telling him about where our message comes from, aka the Restoration.  It was the most powerful I have ever seen the Restoration story impact anyone since I've gotten to Ukraine.  He was utterly blown away by it and further surprised that we wanted to give him our book for free.  His final question was that he saw a brochure of ours that asked "Can my family live together forever?" and he asked what the answer is to that question.  We told him yes, of course.  He got really excited and told us that he's going to bring his wife the next time he comes.  All in all, great lesson.

The last little miracle of the week was during contacting.  Just before we went out contacting, Elder Coakwell (on split) grabbed a bunch of brochures to hand out.  During my prayer to leave the apartment, I asked for us to be able to find someone who will read that brochure, read through the Book of Mormon, and get baptized.  When Elder Coakwell got down to his last 5, he handed it to a man that stopped in his tracks and read the brochure in its entirety.  He then looked up and said, "When was Jesus on the American continent?"  So we gave a first lesson right there on the street and he gratefully took a Book of Mormon, excited to learn more.  We have yet to find out if the rest of my prayer will be answered, but I feel like it will.  Be careful what you wish for- you just might get it!

That's my week in a nutshell.  I hope you enjoyed your week concurrent to mine.  I love you all and I will talk to you again next week.  Same time, same place.

Love,

Elder Brandon Porter

"Made me feel like I'm actually making a difference!"

Family,

First off, Happy Mothers Day!  Woot!  I hope you're all treating Mom very well for me this week.  Not that you shouldn't be nice the rest of the year... but right now especially!

I'm going to be talking to you all this next Thursday, so this email will be slightly shorter than usual.  I just wanted to relate a little bit of an experience from yesterday.

We had a District Conference this last Sunday.  There's a new Eastern European President, and he's touring around a bit to get to know the missions he's over, and this Conference was all of the branches under the Donetsk District coming together.  This was such an amazing experience.  If you didn't already know, all of the branches that I've served in fall under this district, so I got to see literally every member of the church that I've ever been around in the Ukraine.  It's so nice to go and talk to people I met while in the Office and find that they have some sort of good memories from my serving with them, which shows me that I succeeded in balancing my time between Office work and missionary work well.  It was awesome to see Lugansk there too. Just in the four months since I left, there's some visible growth in the members.  Z, one of the youth, seems like she's grown up a bit in maturity, and the new branch president is doing well.  

The person I was most excited to see was H, the Nigerian member in Lugansk.  He found me and gave me a big hug.  He told me that when I left he had gotten all prepared to just be forgotten by me since I was no longer serving around him, but that when I sent him that English hymnbook he felt like he had a real friendship with me.  I talked with him a bit and found out that his plan is to start up a medical practice over in Germany when he graduates, which will be just after I leave next year.  He's studying German now.  In Ukraine. Go figure.  I definitely am going to be life friends with Gabriel.  And I got really excited to find out he'll be in Germany.  We discussed plans of visiting him when he's settled there.  I'm excited!

So yeah, good weekend there.  I got very pumped up seeing everyone.  Made me feel like I'm actually making a difference!  Yay!  

Well, that's my big thing this week.  We'll talk more this Thursday.  Can't wait!

Love,

Elder Brandon Scott Porter, the first

A week of miracles!

Hey all,

So this has been a week of miracles.  Specifically Thursday.  Honestly, I can't think of anything else at the moment that was more memorable than Thursday.  There was just a string of events that dominoed one right into the next.  We started our day with being yelled at for singing hymns on the streets.  That part wasn't so miraculous.  But after a day on the streets, we had a lesson in the evening with S and J.  They enjoy speaking English with us, and we weren't exactly sure what their spiritual progression was like.  We had an amazingly spiritual lesson about the Plan of Salvation that they just ate up like "Yeah!  This makes so much sense.. THAT'S what happened!"  Kind of that deal.  Pretty awesome.  We're going to invite them to be baptized this next week.  After the lesson S invited to drive us home.  We were going to say no because we had another half hour to walk the streets and find people, but we decided that we should give S the opportunity to do service for us.  We were grateful, he's an awesome guy.  But it only took about two minutes to get home, so we decided to make some rounds near our home before heading in.  The first people we stop turns out to be a young family that was extremely interested in the Book of Mormon and wants to meet sometime to discuss.  They were way cool to talk to.  Then continuing on, the next guy was a Christian wanting to discuss the doctrine sometime- and he lives in our building!  We were on a roll.  I mean, in case you didn't know, we spend obscene amounts of time trying to find people with absolutely no avail most days.  This was miraculous all in itself.  But then we ran across Paul.

Did I tell you about R already?  He had met with missionaries before, so we decided to call him up.  He was amazing!  He's got a crazy story, involving getting framed for fraud and getting sent to jail for eight years.  Crazy stuff.  We found him on the street as soon as we left the last contact.  He was a little drunk and just kept repeating "I always see you guys at these times.. Always.."  Pretty much, he's seen missionaries at every extremely tough time in his life apparently.  Tonight he was in a mess where he owes 50,000 dollars to a very powerful man here, and he was freaking out.  We could do nothing but comfort him, but that was more than enough.  He was so thankful when we said a prayer with him and walked him home, he said it felt like everything was going to be okay now.  So awesome.

That was pretty cool.  Besides that..  Did I tell you that I'm District Leader here?  It's pretty interesting/humbling to be in charge of missionaries' spiritual and physical well-being.  I've been trying to incorporate the whole idea of Socratic teaching into our meetings.  The best teacher is yourself, right?  And as part of that DL duty, I get to interview this girl, K, for baptism tonight.  I'm so pumped for that!  From what I can tell, she is super ready, so I don't envision any problems coming from that.  

English groups got started up again, by the way.  They are great!  We just sit for an hour and a half with kids that want better English and chat.  It's great!  And more often than not, the conversation inevitably turns to why we're here as missionaries.  They actually WANT to know!  If you can't tell, I'm super pumped about that.  Every Friday at 7!  Also along with that, we have enough youth here in Petrovsky to have a successful youth night!  Like Mutual. I think I underestimated the power of a strong youth foundation at church before.  It really adds life to the branch.  Compared to Lugansk where pretty much all of the youth left this last year for school or marriage or whatnot.  It's nice here, in short.

So, I'm loving Petrovsky.  It's a great place and, like everywhere else, it has great people in it.  Life's good. Not to mention having two awesome Elders as simultaneous companions.  Life is gooooood.  Anyways, I love you all!

Til next week

Elder Brandon Porter