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
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