Dear Family,
While you are all in Arizona I am here in Ukraine. Let's just pause and ponder that for a moment... Alright, pondering done!
Well,
it's been a pretty quiet week. Not a whole lot I can say about it. It
was a four day weekend here for some random Ukrainian reason, so
missionary work has been slow. Pretty much everyone and their dog was
out on the sea vacationing. We spend a lot of time walking around trying
to find people.
One thing that did happen this week was that we
missionaries cleaned up the entire grounds of the church. If you look
at the previous paragraph, you will know why no one else nor their dogs
would volunteer to help us. That's okay, though. I got plenty of self
ponder time. My main job was pulling weeds. After about the 200th
weed, I had developed a list of ways that weeds relate to the Atonement
and overcoming sin. Did you know that the root of practically every
weed is exactly the same purple, ugly stick that just roots straight
into the ground and just sucks the nutrients out of the soil? You can
well imagine the conversations I had going down in my head. Yes,
conversations. We were doing service for a long time.
On Saturday we had to do a mini split to make sure
that our lessons and the other missionaries' lessons were all covered.
When I got back to the church from a lesson with an awesome man named B, I found my companion and his split-comp talking with a less
active woman named T. I waited as they finished and later asked why
it looked so intense when I walked up. She had unloaded all of her
issues she had against the church. Her main thing was that the people
in the branch are not nearly as fun as the ones in the church she goes
to now. And the people are more judgmental, she said. There were other
things, but that's what it came down to. I was actually kind of sad
that I wasn't on that lesson. The whole reliance on the social side of
the church is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. I hear all the time that
someone is a member just because the people are so kind to them, or on
the other hand that they no longer come because people were mean.
They're all just missing the point- if this is God's true Church on the
Earth, does it matter what people do around you? Truth is truth. If I
was the only person on the Earth that knew about the fulness of the
Gospel and had the Book of Mormon, I would die with a firm knowledge
that it is true even though no one else knows. There are countless
examples of people that do just that in the scriptures. Abish.
Abinadi. Even Elijah (I just read about him this morning) when he was
up against 450 priests of Baal, and he was LITERALLY the last man in the
House of Israel that continued to follow the true and living God. 1
Kings 18. It's a good chapter. I just really want to get everyone to
understand that one thing- the Gospel is straight from God. Everything
else is subject to fallibility.
Anyways, that's my thoughts in a nutshell on this
week. Me and my companion are having a great time here in Petrovsky.
Kicking butt and taking names. Well, at least taking names. Enjoy
your Summer!
Love,
Elder Brandon Porter
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