In the summer time

Hey, all!

By the way, if anyone got the song reference in the subject line, kudos to you.  I heard it the other day in a taxi and it made me extra happy.

So, transfers happened this last week.  All the elders in my district left me alone in Petrovsky.  Luckily they were replaced!  My new companion is Elder Harvey.  I was really excited to find out I would be serving with him.  He's one of those likable guys that you like having around but you're pretty sure that you will never get the chance to serve with.  But I do!  We hit it off right away.  He's from Glendale, AZ and he's just a few months away from finishing his mission.  He's a great guy.  

The other elder's apartment is now filled with Elder Russo who is training Elder Samuelson.  It's weird to think that both Russo and Samuelson have been out for almost a year less than me.  Oh, by the way, I am District Leader again.  It'll be good, we've got a good district.  For some reason, though, a lot of members and people all thought that I was supposed to have left already, so all of yesterday I got people coming up to me saying "Elder Porter?!  You're already so old here, why aren't you gone too?"  Or something of the sort. Whatever, I love Petrovsky.

Harvey and I decided to do a lot of calls yesterday, with some interesting results.  Most people just told us that they're at the sea for the summer and to stop calling them.  One called me by name and said she wants me to come help her son.  But she was so vague and so old that for the life of me I couldn't figure out what she was talking about.  You know that point where you understand each word that a person says, but you still have no idea where they're coming from?  Welcome to talking to babushki.  Oh, and one lady tried really hard to flirt with Elder Harvey -it was hilarious.

Overall it's been a pretty quiet week.  We did have one funny meeting with a member this week.  The story of why Mama C- now probably hates me.  She invited us over for a lesson and fed us a full course meal that we weren't expecting.  We had just eaten, so we were cramming more than we could actually fit.  Then she says, "I've got a special recipe here- chicken in oatmeal!"  Now, any of you that know my eating preferences, specifically with breakfast, will know what is inevitably coming.  I decided to be a good little missionary and eat up the oatmeal.  But I was straining on every bite, as it voluntarily wanted to spew back out of my mouth.  I tried hiding my strain, but Mama C saw it and told me I didn't have to eat if I don't like it.  I told her I'm fine and kept eating.  Further grimacing and we had the same exchange a few more times.  No, I'll finish it, I'll finish it..  Finally she snatches up my plate and throws its contents into the trash can, and stomps out of the room.  Now every time she sees me she just shakes her head in slight disappointment.  Lady, I wasn't hungry!  Oh well.  The only man who never disappointed anyone was never born, right?  Live and learn.

Well, until next week!

With love,

Elder Brandon Porter

Walking around the hot, green landscape . . .

From 7/9/12:

Family,

Well, it's mid-summer!  That's pretty cool.  I've been thinking the last week, walking around the hot, green landscape, about how bitter cold and grey it was here just a few short months ago.  Ukrainians definitely live it up while they can in these hot months.  Going to cooler vacation spots and dressing according to the weather is what they're all about.  Thankfully, though, it has been so much better thus far this summer heat-wise than last summer (which I was here for... weird).

This week has been pretty good.  I had one.. interesting lesson with a man named R.  We have tried setting up with this man who was a former investigator and he finally shows up on Wednesday.  He's an older man with a Beethoven-style grey fro going.  And he told us that he doesn't speak Russian very well, even though he has lived in Donetsk his whole life.  So this led to one of the strangest lessons I've ever been in, just in that he spoke Ukrainian the entire time as we spoke Russian.  At first it was a cool challenge, realizing that I could understand him just fine even though I don't speak Ukrainian.  But it grew annoying, since we really just wanted to share the gospel message with him, but we had an awkward language barrier that he was putting up.  By the way, it's totally ridiculous that anyone could live in Donetsk and not speak Russian.  No one speaks Ukrainian unless they want to be extra official.  Whatever, I just hope that he got something out of the meeting.

Saturday was an interesting day too.  This week we were somehow roped into doing the rest of the yard work for the church grounds all by ourselves again.  It just got kind of pawned off on us.  Oh well, weed whacking is fun I guess.  That afternoon there was a baptism for a twelve year old girl who's been meeting with the sisters. That was cool to see that finally happen.  I spent most of that time talking with an old man named P who was content sitting back and complaining about how the church hymns just sound like a bunch of noise to him.

In light of more personal achievements, we had a District Meeting with our Zone Leaders and some prospective missionaries, and our District Leader Elder Coakwell asked me to perform a musical number.  So I prepared my own rendition of "If You Could Hie To Kolob" on the guitar.  It always feels so good to share music with others.  That was kind of my "me" moment of the week.

Transfer calls went out this week.  I'm the only elder staying in the Petrovsky district.  Rooney, Coakwell and Hardy are all heading out.  It's too bad- I've enjoyed our time together a lot.  But all good things must give way to something else, right?  And I'm sure the next group will be a good one too.

Anyways, I love you all.  Continue having a fantastic summer!  Girls, enjoy Girls Camp.  Dad and Joseph, whatever you do, do it freely and manly.  

Love,

Elder Brandon Porter

The Gospel is straight from God. Everything else is subject to fallibility

From 7/2/12:

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

Carbon monoxide and rainstorms

Dear Family,

What's up?  Glad to hear it.

So, this week has been pretty interesting to say the least.  On Wednesday our carbon monoxide detector went off in our apartment.  We're not really sure what the deal was.  We cleaned it off and did everything we could think of to minimize the threat, but the dang thing just kept going off.  It totally freaked out Elder Rooney.  Long story short, we've been living over at the other elders' apartment for about the last week.  That's been fun, but I am very excited to get back to my apartment and not be cramped up in their tiny apartment.  

In other excitement from this week, I witnessed probably the craziest rainstorm I have ever seen in my life on Friday.  Elder Rooney and I went out to find a less active lady and on the way back we noticed that the sky was a deep shade of green.  Humidity mixed with increasing winds and rain started up.  We found a trolley bus and got on just in time to avoid the craziness of the storm.  Rain whipping around like nobody's business, lightning like crazy and trees being blown apart.  The trolley bus stopped because a tree had crashed down on its power line further up the line.  We just waited it out for 40 minutes then walked through the wreckage.  It was awesome!  I got some fun pictures of that.  Luckily, I think that most people were safe. 

 

This is our district, soaked after a crazy rainstorm.

We have continued meeting with R and he has really good questions.  He thinks so deeply about the doctrine and really tries to internalize it.  I was really proud of one answer I gave to him.  I'll try to relate it to you.  He asked how God can be a just and fair judge if he loves us.  He drew up a diagram of a courtroom with God the Father as the judge, Jesus as the advocate and Satan as the prosecutor (not completely accurate, granted, but not important for his question).  His point was that God shares sympathies with Jesus and us, so how can he be completely fair?  Can't he just repeal the very laws that he set?  I answered with relating it to the story of Daniel and the lion's den.  Just to recap, Daniel gets all buddy buddy with the king and even makes it up to being his right hand man.  Then corrupt men convince the king to make a law that makes it illegal to pray to any man or god but the king.  These same corrupt men catch Daniel in the act of praying and take him to the king demanding justice.  Now King Darius is in a bind.  He loves Daniel and wants only the best for him, but the he had violated the law.  True, he could repeal the law then and there, but that would not change the fact that Daniel had gone against the law.  The only just thing would be to punish him according to the law- no more, no less.  Relating this to God, God will not punish us beyond what He has to because He loves us.  But He will dish out punishment as is required of the laws set in place.  R was pretty blown away and said, "Wow, good answer.."  That's probably one of the best compliments I've gotten my whole mission.  I hope that soon R can be satisfied with his current knowledge and accept to be baptized.

Life has been pretty good.  I've been sleeping on a couch for a week, but that's okay.  My pre-mission life prepared me for just such events.  Oh, and Rooney and Hardy in my district are going to Armenia this week, so I'm going to be temporary companions with Elder Coakwell.  Yeah!  I'm actually pretty excited, he's a good guy.  And we will get to run two areas at the same time.  Multitask, go!  

One last comment- Rooney and I have gotten really good at scheduling multiple lessons for the same time.  A couple days this week we have had four or so people planned to meet with us at the church building at 7 PM.  By the time 7 PM rolls around, enough people have cancelled or just not shown up that we get just one lesson in.  So far it hasn't come back to bite us, so that's good, right?

Thank you for listening/reading.  Enjoy your American Summer, everyone. 

Love,

Elder Brandon Porter

Below:  I found the Beatles!

 Me and G - I love that guy!

Me with my district from Lugansk

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