5-30-2011

Hello Family!


Wow! so much is happening back at home. I'm so glad to hear everything went well with Joe's exam. From what megan was saying it sounded VERY intense. I definitly want to hear more about it! Also congrats to Benjamin and Caleb for finishing up school for the year! Thats always a great feeling!:) I'm still trying to get it into my mind that Benjamin is a senior now! Thats crazy!:) (question: how tall are you now Benjamin?) Im afraid im going to be the shortest of the men in our family. I have no doubt that Caleb will pass me up, or has already passed me up! (him growing as fast as a bean stalk and all! :) I hope all is going well with the kofford's and their preparations to leave. It was great to hear the DelBiancos found a house to stay in. Even better than their last one!:) Also, its great to hear that things are moving forward with Josh and Jen. California here you come:) I may have to visit you about every other week when i return to college:) Well, this week i have some not so good news that our little girl is off date. The mom is struggling right now trying to be active so we are going to move the date of baptism until they can regularly attend church. I have great confidence that they will, they are just very busy and have many other distractions that sometimes get in their way. Praying for Nastia(daughter) and Aleona(Mother) would be greatly appreciated. Oh, and also for us so we can know what to do that will help them. Thanks a million! Other than that this week has been pretty great! We are still seeing the blessings of our efforts from our first week of intense work to meet our goals. We've had about 7 new people seemingly come to us out of no where and very willingly give us their numbers and many of them speak english. We've also had an abnormal amount of Refferals which is also a miracle. Refferals are so important but are extremely rare. We hope that some of these will turn to have great potential! Allright, I've got some pictures i'll try to upload right now for you.


This is one of the only kids in our branch and he is sooo cute! His name is Adam and he's such a funny kid.

 We have to go to an area where they keep a bunch of crazy people to get to one of our recent converts who is such a great lady and suddenly out of the clear blue sky it started pouring! it was the weirdest thing... Felt good though:)

 

1355- This was last P-days masterpiece. Borshe!!! It was pretty good but we still have some work to do on it.

1321- THis is a view from our brach presidents apartment of the sea! it was very beautiful!!

1353- These are our two new elders, Elder Marinchenko(left) and Elder Smith(right) Both great Elder's!

Well family, it was so great to hear from you and i hope you all have a great week ahead of you. You are all in my prayers and i hope you know that i love each and every one of you. Cant wait to hear from you!:)

With Love,

Elder Ostler

5-23-2011

Привет моя любимая семья!!!




This week has been another great week! As a companionship we reached our mission's Standards of Excellence which was quite the endeavor. Elder Smith (my new companion fresh out of the MTC) and I worked like crazy to get our 20 quality lessons (a lesson with a prayer at the beginning and end amd principle taught) by the end of the week. I dont know how that compares to other missions but here in Donestk, lets just say its pretty stressful :) Between people "dogging"(cancelling their lesson) us about every other lesson you have scheduled and the long bus rides to get to their houses, its pretty difficult to plan out your days and to actually know what will happen. In the end we reached our other goals we had set just along the way and met the 20 lesson mark. We are in the 'miracle zone' now so hopefully we can keep it up! We gave another blessing this sunday and brought the sacrament to an old lady in our branch this sunday with our recent convert Kolya since he is now a priest. I, once again, had the oppurtunity to say the words of the blessing. Their is something extraordinary and very humbling about these different experiences, when you know how inadequate you are with the language and even in experience with giving blessings, that you really do have to place yourself in the Lord's hands and let him guide you through his Holy Spirit. For me personally, i'm a very "do it yourself" kind of person, and have never really been the one to ask for help unless it is desperatly needed. I can see that as a result of these experiences, my trust in the lord is becomeing more and more real, slowly breaking down the walls of my pride that have been built up and well maintained for so many years. I can see that there is still much more that lies ahead of me that will continue this process and though it may be absolutley exhausting, i can say that each of them will be worth it.

As far as training goes, we are actually working very well with eachother. Elder Smith is from Cheeno, California and actually stayed in my exact same hall in college just a year after i was there. Its weird to think that i was was there a year ago. It's crazy how time flys! He is really great elder with a great determination to do good. I think we will make a great team.

Thanks for all that you do for me and thanks for all the emails i recieved this week! I Love you and I hope you all have a great week!



With Love,

Elder Ostler

5-16-2011

Hello Family!


Well, I has definitly been a crazy first couple days training! We've been working hard to find more people to teach so we spent most of our time on the streetsl We handed out 5 books and had 27 other lessons with as many people as would listen and talk to us. Though none of them seemed like a golden find, as we talked about them after each experience, we realized that each of them had something change in them while we spoke, whether it was from being atheist to believeing in God and christ or not liking american to thinking that we are all God's children and that we're actually some pretty classy people. :)It was cool to think that we were really making a difference in people's lives. The language has definitly started to peick up again and my understanding is also increasing. One huge spiritual experience we had was when we were on a lesson With a Sister Bigoon in our branch when i recieved a call from the branch president. He told me that someone needed a blessing right then and that we were the only one's with that ability to bless in our part of Marioupol. We closed our lesson and quickly made our way to the bus stop. Being confused as to where eactly we were supposed to meet our member who would then take us to the family, We almost passed the stop but liuckily the sister saw us and waved at us to get off the bus. We made our way quickly to a small apartment cramed between a few big apartment structures. As we entered the dark room we found a man breathing very heavily laying on a bed witha distraught wife and younr daughter across the room. The man was too weak to get out of his bed so we had him lay there as we annointed his head and gave him the blessing. As I pronounced his name, I could suddenly feel the intense love God had for this man, though many different aspects of his life may not have been in accordance with the commandments. I pronounced upon him that he would be able to find peace in his heart and a love for his family and that he would see them again. As I fought back my emotions, I told him just how much his father in heaven loved him. I told him that some day he would have his full health again, not fully realizing exactly what that meant. After closing, I knelt by his bedside and reassured him that what had been pronounced upon his would come to pass according to his faith in Christ. The man lay there but shook our hands very greatfully saying "thank you , thank you" in russian over and over again. As we quietly said goodbye and left, I could see that the wife had been crying and i hope she could feel some of that love that God had for her too. The next day at church we found out that the man had passed silently away that night, a few hours after we left. This came as a shock to me. I thought back over and over again about what I had said. I felt I had been led by the spirit but why had he died when I had blessed him to return to health someday. Moments before the blessing I remembered having thoughts about whether this man would live or not. At the time I took them as doubts when perhaps it had been the spirit whispering the will of the Lord to me. Though the meaning of my words had been something different to me, thinking about it makes me think maybe the spirit spoke those words through me with a different meaning. perhaps that he would have that fullness of strength and health in the next life with a perfect body at his ressurection. I was also reading an article from Elder Oaks about the healing powers of the priesthood and he made the point that ideally the words in a blessing are guided by the spirit to know Gods will but with inexperience sometimes comes our own desires for the person, so that we may not correctly communicate Gods will. He said though the words of the blessing can help bring peace , they are not essential to the blessing. He said the power of the blessing really depends upon the faith of the individual blessed and the will of the Lord. This whole experience has been quite emotionally and spiritually consuming for me and has taught me many lessons about the whisperings of the spirit, Faith, and God's will and love for his children. I will never forget that experience and I can say with out a doubt that God loves each and every one of his children no matter who they are or what they have done. This experience has made me want to be better and to come closer to understanding that love that God has for us and how I can better make that a part of myself in my daily conduct. The Lord is so good to me and I am so grateful for this chance to serve on a mission!! Thankyou for all you do for me family and i hope all is going well. I love you all and i hope you all have a great week!!



Love,

Elder Ostler

5-9-2011

Hello Family!!


It was really great talking to some of you yesterday! It was so great to hear how you have been doing. This week we met twice with the little girl who wants to be baptized and her mother. They are so great and so nice to us it has been a breath of fresh air to see people with such great potential and sincere desires. I've been trying to adjust the lessons that we would normally teach to adults to fit what a ten year old would understand and enjoy. For our first lesson we brought a book of church art and showed those to her as we went throughout the lesson. We also taught about the plan of salvation and i prepared an outline of the plan like we would write it on a white board at church and then colored it in and gave it to her. I am pretty much terrible at making these things interesting and exciting so any advice or ideas would be GREATLY appreciated:) Thanks! So, Dad made the comment of maybe sharing more specifically some aspects of the work here so you all have a better idea of what it is like. Thats a great idea and i think this week I'll just share a little bit about a "normal" sacrament meeting. So, usually we arrive at church about 30 minutes early and most of the youh in our branch are already there getting things ready. This branch really has some great youth. The rest of the branch slowly comes trickling in within the last ten minutes of sacrament meeting starting. As investigators show up we talk with them and find a seat next to them to make them feel more comfortable. Once the meeting begins and we begin to sing, the hall sounds like a choir of angels, everyone singing their hearts out whether it sounds good or not:) The accoustics in the hall are actually really great too and i really enjoy its reverb. We procede with the meeting and normally the talks are farely normal. Sometimes some of the less experienced and newer members get a little blasphemous but normally its pretty hard to go astray when the assignments we are given to talk about are from conference and past Liahonas. This last meeting we had the girl who directs the music was gone at youth conference so i got to get up and lead. For some reason the electricity kept going off and then back on so it was a little crazy since we use an electric keyboard. For the opening song we were on the last verse and the power went out and then for the last two phrases it came on and the lady who plays the piano picked up just in time. It was pretty funny and many of the members had big smiles too as i walked down from the stand. After sacrament meeting we have gospel princples where recent converts and investigators go. The teacher is good at getting the class involved and helps us as missionaries answer questions to along the way. Those usually go pretty well and are very helpful for our investigators. After that priesthood begins and the craziness begins!:) just this last sunday President Fry was here and the teacher had prepared a lesson on honesty. He started out with some crazy scripture that i didnt even understand in english. We had two people translating and the whole class was in an uproar trying to enter in their two cents. We turned to President Fry to answer and he did pretty well but the second counsilor kept pointing out something that Jesus had taught that he didnt feel was right. We finally compared the english scriptures to the Russian ones and came to the realization that there was a difference of only a few words but it was those few words that changed the whole meaning of the passage. It was just another testimony to me of how quickly the word of God can be distorted by men and how much we need the prophet and priesthood leaders to guide us. We concluded the lesson by reading all of the chapter headings to make sure everything was convered and closed with prayer.:) So, this experience was not to far off from a typical day in priesthood and that is pretty much what our meetings consist of. Just a little different than in America i'd say:) haha Alright, well times about up but i hope you all know how much i love you all and i hope all is going well for you back at home! Keep up the great Work. I love you and i cant wait to hear from you all again soon!

With Love,

Elder Ostler

5-2-2011 Pictures

This is the Ukranian countryside and is a great example of the many rolling hills here in Ukraine.

Starting the barbeque....

Missionaries with our native friend, Roostam, getting the Shashleekee ready.  It's like shishkabobs.

After letting the fire die down, we cook the meat over the embers.

This is Roostam, myself, Elder Shorthwill and Elder Smith.

Here we are playing baseball with dirtclods in an empty field.  (Extremely entertaining!)

This empty field stretches as far as the eye can see.  That's how a lot of the land is here, if there is no city.

5-2-2011

Note: pictures won't download, so only letter is included.

Hello Family!


So this week has been great week!! Though my companion was sick most of this week, we were still able to set up and meet with a good amount of people this week. We were also able to get into a less active lady's house and have a good talk with her. She was very grateful that we came and stopped by. She also gave us the name of another lady who was inactive which we hope to meet with soon and reactivate. We also picked up another investigator this week whose name is Aleksey. He initially wanted to learn english from us but we made it very clear that we can only teach him in english using gospel topics. We hope he will feel the spirit of what we teach and change his priorities from english to SALVATION. I'd say thats a good change:) Also the greatest news of all this week is that we had a 10 year old girl and her mom come up to us at church this week and told us that she wanted her daughter to be baptized! just like that!! The father passed away not to long ago and he wasnt a member but the mother really wants to have them all sealed together in the temple! Its people like these that you know wont have problems getting baptized when they have the temple as their goal. It really is amazing what a difference having that temple in Kiev has made. So, this will be my first baptism and i am way excited!! The little girl is really sweet and her mom is just as great so im sure everything will be great.

Oh, and we heard this week that our recent convert Kolya is moving to the Czech Republic very soon, maybe within a week. No one really knew much about it but he said he had looked up the branch there and plans to attend. Maybe Lucy Brimhall will have the chance to meet with him once she is there or at least check up on him. We hope and pray everything will be alright. Alright, here are some quick descriptions of the pictures i attached from our barbecue we had last week.

1219-THis is the Ukrainian countryside and is a great example of the many rolling hills here in ukraine.

1220- Starting the barbecue

1224- Missionaries with our native friend Roostam getting the Shashleekee ready. Like shishkabobs

1225- After letting the fire die down we cook the meat over the embers.

1227- This is Elder Smith, Shorthill, and I and Roostam

1250- Playing baseball with dirtclods in an empty field. Extremely entertaining:)

1256- Empty field that stretches as far as the eye could see. Thats how alot of the land is that is not taken up by the city.

Well, thanks for everything! I love you all and I cant wait to hear from you this next sunday!!


With Love,

Elder Ostler