Hello Family!
I resent my last 3 emails hoping you would get at least one of them. I hope all is going well back at home. I didnt get an email yet so the system probably just has problems right now. This has been another very fast week and we had great chances to meet with many new investigators and pick up 3 new investigators. It was great! Its a breath of fresh air to have a fresh batch of new investigators when many of our older ones run against the wall of deciding whether or not they want to change their lives. One of our english speaking investigators, Sasha, brought a friend who had lived in the US for two years and it was fun to talk to her and we hope that she will help him get to church to really start to experience what the spirit feels like. In one of our recent trainings with Pres. Compero, he showed us a graph showing that we had a good number of about 23 new investigators being reported each week in the mission. The next step was getting them to sacrament meeting, which dropped to an average of 6 of those new investigators actually attending. It became very apparent that that was the main issue. All of this led to 1 baptism this last week in the mission. It was apparent that raising the number in church attendance would raise the number of baptisms in the mission significantly. We switched our focus to that and really pounded it with our investigators but they still struggle to make this relatively small descision. Its also hard not to have any control over it as a missionary besides reminded them and doing all you can to get them to go. So, we hope that we will see that progress with Sasha and his friend Marina soon. They're great! We also had a great experience with another person wanting to learn english who just walking in on one of our lessons. It was a final lesson with a couple we had been teaching and hoping would baptize but they lost their spiritual desirea and really just want english. It was really sad to lose them but great to pick up a new younger investigator. We hope to meet with her soon. Their was also a little drama in the branch regarding someone who had spread a rumor that the missionaries had recieved permission from the branch president to baptize an investigator who was drinking and smoking. I spent an hour or two just talking to the people involved after church, reassuring them that everything was alright and that nothing like that had ever been said. Sometimes the things that you end up doing on your mission are things that you never thought you would have to do. I'm sure it will be helpful down the road but looking back on it, i never thought i would be having to counsel people like that, especially in Russian. The Lord is so great to bless us with such experiences. Thanks for all of your prayers family! We desperatly need them out here and every single one counts, im a firm believer of that! I love you all and i look forward to hearing from you!
With Love,
Elder Ostler
