Hello Family!
That picture of Elder Oldroyd got me laughing pretty good. :) I guess we're both going through our mid-mission crises :) This week has been another great week. This week we had 20 quality lessons all planned out. We called and got ahold of nearly every person to which they agreed to meet. By the end of the week we ended with a total of 7 qualities because of lessons cancelling. This is a pretty regular occurence unless you get a week of pure miracles like we had a while back. Something about all the planning and preparation and then the cancelling is VERY tiring and i find my self exhausted every night. I am thoroughly convinced like i have never been before that the mission is made to be one big, humbling experience. We saw the blessing of this last month's work this last sunday, having 10 more people attending sacrament meeting than the average, even with some of our regular members not in attendance. It was great! We also had 3 investigators at church which was another miracle! then, during the next two hours following sacrament, we had two more new investigators show up wanting to meet! We were basically in heaven! a busy sunday at church is always a great sunday, expecially after a drought of investigators not being willing to come for a few weeks. We so grateful for how the lord has blessed us! You learn more and more that it is the Lord sending these people to you and not really yourself at all, just the efforts you put forth that matters. Another fun 'miracle' we had yesterday was when we got on the but to go to church their was a seat beside me. At the next stop a girl got on and before even sitting down she reached out, shaking my hand saying 'preevet' (friendly hello). For anyone thats been on marshutka's in ukraine, you would realize that this is not a normal experience and i was immediatly very confused. We got talking and i soon found out that she was a member from russia here visiting a friend. She and her friend had no idea where the church building was and were very grateful that they had decided to get on our bus and not on one of maybe 100 other buses. Its just small random things like that that just let you know that God is mindful of all his children, even with the small details like that. I also had an interesting learning experience a while back that I'm not sure if I shared yet that I thought you would like. We were at the church building which is located in the middle of a bunch of flats, apartment buildings. We were in a room waiting for our investigator when a grandma came shuffling up to the door, very distraught. She told to help quickly, that some kid was trying to wreck our gate to the fence that surrounds our building. Sure enough there was a teenager on our gate swinging back and forth on it. I immediatly started walking toward the 17-18 yr old with confindence to which i think he might have been a little frightened, maybe thinking i wanted to fight. I had no idea was i was going to say or what i was supposed to do. The young man quickly got off the gate and kind of hid around the side of it keeping it between us. When i reached the first thing i did was reach out my hand to shake is asking what his name was. I dont know if it was the missionary that was in me or what but thinking back about it, it was kinda an interesting way to react. We soon had a friendly conversation going and soon some of his friends slowly walked over to us, trying to figure out what i was talking to him about. They were soon all asking questions about what our building was and what american were doing here. It was surprising to hear these questions, these kids living right across from the church but not having any knowledge of what it was and who we were. Soon our investigator walked up and joined in the converstion, also explaining the functions of our building, confirming that he had actually been listening intently to what we had taught him which was great. It is amazing how the spirit can help you in instances like that, when the culture here would be to come out, swearing and yelling at the kid to get off the fence. I am so grateful for how the spirit helped handle that experience with love and it was very apparent that all of those teenagers were very surprised at our reaction and how we treated them like adults. Its amazing how much God loves his children and it is a great blessing to have such experiences that help that testimony grow. Well, my time is about up but i hope that all is going well at home. Thanks for keeping me filled in on what is going on. It is always great to hear! Have a great week!
With love,
Elder Ostler
I think the package arrived at the office a while back but i should be recieveing it tomorrow. I'll let you know. Thanks!!:)
