2-27-2012

Hello family!!

This week we have started to see some good sucess from our efforts. We have just been finishing up our extensive list of in-actives in our area and on our last door for the night we were let in! I nice, middle aged woman named Maria who said she had lost track of the church years ago do to marriage to a nonmember and going inactive. She now has a young child and we look forward to meeting with them and helping them return to church. We also met with a new investigator who used to be an accountant but is now retired and pretty old. She is very nice but fairly emotional and gets drunk on a regular basis. This time she promised that she would stop drinking because she new it was bad for her. Our next step is to get a member to that lesson to help us determine how she is progressing. The last great miracle i wanted to share was about a former investigator family, another one of those last door's of the night that we found. The wife, a middle aged women let us in and was very nice and the husband came in from work soon there after. They both met with missionaries about 5 years ago but stopped due to other meetings they had been having with another church in the area. After they had had enough of that they quit going because they knew it wasnt right and just found themselves getting more confused by their teachings. We talked a little about the Book of Mormon and thier progress and they told us that they were interested to meet again soon when they would have time. They have a teenage son that was out for the night but we look forward to meeting with them all together. Such a Great blessing!!! Rarely do people get let in to former investigators like this. We are very excited to work with them. OH, i almost forgot another miracle! THis week we also tried meeting with a investigator and her inactive husband but it turned out that he was the only one there. We talked about his wife and how we can help her and it turned out to be a great blessing. Before, we had been struggling to figure out what to teach because she had been taught all of the lessons 3 time already. We also found out she adjusted her work and now has the day off on sunday!! The Lord is  really opening up the way for them. I hope they choose to take this great oppurnity and reap the blessings that are in store. We continue our early morning efforts to find and teach and are learning how we must remained focused on our goal if we truly want to see the miracle happen. The Lord has blessed us so much thus far and we look forward to the new people we will teach in our future. 

THe weather has been warming up lately and all of the recent snow is melting! Our region is the most notorious for mud in our mission so we are just getting the first tastes of it!:) Just as long as i dont slip and fall in it, i think i'll be ok! 

Well family, thanks for all of your thoughts and prayers. Thats especially mom and dad for advising me on that question i had last week. I'll do my best to apply those principles you spoke. The more i learn in the gospel, the more weakness's i seem to find! ahh!! but its ok! i feel like my consitent desire to change is starting to make a difference in my life and i am grateful that Lord has blessed me with this oppurtunity for spiritual growth. Thank you for all that you do for me!! I hope to attach some pictures now so i hope you enjoy them! 

With Love,

Elder Ostler

 Early morning contacting and beautiful sun rises!

 

         Branch wedding celebration! We sang "can you feel the love tonight" from the lion king.

Huge icicles on our heating facility

          Early morning frost! BRR!!!

 Our church building! a winter wonderland!!

Our church snowman!:)

This is a picture of the Christmas box we received in February from Daniel.  We were amazed that it still had everything in it!

2012-2-20

Hello Family!!

It is soo good to hear Benjamin made it into BYU! Great job!!!! I remember that being such a great, relieving feeling. You will trully love it! I'm way bummed that it wont work out for him to come though but their must be something to learn or someone to help in that summer semester and God must trust you enough to find out what that is. It really is amazing how our Heavenly Father works it so that there is purpose in all that we do in life. He loves us soo much! Just this week we had a special meeting as a district with President Compero. He taught us more about the Atonement and really wants us to apply it to our lives and gain our personally testimonies of it, stressing that if we can learn and then teach these our investigators these important principles and they apply it, then they will be baptized and come unto Christ. It was another great spiritual experience with our inspired leader. He also shared some new weekly and monthly goals for us to meet and i look forward to making it a great matter of prayer and faith to be able to fufill these standards that he has set. I recently made up a chart to help us as a district gage our progress in these area's that we have been asked to improve and i hope it will truly help each of our missionaries. 

As far as working with our members goes, we just had our first meeting with our new mission correlator and were able to establish many important things with him. We also saw our branch mission plan for the first time and were able to type it up both and english and russian and post it in the branch for everyone to see and support. I think this plan will be great and we are just now trying to figure out what we can do to support our branch president in this his and branch members goals. 

I also had an idea of making a service sign-up sheet for our members to fill out when they are in need and the missionaries have time to go and help for an hour or two. I hope this will increase our oppurtunities for serving our members and their neighbors and open up doors that our mission has struggled to open thus far. Service is such a great tool but has been hard to use because for the most part , any clean-up job or other type of service to be done here is already taken by workers that hardly have any money and get really mad when we do it for free:) soo, we'll see what we can figure out. 

This week i had the chance to read a talk given by David A. Christensen at a devotional at BYU idaho called "Has he learned? Does he love? is he a lifter?" It was such a great talk and inspiration to me of what i need to be striving for and and helped me understand some of the feelings i have been having that i had a hard time determining what to do with. He gave it from the view of a return Mission president and really hit what matters most on a mission with the spirit. I hope to read it with my district to help and inspire each of us as we work to really make Christ's attributes our own by applying them to ourselves.

We are still working to find new investigators and have already found one who's name is Leeda, an older grandma. She sounds very nice and i look forward to meeting with her this next week. 

Well i hope that this letter finds you all doing well. I'm glad you got my box i sent but suprised it came in such bad shape. I guess it is a miracle for a box to be sent half way around the work and still make it in one piece. Hope you enjoyed the candy!:) Have a great week and i look forward to hearing from you all.

With love,

Elder Ostler

2012-2-13

Hello Family!!
Another week has flown by! There isnt much new to report other than we have continued our work with the members and less-actives. We are organizing a member book that will give missionaries a better idea of when these people have been visited and what each of there needs are. We are also interested in part member families and hope to begin  to work with the many that are in our branch. We have slowly been recieving more referrals and contacts and hope to see some sucess from these soon. We met with one investigator this week who was a very nice lady but she struggles to find a desire to know if what she has been taught many times is actually true or not. She is comfortable with the life she has right now and doesnt feel much need to change it. We pray and work so that some day these people will find the desire to recieve the blessing that God waits to give them. 

With our district I've been trying to help our missionaries have more courage in their callings as missionaries of the Lord. I used the story of the 2060 strippling warriors and focused on the word "doubt" and how that was the main difference between them and the rest of the army of the nephites. They did not doubt that God would deliver them. They had been taught by there mothers and the examples of their fathers and pressed forward with confidence and perfect faith that they would be preserved. I then moved on to where it talked of the army of Moroni where they struggled even among the leaders to not doubt. Not that they were weak, but that the confinence they had in their army was low due to the wickedness of their soldiers. They couldnt help but doubt because they knew the promise that the Lord had given them many many times, that if they remained faithful and righteous, the Lord would prosper them in the land. They had "no promise' when the soldiers chose to not be completly obediant and follow the example of thier captain. I think this applies to families as well as missions in that the strength and good example of each person is so vital to the spiritual growth and success of that family or mission. I encouraged each of them to think of what more they could give up that might be holding us back from moving forward in perfect confidence that the Lord will deliver us and lead us to those who are ready. I am so grateful for the lessons that the scriptures can teach us. I have loved reading through alma, finding so much that i need to apply to myself. Something i would encourage Benjamin and Caleb to do and anyone if they arent already doing it, is to set aside some personal time, no matter what you may be doing to read the scriptures. There is so much there that can help us, we just have to make the little sacrifice to read and find it. I wish i had spent more time in the scriptures now that i look back to the years before the mission. It may take sacrificing reading a Hardy Boys book or a good C.S. Lewis book but it is worth it! :)

OH, and this week we recieved some great news!!! we have a missionary correlator now in our branch which is a great help to communicating between missionaries and the branch leaders. This is something we have been asking for for a long time now and now that we have him, we will work to use this great gift well.
Thanks so much for those who wrote me this week! It is always so great to each from each of you. I hope you all enjoyed the packages i sent and that they got their safetly. I havent yet recieved those pictures you were talking about yet. That object i was holding in the christmas picture was the broken off chair leg we found in the apartment. Legit, huh?!:) haha i'd agree! Well, i hope you all have a wonderful week! Can't wait to hear from you all!

With Love,

Elder Ostler







I have a question. Where did mom learn the word legit?:)   

2012-2-6

Hello My Dear Family!
Great to hear from you and how you are doing! That looked like you were having a great time playing "battleship". I need some of that kind of creativity out here!! We have been using the Holy Ghost object lesson with that scorpion and pictures you sent and its been a big hit! The members love it! they were always facsinated or terrified by the scorpion and asked many good questions that we could use to make our lesson even more meaningful to them. Thanks for the idea Dad! I'd love to hear any others if you have them!:) I also loved hearing about the missionary work going on back at home with that investigator and her sons. I really wish i had gotten more involved with the missionary work before my mission. There is just so much good to do there. I would highly suggest that if Benjamin has time, go on splits with the missionaries! You definitly wont regret it and will be grateful for that experience once you get into the mission field. Caleb could also do so much good among his friends that may not be LDS just by being a good example. You all sound like such great, seasoned missionaries now! i just hope i can measure up to you all!:)

This week we spent lots of time getting this area organized, straighteningn out things with our landlandy which had been a little rocky when we first came in, and finding new investigators. We tracted into a pair of young men doing repairs on an apartment and returned to teach them a few times but it just hasnt worked out to have a good lesson with them. We also met with a few members in our area, the branch president and relief society president and a few others who are all great people. We already have a few potential investigator options which we recieved just by showing the members that we were sincere and wanted to help whoever we can. We look forward to teaching these friends of our neighbors. We also had the unique oppurtunity to serve two people, one after the other. We were walking along contacting when a grandma called out to us and asked us to help her close her bread stand door. It had frozen at the hinges and she was to short to reach them so we glady agreed, broke the ice and closed the door, giving her a church pamphlet as we left. As we were talking about how great it felt to FINALLY have a chance to help someone out, i had the feeling that we should go visit a potential investigator who lived on a far edge of town. It was kinda random but we said why not and headed for that part of town. About five minutes we came upon a women who had sat down in the snow her face bruised from a beating she had recieved from a abusive husband we later found out. It was aweful. We quickly helped her up, giving her my gloves so she wouldnt freeze, and started slowly walking towards the apartment of her son. I must admit i was struggling to find christlike feelings for the man who would do such things to such a precious daughter of God. I had to brush those feelings off and just focus on getting this lady to a place where she wouldnt freeze to death. The temperature was somewhere in the negatives with wind which made it one of the longest walks of my life. We soon arrived at the apartment with an astonished look from the son who could only manage to shake his head and thank us.
I am so grateful the Lord led us to help those two women that day. Never pass by the chance to help someone. You never know what it could mean to a person. Our heavenly father truly loves his children!
Well, my times up yet again! I love you family. Have a great week!

With Love,
Elder Ostler

Please tell G and G Ostler thankyou for the christmas package! It was greatly enjoyed!:)

2012-2-6 Letter from Mission Office

Dear Parents,

All missionaries here are safe and warm.  Their health seems to be good; President has provided nutritional supplements and we are not hearing of respiratory illnesses.  It is true Ukraine is experiencing a severe cold snap and there have been many deaths related to the cold weather as you have probably seen in the news.  We are very concerned here for the safety of every missionary during this “at risk” time.  Besides the typical safety net precautions such as staying in companionships, always having a working cell phone on their person and coming in on time, we have stressed the following to each missionary:

1.      NEVER create supplemental heat in your apartment with any gas appliance or open flame.

2.      Always plan ahead so you do not miss bus schedules etc.

3.      Every time you leave the apartment, even if you think it will be for a moment, dress warmly.

4.      You are encouraged to discuss additional heating needs if your apartment is still cold after the supplemental electric oil filled heaters are not adequate.

5.      Wear proper thermals, scarves, gloves and hear gear.

6.      Gas detectors are in each apartment and should be checked regularly in addition to once a transfer checks by the mission.

This note is meant to communicate our concerns and actions and not meant to alarm you.  Most of the deaths are in the missions to the north of us and are homeless persons or those who got too drunk and fell down in the snow late at night. 

Thank you for your son or daughter’s service and preparation to serve this mission. 
We do love and appreciate them.

Ukraine Donetsk Mission

062-381-1977