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
