Everything is Awesome!

We've been anxiously awaiting Andrew's email this week to hear how his adjustment back to "regular missionary" has been going.  Sounds like it's going just great!  See for yourself…

Hey everyone! 

It's been a pretty crazy week. This Russian computer I am writing on in this Russian post office thinks that I am spelling every single word of this email wrong so far. But it is the one that is mistaken! I'm just bilingual. Don't worry about it. 

I have some very excellent things to report. 

EVERYTHING IS AWESOME!

Elder Nielson is a giant boss. I specifically took some small pictures on my camera so that I could email them to Melissa. [Seen at the end of this blog post]  So hopefully everyone is as pumped about the fact that I'm serving with Elder Nielson as I am.

On Thursday and Friday, we had a 2-day Zone Leader Council with all of the district leaders in attendance. Aside from being pretty nuts how many people we fit in the apartment, it was possibly the best ZLC of my whole entire mission. There was revelation flowing in that room the same way peanut butter oreo shakes flowed when I was serving with Elder Langston. That's a lot, for the record. 

Perhaps the most interesting thing that happened is the redefinition of what constitutes "finding" a new investigator. Virtually my whole mission (well, starting from about 3 weeks after I hit the field out of the MTC), the Russia Samara Mission has been operating under the goal of "one-a-day, one-a-month." Meaning one new investigator found every day per companionship, and one baptism a month for each companionship, as an ideal. In order to make that goal more achievable, President Sartori saw fit to tweak the Preach My Gospel definition of a new investigator from "a lesson taught with a commitment given, a firm return appointment set, and an opening and closing prayer" to "a lesson taught (could be as small as one principle) with at least one prayer and a commitment + return appointment). Basically taking one prayer out of the scenario, which made it VERY possible to find people on the streets the first time you met them. 

No longer. President felt that it's time to return to finding the way PMG says. That sounds like a very small change, but it has really changed EVERYTHING in my mission. No longer can I expect to find new investigators on the streets the first time I ever meet them. That kind of sounds bad, but this is all good, really. It forces us to look ahead, plan better, and what I've noticed is that every single person on the streets that we talk to seems to be full of potential, and if we can get their number or place a Book of Mormon with them or have a prayer with them right there, or anything, suddenly, they're WAY important to me to follow up on, instead of just confining them to the endless Potential Investigator sheets of the area book and forgetting about them, because it "wasn't a find." This change helps me see the value in every person, and the potential they have to learn more about the truth we share, instead of just searching out the people who are absolutely crazy religious or prepared. It has also led to us having approximately 108,347 meetings set up every day, of which maybe 2 or 3 go through :D. That's the nature of potential investigator meetings here, I guess. 

Anyway, sufficeth it to say that I'm pumped about this change, and I'm loving it, and coming in from contacting feeling like I accomplished something, because there's not so much stress about "finding" anymore. We still want to find new investigators, but it's not an instantaneous thing anymore, so we're not expected to do it every time we hit the streets. 

So another good thing from this week: A* is a guy that Elder Langston and I taught here in Bezimianski right before I left. He got baptized, and is a boss. But right around the time Elder Langston left, he started having some major hardships at work, and with money, and who knows what else. He went inactive, and it was "bad" inactive, not just "call him and invite him to church" inactive. He said he didn't believe in God, and that he didn't want to meet with anyone, even though we had E*, his best member friend, calling him all the time. 

Well, he decided to let the missionaries meet with him. Elders Langston and Bishop met and committed him to read, pray, and come to church. He showed up to church on Sunday right before I got transferred, and seemed to like it. That night, he called Elder Langston and said "Langston! I was at work, and I got online and for some reason I found a talk by Thomas Monson to listen to during my lunch break! And I listened to it and I felt the Spirit! I still have a testimony!" He was so stoked. So Elder Nielson and I met with him on our first night in Bezi. Elder Nielson introduced himself at the beginning of the lesson, and then said, "Well, A*, tell me about yourself!" And A* was like, "What is there to tell? I found my testimony. I believe in God and I believe that Christ is his Son. I believe this is the true church. I'm coming back, and I'm not missing church ever again. I listen to conference talks while I'm at work and they help me feel something from above all day long." And he was just beaming, and then he said the closing prayer and I was happier than I can even possibly describe with words in any language.
Man, God is so cool. 

So, two more miracle stories and then we'll call it quits. Both of them have to do with a lady named N*. Actually, two ladies named N*. They are different miracles, and each miracle has its own N*. Make sense? Okay, here we go.

Elder Nielson and I decided to take a break from all the drudgery of overhauling the unorganized apartment we had just moved into (as of this morning, by the way, it is TOTALLY organized and sparkling clean), and punish the streets for a few hours. So we hoofed it out to a far corner of our area, and talked to everyone on the way there. Street one: Sovetskoy Army. We got our faces kicked in. Nobody wanted to talk or even break step. Street 2: Novo-Sadovaya. Now we're talking. We were getting numbers and meetings set up left and right, and then we talked to this mom with a 10-year-old daughter. Her first reaction to Elder Nielson's enthusiastic "Zdravstvooytye!" was the typical "hide my child from the cultists" maneuver. She seemed to be ready to walk off, but then suddenly her eyes got all wide and she said, in tones of absolute rapture, "Takiye krasiviye..." For those of you playing at home, that means, translated by meaning rather than literally, "Oh my gosh, you're so beautiful..." I guess that's more of a normal thing to say in Russian; it doesn't translate real well as far as how awkward that sounds. Anyway, we started laughing and the conversation took off. Turns out she's really pumped that we're Americans (normal). She believes in God (mostly normal). And she really wants to meet with us really bad (not that normal). Her daughter, M*, is super cool. She's an artist and she speaks English pretty well because of her specialized school. So later that night, after we concluded a particularly spiritual planning session (with the help of two candles and no electric lights), she called us to report that she had read the introduction to the Book of Mormon, and wanted to move her meeting to a closer day because she had lots of questions about Joseph Smith. Yeah baby! 

Miracle number dva (2): Not 5 minutes after N* #1 finished talking to Elder Nielson and we fist pumped, I got a call from "Potential Investigator: N* AB" on my phone. The very last potential investigator that I hadn't been able to get ahold of or sort or organize in any way, left over from the last Elders here. She told me that she was told by her daughter that she was meeting with two missionaries from a church that wasn't the Russian Orthodox church, and that the missionaries who her daughter, Ksyusha, was meeting with, were leaving town, but there were supposed to be two new missionaries moving in. That would be us. She then proceeded to explain that not long ago, she decided that her church wasn't for her, and she was planning on getting re-baptized into a different church, but then she found out about our church, and went online to research. Usually that's bad, because online contains about 99% trash about our church, and 1% truth. But she just said she was really interested in meeting to find out more, and asked some detailed questions about what we believe in, etc. Got a meeting set up with her in a couple of days now. 

Yeah, Elder Nielson and I enjoyed another fist pump. 

Basically, everything is sick awesome. 

I can't seem to print your emails anymore, so I'm probably going to have to figure out some other system of making stuff work here. We'll see what happens.  But for today, enjoy the photos. Thanks for the updates from home. 

Also - I'm way in shock about the missionary age change. That's nuts - 19 year old sisters? That is nuts. So cool though. The sisters down here are really "angry" about that, because "I HAD TO WAIT SO LONG BEFORE I WAS ALLOWED TO PUT MY PAPERS IN!" Ha. 

So we'll be talking to you next week.

Love,Elder Broekhuijsen

Elder Nielson and I being gangsters in my old stomping grounds (Bezimianski North Apartment.)

Elder Nielson posing a question of the soul (Is there life after death?) while I just pose in general. And lift a weight that is lots of kilograms. So yeah, I'm strong. Don't worry about it.

Elder Nielson and I marveling at how organized our zone is, while enjoying the possibility of hands-free conversation if the need arises.

Elder Broekhuijsen (hand model comparable in many ways to David Duchovny) doing some nightly planning by candlelight. Yes, that's a thing in Bezimianski North.