As always, Monday morning started out great for us as we received an email from our favorite Elder. Thanks to all of you who have been so good to write to him. We love knowing that he has the support of so many family members and friends. Without further ado, here's what Elder Broekhuijsen had to say for this week!
It was a good week. But really long for some reason. I didn't take very good "notes" throughout the week on things I wanted to write home about, but I'll just write what I can remember. But this email will probably be shorter... hehe.
So as you predicted, being with Elder Kuzmin is REALLY crunching my language skills. I've noticed SO much improvement over the last week, which is actually really nice. Of course I was improving while I was with CT. Walton, but since 75% of the talking I do (at least) is with my companion, it helps that most of it is in Russian. I get a lot more practice this way. So I'm not where I want to be yet, but I'm getting there at a respectable rate. I'm glad Heavenly Father put me with a native on my SECOND cycle though, because this much Russian would have destroyed my brain on the first cycle. Sometimes I finish a conversation with Elder Kuzmin, and then realize that it was all in Russian and I didn't even realize it. It's awesome when that happens. Because usually I have to hear what is said, translate it roughly into English in my head, and derive whatever bits of meaning I can get out of that, skipping over words I didn't know how to translate, etc. So I think I'm starting to finally make that paradigm-shift into hearing Russian and understanding meaning, rather than hearing Russian and translating into English and then understanding meaning. So the language is coming along.
This week we had a couple of cool things happen. First of all, we had a day where we went and met with a man out of the area book. He was super awesome. Super Christian (some Protestant church), but very open to hearing more restored truths. He was also LIVING how he thought he should, which was awesome. He spends several hours every week doing service for free at this center that runs a bunch of free showers for the homeless. Awesome awesome guy. So he became a new investigator. Directly after that, we went to go meet with a referral we receieved; a lady named T* who's probably about 50. Well, when we showed up to the meeting, she had two friends with her who wanted to hear about our beliefs as well. They are all great Christians as well (Orthodox) and were all super accepting. So in short, we found 4 new REALLY GOOD investigators within like 3 hours. Woot!
Yesterday was kind of the opposite situation. We had three meetings planned, all of which fell through. So we did a marathon 7 hour block of street contacting because we couldn't set up meetings with anyone. And somehow we didn't find a single new investigator. We did find a lady who was some religion kind of like Hari Krisha, although she firmly denied that she was Hari Krishna. She asked Elder Kuzmin "how long have you been in this system?" Which we eventually figured out meant, "how old are you?" Because she believed in reincarnation. But anyway. She was super nice I guess. Just wanted to talk a lot more than she wanted to listen. Then we met a man who said he prays every day that America gets destroyed. Lol. (whoa, I just used "lol" for the first time in like 4 months). Then we met a man on the way home who really really wanted to argue with us about why our church wasn't true. He was obviously not interested in hearing more, but whenever we tried to excuse ourselves, he said "No, no, I'm not finished," and continued his rant. It went on for 30 minutes. So. I'm not sure what we did wrong yesterday. Maybe it was just a test of patience or something. But I was pretty happy to hit the pillow by the time that happened :) Oh, well. As the Russians say, "Buivaet," (bwee-vai-et). "It happens."
So. Hopefully everything is still going well there. CT. Kuzmin has been having some problems with plantar warts since the beginning of his mission. Today we're going to go to the doctor and get them frozen again, which means no walking for him the rest of the day, and likely none tomorrow as well. We'll see how it works out. But I'll be sitting a lot today I think.
Thanks for your prayers! Don't worry about things here. Of course there are hard days, but they don't bother me really. There's too much good stuff happening here to focus on the bad stuff.
Word.
Love,
Elder Broekhuijsen
No comments:
Post a Comment