Life Rocks

Man, life rocks.

How is everyone doing? I'm doing great.

So I had a rockin' week. (I feel "seventh grader" vibes radiating from my vocabulary when I use the word "rockin'." I think I'll replace it with "spicy" from now on.) I had a spicy week. Both literally and figuratively. Take that as you will.

Okay.

Let's talk about awesome things that happened this week:

-Miracle in Kazan! This happened last night, actually. I got a call while I was contacting our way home from a meeting at about 8:45 from Elder Hale, one of the Tol'yatti zone leaders, who was an assistant until I came over to Avrora. Elder Christensen, who just barely whitewashed Kazan North area (when two missionaries get transferred into a new area blind, without anyone staying there who had been there before), had a story. By the way, Elder Christensen is also a district leader there in a city he's never served in before, and is training Elder Nielson, who just got to Russia two weeks ago (and is from Highland, and went to Lone Peak!)

Anyway. Elder Christensen and Nielson had a rough week, and they were making their way home from church, just kinda contacting without a lot of energy or faith. Elder Christensen decided that they weren't being effective, so they took a second, ducked off the street into somewhere a little quieter, and took a minute to have a personal prayer for each of them. Then they prayed as a companionship to find out where they should go contact. Both of them felt like they should go back to this street they had passed not long ago that was in the opposite direction as they were walking, so they headed back. Nobody was stopping for them, so Elder Christensen says, "I got a crazy idea. Let's just contact people in English and see what happens." So they started contacting people in English. They see this guy about to walk into his apartment building, and Elder Christensen snags him and says, "Do you speak English?" in Russian. To which this guy responds, in English, "Sorry, I don't speak Russian." Ha! So they start talking to him, and he invites them into his apartment. Turns out he and his brother just moved to Kazan from Syria. They don't speak Russian. They don't know what they're going to do with their lives. They are "searching for truth," in their own words. They don't have jobs or plans; they're just kind of floating and trying to find work before their savings run out. So the missionaries teach them the first lesson (The Restoration) in English, which means Elder Nielson can fully participate with no language barrier (awesome!). These guys are just eating it up. They're the most prepared people ever. So the time comes and Elder Christensen starts extending the baptismal committment: "As you read and pray and find out for yourself that the Book of Mormon is true, and the Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, will you be baptized--" and this guy cuts him off and finishes his sentence: "--by somebody who actually has the authority from God? Absolutely we will!" So they have two baptismal dates out of nowhere for April 14th. And these guys are awesome and want to meet every single day to learn more. And then he asks, "Hey, this stuff is really important. The work you're doing here is so important! Can we help you out any way? Can we come out on the streets with you and try to find more peopel to share this with? Or... we know a bunch of English-speaking students from the universities around here. We'll talk to them and get them to meet with you!"

Oh, man. That's gotta be one of the top two miracles on my whole mission. They basically were given straight from God two new investigators with baptismal dates, who are perfectly golden, want to go contacting with them, give them 1000 referrals, and are going to meet every single day. MAN this church is true.

-We had Zone Conference in Saratov this week! It was wonderful, as we all expected. Tol'yatti zone got SUPER inflated after their Zone Conference. This last week we got in the key indicators, which kinda gives us a really rough idea of how things are giong on in the zone, and they are WAY up from the previous like three months. So that's exciting. This week I'm looking forwards to another sweet Zone Conference in my hometown, Samara (also Tol'yatti and Saratov are kind of my home towns, I think). It should be rockin'. I mean spicy.

-Man. That's about it. Life is so good. Elder Morris and I threw down some spicy weekly planning on Saturday (finally had time for it, for once) and we are gonna make it happen this week with our area. Yeah we have to plan a Zone Conference and a six-group visa trip, but man we're going to set some baptismal dates while we're at it.

Thanks for everything you do! I love you all! Have a wonderful day and week!

Love,
Elder Broekhuijsen

P.S. The weather is getting warmer finally. Today we woke up and it was exactly 0 degrees C, and we went outside and I didn't have to wear the inside liner of my palto, or gloves, or semi-broken earmuffs I've been using that I found. It felt like SUMMER outside. Elder Morris says spring gets ridiculously muddy and stuff. I'm ready to rock it. It's sunny and warm and all the snow is melting, and the 18-foot icicles are all crashing to the ground spectacularly (we're not allowed to walk near buildings until like May). Word.