Living in a Fairy Tale

It's always nice to wake up to a great email from our favorite Russionary!  No sound files today - but maybe next week!

We had a rad week. We had exchanges with the Samara Zone Leaders, which was cool. I got to spend an evening back in my old area in Bezimianski North. Good times. Even just smelling that apartment brings me right back to that winter when Elder Langston and I tore up the street. Cool story - during those exchanges, I had a meeting with Elder Hughes and their best investigator - A*. A*, interestingly enough, was in the area book. Elder Langston met her on a bus when he was serving with Elder Wood in Bezimianski... 11 or so months ago. Then I was serving with Elder Wood the next transfer, and she called us and we met with her two or three times before she stopped answering her phone. Well now she just decided to get baptized, and is really awesome. So, that's pretty rad. She said my Russian has gotten better since last time she talked to me. I sure hope so. Plateauing after 8 months on my mission would be sad.

Elder Langston and I had a wonderful miracle last night, called setting two baptismal dates with a delicious family. We were feeling pretty down because A* and M* are really in "say lots of words and keep 0 committments" mode, and so they have completely stopped progressing. We're likely not going to be meeting with them more than once or twice a month unless they start doing something now. But we have another family that we just found a week ago. They are wonderful, humble, kind, amazing, good people. The mom's name is O*, and the dad is R*. They're in their late 20s (or somewhere around there) (I wanted to use all three kinds of "there"). Last night, we taught the Restoration, and they just GOT it. Before we had even finished, the asked us to be baptized. So we set dates right there for the 29th of September. Just so happens that O*'s birthday is the 30th, as we found out. Those dates are so solid. More to come on this family, for sure. They also have awesome cute kids. A 4-year-old son named D* who is always smiling, and a 5 year old whom I haven't met yet.

We had some cool adventures in a random part of our area behind the railroad tracks. There was a crazy babushka with a huge goose that was just chilling there. She was petting the goose, but when we came up to contact her, she switched from petting it to beating it back with a stick so it wouldn't attack us. Apparently you can buy geese here for 200 rubles. The next day, we were contacting again in that area, and she was there again. Same thing, petting her goose. I'm pretty sure that area is a fairy tale.

I've been keeping up on my journal wonderfully :D Once again, thanks for that recorder. I'm happy to hear you got the recordings, but man. I was NOT planning on you having to transcribe them. I figured you would just post them on the blog as MP3s. You don't need to do that. I think what I'll do is type you a regular email for the blog, and then just during the week, make you a recording to answer all the questions you asked in the previous email. And I'll try to send photos as much as possible. Videos are not allowed anymore in our mission without permission in advance, so probably don't be expecting many of those.

Ooh. One more cool story, then I'm done. We had a big old thunderstorm on Thursday, and it just so happened to hit right about 9:00, when it was dark and we were going in for the night. So I took the opportunity to try out some lightning photography. No particularly impressive results, but I did get about half of one good bolt. I'll send it next week if you remind me.

Cool. Everything is good. I'm so happy to hear about Dad's work success. That really is an awesome miracle. Keep up all you're doing!

Love,
Elder Broekhuijsen