Man, is it weird to be in October.
Well the time has finally come to spill the beans with transfers. I know you've all been waiting. Or at least, if you're anything like every single Elder I have talked to on the phone for the past two weeks, you've all been waiting. (Come on, just give me a clue!)
I am headed over to the fruitful vinyard of Bezimianski North! My old stomping grounds. Woot! And my companion is none other than the famous Elder Nielson. For those of you playing at home, why, yes, that is indeed the very same Elder Christopher Nielson from the Lone Peak class of 2011. And what's more, Elder Swartz is in our district; serving over in Novokuybyshevsk, the smallish neighboring city to Samara right across the Volga. So we pretty much have the Lone Peak District chilling in Samara. Woot again! The new Assistant is Elder Taylor. You don't know him, I don't think. But he's from Morgan, Utah. And he's a pretty cool guy.
So things are going to go down over there in Bezimianski. Elder Nielson and I are going to parachute in and get some hardcore new-investigator-finding going on from day one. I've seen what that area and that branch can do, and I'm ready for a repeat performance. The last 8 months of administrative work have been steadily pulling me back further and further like a slingshot. Without so much "extra-curricular" stuff to do, it's about to get unleashed.
So this week we made maple bars. There's not much to say about them except that they were delicious, and I haven't eaten any such thing for a year and a half.
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The insanely delicious maple bars we made. From scratch.
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T* is doing well. She has understood and told us that she will eventually get baptized. But any time we bring it up, she digs in her heels and clams up, so we told her to pray and read and ask God every day when she should be baptized, and that we won't have any more lessons about it; it's her decision. She really wants to get baptized in the Volga. We told her it's getting late. But there is a picture hanging in the MTC of an American Elder baptizing someone in a rectangle of absolutely arctic water that they chopped through who knows how many inches of ice. It was taken somewhere near Vladivostok. Cold water is something I just don't do. It's the worst thing ever when the city turns off our hot water and we have cold showers for a week. But I would do that to baptize T*. She's also really bummed that I'm leaving Avrora, and has threatened a bunch of times to start going to Bezimianski branch, even though she lives in the Avrora boundaries. We tried everything to get her not to... but we'll have to see what happens. I'm not allowed to meet with her anymore, but she's being really stubborn about that. She really in general just doesn't like rules, and has a long way to go before someone can just tell her, "You can't do this because God said so," and have that be a good enough reason. I remember Mom wishing me children "just like you" whenever I was being argumentative as a child for the exact same reason - not agreeing with the "why" and not understanding the whole doctrine of obedience. I guess this is my paycheck. :D [Editor's note: "Ah - music to my ears!" :-)]
So we had exchanges this week too. They were fun. But honestly not a whole lot to talk about there. Elder Langston apparently went out to explore the far corners of our area one day and followed the train tracks out to the bridge that goes to Novo-k. I guess there weren't a whole lot of options as far as where you can run when a train starts coming at you by that point... as in "left" or "right." Not exactly sure what happened, but the way I heard Elder Langston recording it into his journal last night it seems like he narrowly escaped... :D
Well, that's about all I got. I hope everything back home is going great. Looking forward to reading almost twice as many emails as usual today :D
Love you all!
Elder Broekhuijsen
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