Knocking

I had great timing this morning - checked my email at 5:28 and saw this email from Andrew that had arrived at 5:26!  By the way, he doesn't mention the weather in his email, but Jerome checked the forecast for Samara, and they're having highs of around -10° this week!

Wasn't it like June 2011 not that long ago? I distinctly remember sitting in New City North, Tol'yatti, writing emails to you and typing June in the subject line. With Elder Kuzmin. Man. Good times.

Anyway, things here are going really awesome! We had a little bit of a disappointment with N* and M* - we tried really hard to get them to come to church on Sunday, and they committed, but then M*'s recurring eye infection came back on Friday. So we dropped by with cookies on Saturday night and M* wasn't feeling too bad, so we committed them to come, and on Sunday morning we dropped by to pick them up, and M* was sleeping and N* said no. So they can't be baptized this year, unfortunately, but I guess they'll be ready in January. With a little luck, I'll still be around :)

Really quick, before I forget about all the time zone things that are going on right now - things with Skyping home for Christmas are really crazy this year because transfers are like 1 week before Christmas, which means that nobody knows which area they will be serving in for Christmas until this coming Saturday night. For the time being, we have been directed to schedule our calls for Christmas day here. That means that, unless something changes (and I'll let you know next week), I'll be logging on to Skype at 7:00 pm on the 25th Samara time. I understand that the time difference is currently 11 hours due to daylight savings time, so that will be 8:00am on the 25th Highland time. If I did my math right. You'll want to check that one.

Anyway. I'm still burning hot until the very end. The Bezimianski Sisters, Sister Young and Sister Scoville, had a baptism on Saturday! A cute old lady named L*.  She's so nice. We're hoping to get a date set for the 29th with an investigator named T* whom I have never met. She was found and taught and has attended church twice in the Avrora branch by some other Elders, and they found out she lives in our area. So, cool.

We've put an emphasis on knocking lately in the mission as it's more effective when it's late and cold (few sober people on the streets). Man I've got a lot of good stories from knocking. Nothing makes you feel more like a missionary than trooping out of an apartment complex before the police arrive. :D Don't worry, we're completely legal. I just figure I have better things to do with my limited proselyting time than explain that to police officers when there are 3823049 other apartment complexes I can knock in at any given moment. We've also had a mentally deranged man scream at us for 5 straight minutes, after we closed the door on him and went on to the next floor (he told us to pass a veritable tapestry of Russian obscenities on to Obama, so if you see him this week, let him know), and one heavily-bearded guy who explained to us all about what's going to happen with the magnetic poles of the earth on December 21st, including an in-depth tangeant about Higgs Boson particles, however that's spelled, and what they have to do with righteous people gaining ablities that are uncannily Jedi-like in nature following the 21st. All the best mission stories come from knocking.

Other than that, things are pretty quiet around here. Not really, because missionary life is never quiet, and shouldn't be. But you know.

Saturday is transfer calls. Pray for me to stay in Bezi North.

Talk to you on the 25th.

Love,
Elder Broekhuijsen