Some people dread Mondays - all I can say is they obviously don't have a missionary they're keeping in touch with! Hooray for Mondays! Here's what we heard from (one of) ours this week!
It's been a crazy week. I think I start off most of my emails like that, but really. First off I'll apologize for not sending any pictures. The plan didn't work out as we didn't get permission to go to Old City and do email with the Zone Leaders and didn't feel like searching all around in New City for an internet cafe that offered USB. So I may send some fall photography back next week (I do believe I got one good shot), or maybe just wait until next transfer, depending on where I end up. I may well get left in New City, either with a new trainee, still with Elder Lewis, or who knows? Next transfer is really up in the air as there needs to be a new Assistant, which will almost definitely come from the Zone Leaders, etc. I really have no guesses as to where I'll end up.
So some cool miracles from this week:
-We met a lady named M* on the street and she became a new investigator. Why? When we were talking to her, she said "I've seen guys like you before, not too long ago." That's pretty common, so I was like, "Cool, do you remember where or when?" Turns out she talked to them on a bus from Tol'yatti to Samara back at the end of July. She also remembered another detail called "They said they were going home to America; they had finished their missions." I asked if perhaps their names were Yates and Bolt? Her face lit up and she was like, "Yeah! That was it! That Yates... he was a chudesney person (that word translates roughly as "miraculous" or "wonderful")!" So Elder Derby (aka Elder Yates) decided to not stop being a missionary when he was going home and made a super good impression on this lady. Result: she's now an investigator and we're hoping to meet her family this week so they can all be investigators. Molodyets, Derbs. (Someone make sure he finds out about this, okay? Tell him on Facebook or something.)
-V* got baptized! Yeah! V* is like my best friend. We talk about photography and stuff all the time and he's just awesome. We actually had a really intense meeting right before he got baptized. He was baptized on Saturday and confirmed on Sunday. On Thursday, we called him and he wanted to meet one more time before the baptismal interview on Friday. He said he had "a few questions." Normal. So we met with him, and oh, man did he have questions. One was about polygamy. Another was about Joseph Smith fighting back with a gun in Carthage Jail. Then about Joseph Smith changing the Bible. The list went on. Needless to say, he went online and read a lot of things from unfavorable sources. But here's the cool miracle part: apparently when he read all this stuff, he called a member that he got acquainted with at General Conference. She tried to answer some of his questions, but basically told him "better to ask the missionaries." Then pretty much right after he hung up from that call, we called him. Coincidence? I think not. Way to go Elder Lewis following a prompting to give him a call even though our interview was already set up for Friday. We helped V* understand that all his concerns hinged on whether or not the Book of Mormon was true. We asked him if he believed that it was true. He said "I can't say 100% that I know it's true. But tonight I will pray really hard before I go to sleep." He asked us if we could give him advice on how to overcome his doubts and concerns "as friends, not as missionaries." I shared an experience from a couple of cycles ago where I just was having a really hard time and didn't have a lot of answers to my questions, and felt a lot of peace from the Holy Ghost when I prayed. He then told us that every time he's ever come into a church building of ours, he's felt really peaceful.
Cut to after the baptism. He got up to bear his testimony right after he was baptized, and told about how hard it was for him after he read all that stuff online. How much he was worried he was making the wrong decision. And about how he prayed that night and just felt peaceful. And now that he was baptized, he KNEW he had made the right choice, and felt more at peace with everything in his life than he ever had before.
That's right. Miracles happen here.
-Another cool miracle! A dude came up to us on the street that we contacted two cycles ago. His name is A*. Two cycles ago, we were talking to him and his dad came over and cut us off with something like "It's the Jehovah's Catholics Cult, don't talk to them," or something equally as well-informed. Well A* came up to us last Tuesday or something and was like, "Hey, I'm still interested." And I didn't recognize him at first. I was like, "What the heck is he talking about?" But we talked to him, and then I remembered everything all at once. So cool. We have a meeting with him tonight.
So this next week will be insane. We have training all day in Samara tomorrow, and then I'm staying overnight there because I have a visa trip on Wednesday, I think again to Kiev. Possibly to Vilnius, Lithuania. We'll see. Either way, sweet. Then on Friday we have a cultural night, we're going to see a really popular play about WWII. I'm way excited. Saturday we have a few other baptisms going down in the district. Actually there was this sweet old guy from Old City that got baptized with V* named A*. He's awesome. He speaks like a tiny bit of English, and he is like 99% blind. He always says "bones, baby." and then does a knuckle punch when he's talking to us. This has resulted in him accidentally decking Elder Wooley in the stomach like 4 times already. Haha. He's super awesome.
Okay, I have like 2 minutes, so last awesome story. We had a guy come up to us on the street who had an alcohol-blood content percentage instead of a blood-alcohol content percentage. He started the conversation by pleasantly and calmly stating. "I'm going to kill you today." We immediately started walking away, but he followed us saying death threats and stuff. So I pulled the old, "pretend I don't understand very well and get him to explain and repeat stuff a ton to stall him while we wait for the crosswalk light to turn green" trick. It worked. We bolted when it turned green and he tried to follow us, but let's face it - what are the odds of that working out for him? So we lost him. That was fun.
Anyway. An awesome week. Next week will be full of all sorts of news too. Happy to hear my letters showed up!
I love you all. I love my mission. I love hearing news from you. Sorry I can't write to you all individually as much as I would like.
Love,
Elder Broekhuijsen
