One Transfer!

It's hard to believe that we have been here for a whole transfer today! That was exciting to realize. Also, our new Russian districts are coming in today! I probably will not get to meet most of them until tonight, but I'm pretty excited about that. It is kind of hard to believe that we are now at the point that our olders were at when we entered and that are new districts are going to be as impressed with our Russian as we were with our older districts.

We got our Russian nametags yesterday! We are not supposed to wear them in the MTC, just so everybody can at least read your last name in English, but we were super excited to receive them. Getting those made Ukraine and Russian seem that much more real. I cannot believe that we have less than three weeks left here before Ukraine. That has really been motivating me to work harder so I can learn as much as I can before entering the field. It is humbling to realize how soon I will be in a foreign country speaking a different language, trying to help real people with their lives and challenges.

I think it is okay now for me to make it known to everybody that the MTC choir is singing in the Saturday afternoon session of General Conference this weekend! I am completely excited for this experience and we have all been looking forward to it all week. (Also, our choir director said that he has asked the camera people to make sure that everybody in the choir will be shown at least once, which is exciting. So you should all watch it!) It has been a really incredible experience to practice with the choir every day this week and join our testimonies together. I'm not quite sure how to describe it - there's just something really powerful about singing with 363 other missionaries, and I can't wait to do it in Conference. The music is beautiful, and I know it's going to be an incredible experience for all of us involved.

We were walking to the temple today and were speaking Russian amongst ourselves. A couple women in the parking lot started talking to us, and they asked if some of us were from Russia, because we sounded like we had accents. My roommates got excited and asked, 'Wait, which of us?' The woman indicated that it was me, and my roommies congratulated me, with some disappointment. It's so funny - I get that all the time, and I can't quite figure out why. It happened inside the temple today, too. Maybe it's a good thing. Hopefully the people in Ukraine will also think I am from over there, but we'll see.

The other day we taught one of our progressing investigators. (Our teachers role-play as investigators they taught on their missions, and we teach them over the course of a few weeks.) While we've had a lot of incredible experiences in those lessons, this particular day was probably my favorite one so far. Anatoli had been struggling with a smoking problem, and we had taught him the previous time about the Word of Wisdom and offered him support and encouragement in living it. But he seemed very unsure, so we went into this lesson prepared to just focus on helping him see how God could strengthen him. He told us that he hadn't smoked since we had taught him, and that he had already felt the power of God strengthen him. I was floored and excited, because we hadn't expected that at all. We shared Ether 12:27 with him, and spent the whole lesson discussing the power that God has to help and strengthen us and make our weakness strong. He was disappointed when we had to leave because he wanted to keep reading the scriptures with us. In his prayer at the end, he very humbly thanked God for us, his angels, and I was very moved by that. I came out of that lesson with a deep desire to get over to Ukraine and do in real life what we had just done in role-play. I want nothing more than to help someone find God and be able to be happy and overcome life's challenges.

I also really loved the lesson we taught yesterday. It was with Georg, and we had planned a very detailed lesson on the Restoration. I was really excited for it, because it was going to be my first opportunity to share the First Vision from memory in Russian in a lesson. When we got there, though, he told us that he had read his reading assignment, but had not understood it and really wanted to understand it. So we threw aside our plan and read out of the Book of Mormon with him. That was a powerful experience. We were reading in 3 Nephi 11, and as we read he asked questions. It was somewhat of a challenge, considering we had only brought our Russian copies of the book, but we were able to do it. The best part was when he asked what it meant when the people felt their hearts burn. We talked about the Holy Ghost and how he helps us to feel peace and the love of God. Georg then completely surprised me by saying that he had felt that - that he felt that way when he met us and when we read together. He told us that he did not always understand what the words he was reading meant, but he knew that there was power in the words of the Book of Mormon. It was so neat to hear that, and it was a witness to me that God really does prepare the investigators we are working with. I really love these role-playing lessons - they give me a foretaste of what is to come and an excitement to have these experiences with my own investigators. I can't wait to be in Ukraine and hear my own investigator tell me that there is power in the Book of Mormon.

-Sharisa