Pioneer Day!

Happy Pioneer Day! (Tomorrow.) I've done a lot of thinking about the pioneers since I've come on my mission, and I am just amazed at all the sacrifices they made for the Lord and His church. And for me as their descendant. I've drawn great strength from their examples of courage, service, and faith. I feel blessed that I've been able to work with so many pioneers here in Ukraine. The church is so tiny here, and most of the members are the only member of the church in their family. They've given up so much to join the church, and yet they stand strong in their small numbers. I feel honored to get to rub shoulders with these modern-day pioneers and learn from their examples. I've also realized that each of us is a pioneer in a way - we're laying the way for everybody who follows after us, and there is more power than we realize in our examples and our lives.

We had a good week this week. A couple times we went out to this beautiful little islet in the Dnepr River called Prinaprovsk. I'm not quite sure how to describe how absolutely gorgeous it is out there - rolling hills of green, surrounded by the river, and it's especially breath-taking during a rainstorm. I quite love it. :) The first time we went there, we had a member with us who was going to be on our lesson. On the marshrutka over, however, we found out that our lesson fell through. So Sister Lena (the member) came tracting with us and absolutely loved it! It was really fun to go tracting with a member. She was so excited, nervous, and enthusiastic about talking to people about the church. I learned a lot from her. Nobody really wanted to listen, but I think we all enjoyed that experience.

Sometimes both you and your companion feel like you should talk to a certain person, and that's always cool because then you really know that person needed to hear the message. That happened this week earlier as we were contacting in Center. I saw this man with his young daughter that I felt like we should talk to, and without saying anything to each other, Sister Kochel and I walked to him and started talking. He replied to our Russian introduction with a heavily accented, English inquiry into our ability to speak English. It turns out he was from Sweden! He was in Dnepropetrovsk with his daughter on vacation. I think he was probably as excited to hear English spoken as we were (except, probably more so, because he didn't seem to know any Russian - that would be a difficult task to navigate Dnepr without any Russian knowledge!). We talked with him for a good while about life and his family and work. He said his little daughter was asking him questions that he couldn't answer, and he was looking for a church for them. We gave him one of our cards that had the church website (in English, despite the rest of it being in Russian) and he's going to look it up when he gets home. It's pretty incredible, as a missionary, the deep love you feel for people you talk to - we'd only talked with Stefan for maybe ten minutes, but I was filled with such love for him and his daughter and a desire for them to accept the gospel. I pray they do. I don't think it was a coincidence that he came from Sweden to Ukraine to meet two English-speaking missionaries from the LDS church.

I had my first district meeting in my new district, and I enjoyed that a lot. There are 12 of us and we meet in the mission office (which means air conditioning!! best ever). (It's a little weird to not have Elder Fillmore in my district, after being in the same district with him for nearly five months, but I'm sure he's having a great time in Zaparozhzha.) I really like my district - the elders are great and it's been fun to get to know them and work with them. 

We had a wonderful lesson with Anya this week. I am constantly amazed by how open, sincere, and spiritually in-tune she is. She asks such humble, sincere questions and really wants to know truth and know how to live the kind of life God wants her to live. She definitely is a testimony to me that God is preparing people here. It was neat how excited she was to pray at the end of the lesson - she even told us that she'd been thinking the previous day about what she wanted to say in that prayer. She then offered one of the most sincere, beautiful prayers I've ever heard. I was very moved. I feel that she'll soon accept a baptismal date. And I really hope she will, because I love her so much! It's a blessing to be able to work with her, and I'm so grateful I have this opportunity to help her come to Christ.

-Sharisa