Possibly Insightful Ramblings

After spending the past week in four different cities with five different companions, I am pleased to say that all registration confusion has been resolved and I am permanently back in Simferopol. (Permanent meaning I really pray that I don't get transferred ever . . . but for the time being I am here.) The experiences of the past couple weeks have honestly been a turning point in my mission, and I will be forever grateful for all that I have learned. As a philosophizing side-note, I remember early in my mission coming back from a zone conference thinking, "Wow! That was incredible! I am never going to be who I was before. From this day on I am a changed missionary and person." And in my brand-new missionary way, I thought it was as simple as that. But I soon learned that becoming a perfect missionary does not happen over night. Or over a few months. And now I have come to see that such a change will not even come during the course of our missions. But eac...

This week was possibly the biggest adventure of my entire mission. It all started last Monday morning when we got a call from Vova, that incredible young man in Dnepr who is employed by the Church to keep all of the missionaries legal (not to mention he is also branch president and takes care of his wife and three children). He told us that Sister Burgoyne would need to be up in Zaporozhye on Wednesday in order to do some registration. For those of you who are familiar with missionary registration in Ukraine, it is something that we drop everything to do in order to follow the laws of the land so we can continue to preach in this choice nation. So we dutifully canceled all of our plans for Wednesday, and Tuesday night headed up to Zaporozhye, a city about 5 or 6 hours by train north of Simferopol. After doing our usual studies Wednesday morning at the apartment of the lovely sisters in Zaporozhye, we were informed that there was no way we would be able to do registration that...

Wow - wasn't General Conference amazing!? We had the incredible opportunity of watching it this week, and I was incredibly moved and inspired. There is something special about sitting in Simferopol's recently renovated Primary room watching Conference with other missionaries and a few English-speaking members and investigators. I was especially moved by the how so many of the speakers addressed the topic of peace, healing, and light that come through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. I know that to be true - no matter what our pain or distress, the Savior can heal our souls and make our burdens light. I also very much appreciated the messages focused on families and missionary work. (That little Primary room was filled with much joy and laughter when Elder Nelson said, "Let's ask the missionaries! They will help us!" Indeed we shall.) Elder Anderson's talk on miracles also hit home with me. I have seen so many miracles on my mission, and I know that God is a God...

This morning I asked my companion what she was going to write home about and she replied that she was going to tell her family about our "day of miracles." To which I replied, "Which one?" Basically, our entire week was full of blessings and miracles from the Lord for which I am incredibly grateful. Monday night we'd set up a lesson with a girl named Hendrina. She is the roommate of a couple other Namibian girls that we are teaching and although she'd been in the room for one of those lessons, this was going to be the first time we would meet with just her. As we got to know her, we asked her why she wanted to meet with missionaries. "I want to be baptized like Jesus Christ was," she replied. There are very few words that can bring greater joy (or surprise!) to a missionary's heart on a first lesson than those. So we ignored our lesson plan and spent the rest of the lesson discussing baptism and the requirements to be baptized in the r...

Ukrainian Egg In typical Crimean fashion (so we are told) the weather this week went from blizzardy and cold early in the week to 20 C today, with a few ups and downs in between. It rather makes me feel like I'm back in Utah. As much as I enjoyed those little snow days, I'm quite grateful for the spring (or summer . . .) that has so kindly descended upon us. We saw a number of miracles this week of running into people that we haven't seen for a while. It's always a reassuring testimony to me that we are in the right place at the right time when something like that happens. I'll just mention a few of those experiences. First off, we ran into a Mexican/Indian friend of ours named Abhi. Twice. We'd met him a while ago and he had come to English church services once, but due to his lack of a telephone, we lost contact with him. Thus, it was quite joyous to run into him on two separate occasions this week and find out that he is about half-way through the B...