Volodymyr!! (Sept 5, 2007)

Hello again everyone, I just wanted to start out by saying that today I have two very exciting bits of news:

1. Our favorite investigator, Volodymyr, has a baptismal date! On the 22 of September (the day of the big race, isn't it?) he will be baptized. He is pretty much the most amazing investigator of my mission. We found him literally through the promptings of the spirit. We were out contacting one day and after arguing with a man for a long time about the bible and the book of mormon, I felt completely without the Spirit and just angry. I asked Elder Lewis if we could go somewhere and say a quick prayer for the spirit again, so we went into a dark apartment building and offered a prayer. As we left I felt very strongly we should go to one certain intersection I'd seen on a map. In the end, we couldn't quite find it, so we went home feeling discouraged. A few days later we wanted to go tracting, and all of a sudden the prompting came again very strongly to go to that intersection. This time we had a map with us and we found it, only to find that absolutely no one wanted to listen to us. Again, we felt discouraged, but we decided to do one more stairwell. As we were walking up the stairs (we always start at the top and work down), we ran into Volodymyr as he was just coming home from the grocery store. We helped him carry his bags into his house and had a lesson with him that we could only describe later as being like something in a seminary video. He then invited us to meet his friends at work (he's a doctor and a surgeon), so we went to a birthday party his friends threw him at work. We were a little worried after the party, seeing as he spent much of the time trying to get us to drink cognac (we settled instead for something like pickle juice...not sure which would have been worse...), and kept calling us "his American friends" (not usually a good sign; some people like missionaries just because we're American, not because of religious reasons). We went home confused and worried. We decided to have one more meeting, just to see where he's at. And, again, the meeting was like a seminary video. After one more such amazing lesson, Volodymyr now has a date for the 22nd! We've also had to give him 3 different Books of Mormon because he keeps giving his away to his family and friends. He is, as missionaries like to say, GOLDEN! The only problems now: he hasn't heard Word of Wisdom yet (he likes his cognac), and his wife is strongly Orthodox.

2. It's transfers again, and I'M TRAINING! Aaaah! It's exciting, but mildly terrifying as well. This means that my next companion will be straight out of the MTC, with the 20-word vocab that comes with it. Hopefully, he'll have the work ethic of the MTC still with him. (It's gonna be fun though; I get to have a "son" in the mission, as we missionaries would say...so Renee and Quinn, I'm gonna be a dad too!)

Well, that's my week. Wish me luck and pray for me to train well!

--Elder Brett