Khrystos narodyvsya! (Slavuyemo yoho!) 1/30/08

Hello again, everyone! I hope everyone had a good week. As I’m sure you all heard (probably long before we heard), President Hinckley passed away this last Sunday. The only Prophet that I can actually remember has just passed one from this life to the next. It’s interesting to me how this works. Before my mission, despite having a firm knowledge of the Gospel and the Plan of Salvation, I was still very upset over death; to my thinking at that time, death may not have necessarily been the absolute end of existence, but it certainly appeared so, and that troubled me. However, in the past year I’ve been able to realize more clearly than ever before that the departure from this life of a loved one—for example, a beloved Prophet—is about as final as the departure of someone from their living room. Though they may not be with us on this plane of existence, yet will they be with us in the future, and if that be so, then why should we mourn? President Hinckley isn’t gone; he’s just one step ahead of us on the Plan of Salvation. We’ll catch up in time.

This has been a good week. This week we sat down during our weekly planning and counted out our total teaching pool, and we reached the total of 15 investigators. 15! Bear in mind that in my last week or two in Sviatoshinsky, that number was 3. Our main investigators are:

MARYANA, a 25 to 30 year old girl who’s met with missionaries before and is very, very close to a baptismal commitment for February 16—her birthday. The only thing holding her back is her boyfriend, who disapproves of the Church because the Church disapproves of his intentions with Maryana. We’re not big fans of him.

OKSANA and RUSLAN, a 30’s-ish couple with several small children. Oksana works at a beauty salon, and Ruslan’s a taxi driver. They’re both really nice and really cool; they’ll be ready for baptismal commitments as soon as they settle a little marital trouble they’ve hit this past week.

VOLODYMYR, a late 50’s-ish man who loves feeling the Spirit, but hasn’t quite overcome his Greek Catholic traditional background. He’s so close! We just need to get over this last little hurdle, and he’ll be golden.

We had a fun day today. For our P-Day, we chose a random village on our map and went there for a picnic lunch and a game of Risk by the side of a frozen river. It was really cool, really pretty and a lot of fun, and not only because I won at Risk (dominated, actually, may be a better term). Among the more memorable moments happened when we were on the way to this village (its name is Pereshinske, by the way). We were packed on a marshrutka full of people, one of whom had brought his pet black lab. The dog was really friendly and nice, and one of us missionaries, Elder Hokanson, decided to take a picture of it. I was sitting two people over from Elder Hokanson, and so I couldn’t see exactly what happened, but I definitely heard the distinct “Hack!” noise as the dog vomited all over Elder Hokanson’s leg and shoe. Now, unfortunately I don’t have my camera cables with me this week, because Hokanson took a priceless picture of his knee covered in the slimy remnants of Ukrainian dog food (mysteriously found to contain a tomato slice), with a very sick looking doggy face staring at the camera. Remind me next week and I’ll send it…

Well, that’s all for this week. I love you all, and I’ll write again next Wednesday!