Hello everyone! I hope you’ve all had a good week. The weather in Ivano has drastically improved; the sky’s been blue, the sun is shining, birds are singing, and you almost don’t have to wear your big winter coat. Until yesterday, of course, when the rain started again (and still hasn’t really stopped).
Last Friday at 4 in the morning my companion, Elder Horne, and another missionary here, Elder Hokanson, already got shipped off to Chernivtsi, where they will spending next transfer, leaving me here with Elder Lewis, my MTC companion. This is the 3rd time on our missions we’ve served together, although it’s only until tomorrow. Then, the only missionaries in the entire city besides ourselves will be the senior couple, the Hinckles. Basically, I’m going to be in control of the missionary work in the entire city and all outlying villages in the area. In other words, I’m going to be very, very busy. Which will be good; I really like this kind of situation. I had the same kind of situation in Sviatoshinsky when I served there, and it was a lot of fun. Also, I’ve discovered the secret to having a happy mission: when you’re busy, not only are you too busy thinking the work to think about home or anything like that, not only does the time seem to go by quicker, but you actually enjoy it; while on the other hand, missionaries who waste time and screw around seem to be the ones complaining the loudest about how long their missions are taking, and how little they like them.
The Hinckles have started a marriage and family relations course here, and I’ve been assigned to translate for them. It’s great, because not only is it a great tool for finding people who are interested in hearing about the gospel, but I also get a lot of free advice about marriage. Basically, the main thing I’ve learned so far is that I’m very, very grateful I served a mission and didn’t just get married, because I knew just about absolutely nothing about marriage before I came here. It’s still quite a ways off into the future, and to be entirely honest it still scares me to think about, but I think one of the greatest blessings I’ve gotten since I’ve been out has been preparation for my future family. In fact, I realized the other day while looking at my patriarchal blessing that the largest section in it (besides the introductory paragraph, which for some reason is really big) isn’t about my mission or anything like that, but about my future family.
Changing gears a little, we had a great family home evening on Monday. We always have FHE at the Hinckles for any members who don’t have families of their own, or for investigators; and there’s one member who comes there, Andriy Kolyaskin, who I can only describe by saying he talks LIKE THIS! He’s pretty strange. He can’t really control the volume or pitch of his voice for some reason, and he’s overall just kind of…odd. So, we were playing charades, and all of a sudden, about halfway through the game, Andriy guesses one of them right. We give him his card, and he starts acting out a monkey. I’m not sure how to describe it, but he certainly got into his role very well. He had his face scrunched up, his arms swinging around, and was making an odd, not-even-close-to-a-monkey kind of sound. We were laughing so hard we decided that the rest of the game we’d just give him the cards and have him act them all out. My favorites were “tea pot” and “telephone.” I have videos, by the way, on my camera. Remind me when I’m home to show them.
Well, I’d better get going. I love you all, and I hope you all have a good week!
--Elder Hurst
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