Last night we went with our branch mission leader to visit a family, but they weren't home yet. I called and they said they were on there way and to hold on just a minute. We had a fabulous discussion on how the mission leader is trying to improve his dating life, but after an hour we had to call it quits and head home . . . cold. In fact once we got off the bus I just took off running the 1/2 mile to our apartment from the bus stop just to make sure the blood didn't altogether stop flowing before we made it home. Bit of a runny nose this morning, but nothing terrible. Great memory!
Other awesome moments from this week include helping the world's shortest grandmother off the bus and across the street (cutest lady ever) and also making over 500 khuushuur with our young single adults. I've got buuz pinching down, but my khuushuur skills weren't as fantastic. Gave it a solid effort and had some great coaching from Sister Erdenesuvd. With Tsagaan Sar comimg if anyone has a copy of Joey Chestnu'ts work out and training schedule I could really use a copy for the upcoming month! It's all about the "marathon not a race" mentality.
We ended up with four new investigators this week from a variety of sources. The first was a straight up referal. We get around ten a week from other missionaries and what not. In the recent past we haven't had the most success with them so we weren't super pumped. We called and Mandah seemed pretty interested in meeting so we set a time and he asked if he could bring his girlfriend. Fantastic, right? It ended up being a crazy story. He lived in a Darkhan and she lived in Erdenet. Two cities not super close to each other or to UB. They had separately found the church in both cities and started going for a couple of weeks at this point not knowing each other. Then they both came to the city around the first of the year to study and met each other. Crazy right? They are both very interested and just wonderfully humble people. His girlfriend, Nergui (literally "means no name" in Mongolian. A way to common and a bit regrettable name given to children by lams in Mongolia because giving them actual names would bring bad karma gene more on that later) was excited about the upcoming young single adult activities as well.
The second investigator was a bit of a stretch; an old investigator from when Elder Huff and Naef were here a year ago, but we were calling pretty much everybody and anybody in the area book last week. To be honest I kinda forgot that I had called him. He had said he was pretty busy and if it was possible to meet he would show up at the free English class that we do every week at the church building (awesome class by the way. I teach the advanced class with Elder Lloyd and it's crazy. One of our students is reading Gone with theWind and we get on tangents about words like discrepancy and demographic. Plus one of the guys is like this 65 year old grandpa with great English). After the class ended the investigator had ended up sitting in the beginner class across the hall and was waiting to meet with us which was awesome. We didnt have much time, but there was a prepared feel about him as he accepted the commitment to read the Book of Mormon and pray.
Lastly we were happily surprised to run into an old investigator of mine (I've been in Songino for a while now) who had burned us 5 times in a row and we had decided to drop. We ended up getting her as a referral again and she came to church. She seems ready to go and we were able to set a baptismal date.
We are still working hard with all the new members here in the area and Bayarbold gave an insanely good talk in church today throwing down the gauntlet for every other young man giving talks. What an impressive new member!
Just filled with gratitude for the opportunity even when its hard . . . especially when its hard.Its amazing how fast the time is going now. What happened to January?!
I've learned more and more that repentance, change and becoming who you want to be, as much as they are lifetime pursuits, aren't meant to take lifetimes to develop. It takes exactly as long to acquire any of the three as it takes to say I'll change . . . and mean it. Its about saying yeah, I'll do that and making the same resolve tomorrow. We don't have to wait till some arbitrary point to say that we have achieved patience, charity or wisdom if we are making them a part of our lives everyday.
You all are so wonderful!
Have a wonderful week!
Elder Neuberger
No comments:
Post a Comment