jakemcgrathmission: Knocking on the Window (Week Сімдесят дев'ять)

Well, another solid week in the books, pretty crazy how fast time flies when you're a missionary. It was a pretty normal missionary week if I may say as well. The biggest thing that happened was exchanges with the elders from K-town. I had the chance to serve with Elder Swasey for a day and it was very, very interesting. It didn't really turn out how we had planned it, we had set up a few lessons, but every single lesson that we had set up, dogged us so that was a bit hard. So that meant that Elder Swasey and I were out hitting the streets contacting in the cold weather. At one point, some guy was staring at our name-tags and usually people don't like to talk when they see our name tags, but I went up to him and we actually had a super good conversation and I wrote down his number and he was interested in meeting later, so that was a nice tender mercy.

One other interesting, funny story happened that night. Elder Swasey and I stopped by a members house and they didn't open up, so we thought, ok, why are we here? Why did God lead us here? So we said a quick prayer and we both felt like we needed to tract a building not from from the stop-by. So we went up to a building and we see through a window a younger guy sitting there doing some homework, and in his apartment were a few pictures of Jesus, so we thought, ok, this is a perfect apartment building to tract. So we started from the top and worked our way down to the last apartment where the young guy was at. We knocked, and guess what, he didn't answer. So we started to leave and we passed by his window again and Elder Swasey said, "hey, we should just knock on his window." After a quick prayer to see whether or not that was a good idea, we knocked, and he quickly left and turned off the lights in the room. We turned around to leave, but as we did, he came outside and apparently he was open to talking for a bit. So we had a good conversation and even though he wasn't interested, it was still a good contact. As for now though, Elder Swasey and I planted a very big seed for future missionaries by knocking on his window to talk about our message and Jesus Christ. All in all, a great exchange and learned a lot from Elder Swasey.

Our pool of investigators is growing week by week, and now we had double digit investigators which is awesome! This past week we found three new people to work with and one of them is really cool. A couple of weeks ago, I was going through our area book calling some former investigators up, and I come across a guy named Ivan. He was originally taught by missionaries eleven years ago, and so I decided, why not give him a call to see if he'd still be interested in meeting. Guess what, after trying to set up a lesson a few times, we finally met this past week. He's really nice, we met in his apartment, and he even gave us some sweets. He talked about the missionaries that he met with the first time and all I could say was that I was 10 years old when that happened haha. But we ended up teaching him a restoration lesson to help refresh his memory and he has a desire to read the Book of Mormon, so that's a really good sign.

Another investigator we're teaching now is named Andriy lifts, because he's a body builder and his biceps are bigger than my head. This past week, we had a really good Plan of Salvation lesson with him and he really enjoyed it. He said that he might bring his wife onto the next lesson, which would be great because we know that the gospel is centered on families! In short, got some good investigators and I love having the opportunity to teach and meet with them weekly.

The rest of the week was good. The weather was all over the place and it was hard to choose what coat I wanted to wear for that day. We did a lot of contacting, teaching, and all the other normal missionary things that people do. Such a great week and today for P-day, we took a tour of the Chernivtsi National University, which looks like Hogwarts. Super cool and I'll attach some pics! What a great week and I'm excited for the next one!

Старійшина McGrath

Alma 20:4 read and ponder these words, anything is possible with the Lord