jakemcgrathmission: More Foggy than Fog (Week Сімдесят шість)

Well, this week was pretty grand. Not a super different week, a good missionary week, but it was awesome. First of all, to kind of explain the tittle, this past week was super foggy!! I kind of felt like I was back in Saudi, but instead of a massive sand storm, it was cold and it was a bunch of fog haha. I think the sand is better, just because it's warmer. But that didn't stop us from doing missionary work, we still went out and did a bunch of contacting and even did a few finding activities. On one of our finding activities, we asked people what their favorite books were and then we tried to lead that into a conversation about The Book of Mormon. It wasn't the hardest connection to make and people really seemed to enjoy it. One other cool thing that we did this week was spend some quality time with a less-active named Andriy. He really likes this city and actually knows a lot about Chernivtsi, so on Monday night, we took a city tour with him. That was super good, we not only learned a lot about this very pretty city, but we also were able to build relationships with him and become good friends with him. After the city tour, we went to New York Street Pizza and had a good lesson about the importance of commandments. Hopefully, we can continue to build relationships and help him come back to Church.

Another cool thing that happened this past week is exchanges! If you remember, this past summer, Elder Shuley and I took a trip out to a city called Khmelnitskiy (easy to say, right?) and had an exchange there. Well. Khmelnitskiy is actually part of my district, so this past week, we had the good opportunity to head out to Khmelnitskiy and have an exchange. How can I describe this city, soviet. Another Elder calls it the soviet shoebox haha, it's pretty much just full of tall concrete buildings. But it's got a nice walking street and the people there are really friendly, just not the most pretty city. I had the chance to serve with Elder Howard for a day and we did some good missionary work. We had a finding activity in the morning, where we were all able to talk to a bunch of people and we all ended up getting some numbers. We also met with an investigators of theirs who is progressing pretty well. We decided to teach the gospel of Jesus Christ and actually invite him to be baptized. In the end though, when we had the lesson and invited him, he said that he didn't feel like he was ready. We tried to help him to understand that he is ready, but we couldn't force him to accept it. Sooo, they'll continue working with him and hopefully he'll keep reading the Book of Mormon and praying about it. All in all, it was a great exchange and even though we had a one in the morning train back to Chernivtsi, it was worth it.

Anyhow, the rest of the week was solid as well. We met with a few investigators and has some good lessons. If you remember from last week, we're teaching an eight year old the lessons and she is getting baptized next week during district conference, so that's pretty cool. I actually really enjoyed teaching her, whenever she didn't understand something, she would make sounds effects to help us understand that she doesn't know what we're talking about. That was very helpful, because then we could go back and reexplain it in simpler terms. I kind of wish all of our investigators did that so we could always help them fully understand. Also, Sunday was a good day. We had a good amount of people at church of Sunday and I actually had the chance to share my testimony. Just because it was Super Bowl Sunday, I tried to explain that to everyone and then told them the story about when I prayed about the Cardinals during church and asked God to help them win and sadly it didn't happen. I even told them that I started crying pretty hard after that happened, people thought it was funny. I went on to explain that God answers prayers, just not always in the way we want or need. Anyway, it was a good week!! Talk to you all later!

Старійшина McGrath

2 Nephi 32:9 read and ponder these words. Pray always for guidance.