09-09-12
"Peterson, why do you look so sad?" "All the
watermelons...they're gone! No!"
Hey there! :)
Gosh, lots of stuff happened this past week. First off, everyone
give a super big "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!" to my companion Elder Strebe! It
was funny this morning talking about it with my district leader. Elder Strebe
is a good, healthy eater and has tactfully refused to eat any sweets (he
generally graciously accepts the candy/brownie/delicious morsel of food and
sneakily hands it over to me), but it made me wonder about what we can do to
celebrate his birthday today if we can't eat cake. The solution: Putting candles
in a loaf of whole wheat bread :) Yay! In addition I'll probably make a cake or
brownies and celebrate Elder Strebe's birthday in my own way too!
Real quick, Mom and Dad that's probably the fastest I've ever gotten
a package from ya'll. I mean, didn't you just send that a few weeks ago? Both
packages were waiting for me at Zone Conference and I'm currently wearing the
new shoes. Thanks so much for the insoles too! I feel like I walk on puffy
clouds now as opposed to bricks. It's a very nice change :)
Zone Conference was a very cool experience. The main focus of it all
was on being "always" missionaries. To explainw hat that means, we
took a survey wherein we had a question given to us, for example, "Do you
always wake up at or before 6:30?" and we then were given the general 5
options of: Never, seldom, sometimes, almost always and always. President Malm,
when he came, decided to show a section of the statistics wherein he only
showed the percentage of people who answered "always". Of course, for
the waking up on time one we had something like "99%" of people
saying always, but then there were other questions where it was
suprisingly low. Everything was taken from Preach My Gospel like the
example of the question "Do you invite your investigators to be baptized
on the first lesson?" and the percentage of "Always" was pretty
low. This of course rose up questions like "Well, what if the situation
isn't right or..." but the point of the conference was that if it's
written in Preach My Gospel, then it's advice directly from God given to the
Prophets and Apostles who gave the book.
It was interesting to think about, because I never thought of Preach
My Gospel as a set of kind of "commandments" for missionaries,
coupled with a promise that if we do these things we will accomplish all that
the Lord has in mind for us. Just as when we always keep the commandments of
God we are trusted by Him and blessed greatly, so too can we always keep
mission rules and the guidance of Preach My Gospel and find that we're trusted
more by God to do this work. Pretty cool.
We have a meeting with our investigator tonight, as she's now come
back from the Ukraine, so I'm pretty excited about that! We actually bumped
into her randomly on the street last night as we were on a way to a meeting.
She said that she finished the Book of mormon and had written down questions
about it. I was so gosh darn excited, as was she, and when I asked when we
could me she said "Well hey! Let's go right now!" "Oh no, sorry,
we can't right now! We've got a meeting. Can we meet tomorrow?" "Yeah
sure! You can come by in the morning if you'd like! Anytime really!" So,
we set up a meeting for tonight and it's gonna be awesome! Woo!
Other than that, that's about what we've got going on here. I love
you all a lot. Really. I came into Russia nearly exactly 1 year ago today
(Wednesday will be the real celebration day, more brownies!) and it's amazing
to see just how much I've learned and grown in that short bit of time. I've got
lots more to go, and I'm so happy that just as I get to tell you about my life,
a great number of you have told me about your life and the cool things that are
happening. I love hearing from you, and I hope that I bring to you some of the
joy that you bring me, especially my family. You're the best. :)
Alrighty now, you have a great one. Don't forget to eat some cake
for my companion Elder Strebe!
With much love, as always
--
Elder Peterson
P.S. I've got only a bit of time, so I'm gonna print and read your
talk for next week. Thanks for sending it Mom! :)
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