January 28, 2013
"Yes, Mom, I will eat S[c]hi because it is so good for your
organism and is good for the young peoples, like me!" --Angelina, age 5
Hey there everyone!
Well, this was another one of those weird weeks. As it turns out
Elder Treter got some variety of strep throat which brought him down with a
high fever and not a whole lot of energy to run on. To add to the fun times, we
had already planned an exchange for Tuesday and Wednesday for when Elder
Davidov and Elder Batemen would come to our area and work for those couple of
days with us. We were pretty lucky, actually, to have planned the exchanges at
that time because Elder Davidov, a Ukranian Elder, got to help out Elder Treter
go to the health clinic while me and Elder Batemen went to work! Elder Treter's
being sick didn't hinder the work at all, which is way cool. If nothing else it
was a huge blessing because it gave whoever his companion was a long amount of
time to make lots of calls to former and potential investigators. By the end of
those two days we had a lot of meetings set up and potential people to work
with; a lot more than I think we would have been able to achieve had we just
gone outside to work all day. Cool stuff!
One of my favorite parts of working in Saratov has always been the
member work. I don't know why, but more so here in Saratov than anywhere else
I've served I've worked with the members and it's always a blast. Lately we've
been working with an Armenian family who we hope to help get to the temple for
the first time within the upcoming year or so. Sister T loves to feed us
delivious Armenian food, and the time to having a good spiritual thought was
running low since we had to book it back home to make it in time. In
readjusting the lesson plan we had, I asked Sister T a question "what
brings you happiness in life?". She smiled and bore a testimony about God
and His Church and how He had blessed her little family so much. She told us
about how she just wants everyone to love each other and accept God and His
Church. This was a bit of an unusual answer since she pretty rarely comes to
Church for one reason or another, but as she bore testimony about how she loves
God and His Church I really felt the love and honor that she held for God. It's
always cool when we, as missionaries, don't really give the lesson but when the
person we're working with testifies to us of the truthfulness of the subject we
wanted to teach. We're looking forward to working with her and her family in
the upcoming weeks!
Speaking fo upcoming weeks, I'll be finding our about transfers this
upcoming Saturday. Weird, right? I just got here! There's a pretty low chance
that me and Elder Treter will still be together, which means one of us most
likely will be jettisoned from Oktyabrsky to somewhere else. I don't have any
guesses, really. I think it'd be cool to stay in Saratov and especially fun to
get retransfered again to Zavodskoi, but we'll see how that all goes. More on
that all next week!
at also reminded me of a cool experience I had this week with Elder
Treter knocking the other night. We bumped into this 30 year old guy who had
actually taken a college class from a current member of the 70, Elder Anatolii
Reshetnikov living here in Saratov. The guy, who has a young family and is
working hard, had a cool question while talking to us about what we do here as
missionaries. He asked "what will becoming a member of your church do for
me?" Well, there's about a billion and six different answers to that
question, and I gave him one of those with which he was satisfied and the
conversation went onwards. Nothing too spiffy, but he said it was alright for
us to come back and discuss the Book of Mormon with him again another time. As
Elder Treter and I discussed that particular question, Elder Treter mentioned
how, in his opinion, one of the best answers to that question is simply telling
them that becoming a member of the Church brings salvation (with the given
requirement, of course, that we're faithful to keeping the commandments and
keeping our covenants). The investigator was looking for a more physical or
immediate change in his life that would result in becoming a member, but what
the Gospel and the Church are really there to do is help us achieve salvation;:
something that really requires a different point of view than the one we look
through on an everyday basis. It's hard to express how profound that really was
to me in the moment, but it hit me because so many of the blessings we promise
people are really on a temporal basis. Pray, and you will get an answer. Read,
and you'll know it's true. But I think it's a good idea, as Elder Treter and I
discussed, to really put it all into persepecitve as to why we keep the
commandments, especailly now. We don't pay tithing because we expect material
blessings from the Lord, for example, but we pay tithing because we love the
Lord and He asked us to. It's a refreshing way to look at blessings and
covenants, that they exist not really to bless us temporally (although, they
do) but really to bless us in the eternities, something that no temporal
blessing here and now can really even compare too.
Hope that's understandable; just a little thought that I remembered
I'd had earlier this week. Ya'll have a great week now, ok? Be good and stay
warm, and eat lots of pig fat and butter to stay warm, just like at the
Russian's advise you, ok? Great!
I sure do love you lots, espeically you Mom and Dad. Thanks for
everything :)
With love
--
Elder Peterson
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