SCRIPT & POSY: Week 59- JUNE- This Week Was Just One Of Those Sit On a Ceramic Tile Spider Kind Of Week

A lack of time and a crazy week....looks like this week is going to be an Awesome Awkward week!

AWESOME

A District Meeting with juice and McDonald's hash browns
Having a weekly "Where's Waldo" search. Every week we go out with a certain category of people that we will look for, target, and contact. This weeks winners were our senior couple, the Walt's, who found and contacted the most people with brightly colored hair! The prize: a rainbow colored duster, which they are now using as they come around our apartments for cleaning checks
Birthday stop-by's. I can't tell you how many balloons i have blown up while sweating in dark dingy stairwells
When one of your contacts actually comes to English!
Sacrificing dinner for a nap. OK, so the sacrificing dinner part isn't so awesome, but the napping part was pretty awesome
Strawberries with smetana (sour cream) and sugar. Oh my i can't even begin to describe how much i love that creamy sweet bursting with flavor goodness. The strawberry market is just booming right now with the season and every couple days you will find me buying strawberries from a sweet babushka on the street and then running home to make the divine delicacy. Also, im obsessed with smetana. It's like sour cream...but better
When you receive more referrals in a week than you have your whole mission! Now our referrals are giving us referrals! Hallelujah the church is true!
So i had a really great experience this week while we were preparing to have a lesson with a member. We had called and scheduled a lesson with the second counselor, who is married to one of the sweetest most beautiful woman with an almost equally sweet and adorably delicious daughter, and as of 10 years ago is blind. For some reason with meeting with members who are so strongly in the gospel, with the addition of blindness, this really put me and Sister Robertson in a stump. For some reason we have created this idea that we must be creative and fun and "abnormal" to verge away from the robotic boring cliche lessons. During personal study i said a prayer to guide me to what i should study, and ending my study i can guarantee you i did not plan to study about the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon and that Joseph Smith was 100% a prophet. I mean, that's the most cliche lesson in the book. I tried to trust, and seeing how we didn't have any strong feelings to another way to go we went to that lesson with testimonies at the ready. Turns out that our second counselor forgot about our meeting and was off on a business trip but that his wife was home with the baby. We met with his wife while she was out on a walk with her baby, we bought our favorite ice cream cones and went to a park. We bore our testimonies to her about the true power of the Book of Mormon and i shared with her one of my favorite testimonies of all time by Elder Holland from his talk SAFETY FOR THE SOUL. I told her how my testimony burns with his that Joseph Smith really was and is a true prophet, that he was called of God to restore the true church once again here on Earth. It's something he could not deny, nor something i could every deny. After we finished she thanked us for our lesson and for not teaching her just about doing missionary work, but bringing the spirit, which is the motivator or missionary work. And that while she was listening she was thinking of a family who are friends to them who they have been trying to work with, and that she had a strong feeling to share more and testify more of the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith. It's a powerful combination and should never be thought of us "cliche." It, needless to say, was an awesome moment.
The members of the church in Ukraine. They are such amazing examples of youth and fire! Yes, even the babushki! These members have literally forgotten the traditions of their forefathers for faith! It's amazing to be sitting in Relief Society while woman 40+ are still learning about the basics of the Priesthood, it's awesome to have members interrupt your missionary meeting to burst, "Hey! Why haven't you been calling me to join on your lessons?!", it's awesome to have youth calling YOU and asking if the missionaries can begin a mission prep class. These members are just...AWESOME.
Oh and having my favorite restaurant right next to the church is pretty awesome too...

AWKWARD

"THANK YOU FOR YOUR TRUST!"

When Darth Vader is a presidential candidate
When you have a homeless creep that hangs around the church to beg for money and you ask the Elders to keep an eye out for him while you make a run for it around the corner. You get around the corner to see when the Elders call saying that the homeless man is chasing after you and to run as fast as you can. So you do. You run and don't care if you look like a complete fool with a name tag skipping 3 stairs at a time. Then you get a text from the Elders: "Just Kidding."
Humidity+heat+missionary work...do the math
When you visit some members and you watch as they throw around their son, who is six but the size of two year old, around like a rag doll and spin him around as if they were competing in the Olympic disk throw. It was like a game of playful child abuse
Making a birthday surprise drop-by. Little did we know that we were in for a surprise when the door opened and there stood a more than half naked babushka in nothing more than a very low button down top and hair curlers...figures that would be the time that i would drop the chocolate bar (possible shock) and had to bend down to get it...
52 mosquito bites
When your hatred for mosquito's is so strong that when you see one, even on the cheek of an Elder, you are overwhelmed with such numbing hatred that you go right over and slap it right off. It was a shocker for the both of us as we both realized what happened...
When you home is overtaken by obese, on steroids fly's
When you progressing investigator is sick for 2 week's...so not awesome
Being spiritual paramedics and answering to a stress call to only find that your patient is not there...
Trinity Day: A traditional holiday for Ukrainians when they buy big long fresh scented leaves and take them home to lay them on their floor so that the spirits of the dead can come and rest on the leaves and see how you are living