A week and a half ago Elder Knight and I received a call from the mission president saying that Elder Knight, my trainer, was going to be a Zone Leader and that I would be leaving Poltava and going to Sumy! This was big news for both of us. So last Monday I spent my time packing up and heading north to Sumy, where I got a new companion, Elder Silvenoinnen from Finland! He's a super cool guy and he and I both arrived in Ukraine at the beginning of October! He basically perfected English from watching Youtube. Also one of the funnest things is to use google translate to translate a sentence and read it off to him in Finnish.
The weather in Sumy so far definitely has that "series of unfortunate events" vibe, but this week was pretty exciting. We had quite a few lessons with people and gave out 6 Books of Mormon. On Saturday we had a lesson scheduled with a man named Vladislav, but when we tried contacting him he said he was busy and asked us to call later. Disappointed, we assumed he wasn't interested in our message- but then to our delight, he said he was ready to meet with us at the very end of the day! We ended up meeting with him and he had a lot of questions and it was super tricky with the language barrier, but he was defnitely interested which was awesome to see.
I gave my first in-person talk in Russian yesterday at church, which was super cool. The members are few but mighty in spirit, and I can't wait to get to know them more. One of the scriptures we shared this week comes from the Book of Mormon at the end of 3 Nephi chapter 9, which says, "Behold, I have come unto the world to bring redemption unto the world, to save the world from sin. Therefore, whoso repenteth and cometh unto me as a little child, him will I receive, for of such is the kingdom of God. Behold, for such have a laid down my life, and have taken it up again; therefore repent, and come unto me ye ends of the earth, and be saved." I'm grateful for Jesus Christ, and I love the marvelous promise in these verses.
I hope y'all have a great week!!
Elder Olivier
1. View from the new place
2-3. Goodbyes to Elder Knight and Danil
4. Classic selfie with the companion
5. I saw some blue sky today for the first time in Sumy
No comments:
Post a Comment