7/21/14

Okay.....well.... sorry to start this email off so strange but the strangest thing just happened to me! A man just gave me a paper and asked me to go on a date. He knows I am American - that is the only reason why, but my oh my. That was an adventure.

Okay, so things here are going GREAT! We have three progressing investigators - The woman and the two little girls that we are teaching. I just love them all so much and we are making great headway! The woman I met on the bus is a seamstress. She told us that she felt that we were destined to meet! She is so lovely and charming and very fun too. We gave her the Plan of Salvation Lesson and she LOVED it. She has a young apprentice of sorts who also occasionally graces us with his presence in the lesson. I must admit, I LOVE her apprentice. He is a young many maybe 20 years old and has magic hands. He is bigger, and stocky and buff, very trendy with perfectly styled hair. He has a very manly Russian name and a deep voice.... then he creates little dresses with frills, and lace, and thin straps that are the essence of femininity. He is great, and we love when he sits in on the lessons. He is someone who is probably a little bit too cool for school, but he likes us. For the purpose of this email we shall dub him The Apprentice. I think he could become interested. Well, we gave him a Book of Mormon and are excited about that too!

Then there are the two girls. They are very interested. I will have to tell you about them. So, for the first girl, the girl I met on the bus, she is darling. She has a hard time understanding everything that we teach her but she has a great desire to learn and she says that she knows it is true! Now we are a bit worried because we may have to get a permission slip to teach her! But I am not too worried since she says she lives with просте ъаъушка, or simply her grandmother. And the other girl is also progressing. She is VERY intelligent. She speaks so fast and uses large vocabulary words (our member present told us that even SHE had a hard time understanding her sometimes). But she is great. She read the entire Book of Mormon in ONE night. ONE night! She says that she knows it is true and wants to learn more. She is having trouble lettering go of her former religion though (don't quite understand, since she talks so fast, we are working on getting it figured out.) But they are great girls. The latter girl, the very intelligent one, draws. She has very... uh.... interesting drawings. She creates horses with fire wings that have bird legs.... they are unique to say the least and go so well with her Japanese name that she insists we call her. I wish I could tell you what it was, but alas alack, I lack the ability to do so. Well, anyways, she always gives us pictures. One picture she gave us was of an elegant elk perched upon a grassy knoll with a pastel sunset caressing its golden fur. It looks majestically into the sky. On the back was her name and number so we could contact her. Gotta love the elk. We dubbed it the "reindeer," graciously accepted it, as it had her number on the back, and quickly shoved it in our extra copy of our Book of Mormon so no one could see us have it in public. Well, the next day, we were updating our Area Book and needed to put the new number into the Area Book, so we grabbed the Book of Mormon and opened it and.... the picture was gone. Well, that was fine, we have MANY Book of Mormons, it must have been the wrong one. So we opened the next one. No reindeer. And the next. Nope. And the next one.... uh oh. Soon, we had gone through the 7 copies of the Book of Mormon that we had and discovered the picture was no where to be found. We paused for a moment... thinking of who we had given a Book of Mormon to as of late... when it hit us....

The Apprentice

The Apprentice had the Reindeer.

The Elegant Elk.

With a Sunset

In the Book of Mormon

With a number on the back

Which he probably thought was OUR number.

So, we gave a big, burley, trendy man our number on the back of a majestic reindeer.... in a Book of Mormon

We died. We began to laugh, laugh so hard. I don't know if it was out of the humor or the dread at our recent accidental actions. We then realized there was no way we could ask for it back - but if we didn't he would think we gave our number to him... with a reindeer... and we could never go back to teach our investigator out of shame. But, if we did ask for it back it would be a little strange to say "Hey... could we possibly have our water colored elk back:? You know.... the one with the sunset and grassy plain? It had our friends number on it..." Well... what kind of friends do you have? Please, don't come back. So, we lay, on the floor, tears erupting from our eyes caused by both laughter and distress. Yes. The Reindeer was now in the hands of The Apprentice.

Well, sorry to make this somewhat anti climatic, but alls ell that ends well, we had one FINAL Book of Mormon at our door and we checked it and the Elk was inside. WE starting laughing and crying again, this time out of relief. Thank GOODNESS the Reindeer was safe in our possession. WE took it out, and will never put it near a Book of Mormon again. Now the Reindeer travels though our home. Sometimes I find it in my bed. Then Sister Brown will find it our sole picture frame, then again it is on the fridge. We have fun with our majestic reindeer. Oh, but it was almost a disaster.

Needless to say, things are going very well here. We are loving our area and I just love the people here. We have SO much fun. We are just living the dream as missionaries. I do miss you all so! I do know I am where I need to be though. And the work is really picking up. It is so great to be a part of miracles every day! The end of this week was a little... slow... but we realized somethings we could improve on and are working on straightening them out right away! We will keep working hard.

Okay, I am off now, but I love you! Be good, be safe! LOVE YOU!!

Love Lolo