Nov 2 - Refiner's Fire

That's awesome that you guys are all doing great and had an amazing weekend with perfect weather at the beach and stuff. Ukraine is pretty much not that. It's already getting miserably cold to the point where you have no desire to walk outside and is starting to snow. There is this swine flu thing that's killing all these people in Chernobyl and around Kiev. It hasn't got to Harkov yet but everyone is still freaking out about it. People are walking around with those doctor masks and stuff. It's pretty crazy.

And as for the Greatness that is the XTZ-Proletarska area, I have nick-named it “The Refiner's Fire: Where Champions are Made.” And that's exactly what it still is. This has kind of been a tough week, but it's an experience that I've realized I need. We dropped our only investigator on Tuesday, which is probably the last thing you want to do as a negative 30 degree winter is approaching and you only have 5 members in your area that will meet with you (But hey, on the bright side, that’s more than we had a few weeks ago). But he wasn't going anywhere and it was time to drop him. He's a great guy though, hopefully one day he'll get it.

But of course the Lord will immediately reward an act of faith like that with a golden investigator just waiting to here our message, right? Ha, yeah. It really makes you think a lot about things, about everything. About what you're doing, what you could do better, how you could better use the Spirit in your work. We started praying more, and more sincerely, and then looking at the map to see where to go. We still don't know if anything has come from all the tracting we've done this week. I was thinking about what it was, I just know there are people ready here, but I couldn't figure out why we aren't finding them. I knew it was our faith, we know we can find people. We're both confident people (probably part of the reason right there). But then I asked myself where my faith was. I thought of Alekseevka. And started to think of who it was that really went into that area and brought it to life. I realized that part of me still felt like I revived that area, I found those investigators for baptism. I got my comp working again. This might be a small exaggeration, I knew that it was a blessing from God to teach those people and have success there. I know that everything we get is from Him. But, I don't know, I think that just made me realize that maybe not all my faith was where it should be, maybe part of it is still in myself and my abilities. So, I figure once we are humble enough and rely on the Lord as much as we should, those investigators will be right there waiting for us. Or, I’ll just get depressed like everyone else here in the winter time. Ha, I'm kidding, but it is already too cold for me, and it is not hard to believe why winter is not the happiest time of the year. But don't worry, me and Elder Moon are anything but depressed.