1-4-10 - Miracles

This week has been really good. It was tough because New Year's is Ukraine's biggest holiday, so everyone was partying all week and didn't really want to meet with us. They get so wasted on New Year's, so they need to drink alot of vodka and beer in the morning to help recover from their hang-overs. Center looks really cool, they have a carnival thing set up on the square and a huge New Year's tree (not Christmas), and some rides and stuff. But it was kind of lame because we had to come in early that night, so we just went to bed early to celebrate the new year. Anyways, the other day I was thinking about our mission, and about some of my friends' missions and stuff that I read in our missionary newsletter. I realized that I haven't heard of any Christmas miracles happening in our mission, myabe there have been but I haven't heard of any. It seems like we don't really have the Christmas Spirit and desire to go out there and make miracles happen. So I decided that we should start that in our mission, and I started telling Elder Clarkstone each morning that a miracle is going to happen that day. And we've got outside each day with that attitude. Guess what happened?! . . . . . nothing.
I'm just kidding! Miracles are happening every day now. Most are small, and maybe they have always been happening, but now I'm am starting to notice them and see every little miracle that happens each day. The first one was that the Zone Leaders were in Donetsk when my packages came in, so they could bring them up to Harkov the next day. But all the other miracles have been missionary work related :) We're just having more and more success each day. Yesterday, we called all these people we had picked out of the area book and 6 of them are going to meet with us this week. Just to show you how rare that is, I can remember once getting a former investigator to meet with us my whole mission. So that is amazing, I'm so excited for this week. On Friday, we are having a Christmas party at our branch for the youth/young adults, which is going to be way fun. We are going to have a small spiritual thought, watch Joy to the World, then play Bunco and other games, and we are bringing all the American candy (or Canadian) we got and have that for snacks. It will be fun and it's a great opportunity for all of them to make friends. Especially for this one girl, Looda. She is an awesome young girl that is getting baptized on Saturday. Our branch and the New Homes branch share the same building and english classes. She was found through English, and the sisters in New Homes have been teaching her. They found out that she actually lives in XTZ, so she will be coming to our branch and this party will be awesome for her to get friends with the girls in our branch. 2 of our most active members - Veeka and Fatema, and our 2 investigators are around her age, so it will be great. I guess Looda doesn't really know any men in her branch that well because she asked me to baptize her. It will be wonderful, but I've only talked to her a few times after english classes, and not for the last month because our class has been stopped. It feels like there should be someone better to do it, but it's not important who baptizes her, just important that she gets baptized. So that is on Saturday and it will be really cool. This is going to be a great week. We finally are teaching English again, and we're also excited about that, we have a really good lesson planned for it. Miracles are happening in Proletarska and all over the mission it seems like now. We have 2 new investigator lessons tonight, and one is at a member's house. We even had to cut our P-day 2 hours short (God was testing us). Life is great. Love you guys, hope you also have a great week.
-Elder Hyer