Zdrastvuitye!
Phew! This week was both stressful and miraculous. Mostly miraculous. The Lord is not only shining his blessings on us, but also the sun. Literally. In our neck of the woods, the sun sets at 9 o'clock at night and rises at good old 2 o'clock in the morning. When we wake up at 6:30, it feels like it's already noon. Fun times! I have woken up at 4:30 in the morning almost every day this week thinking that I accidentally slept through the alarm because of how bright it was outside. Thankfully this is just a summertime thing. I'm definitely on a completely different side of the world.
Soo... Remember that investigator who called us last week and said that she couldn't meet with us or get baptized anymore? Yeah, she got baptized yesterday! Sister Martinez and I went to Victory Park last P-day and whilst we were roaming around, we got a call from our investigator out of no where! She asked us if we could meet with her in 30 minutes. What?? Considering we weren't in town and it was P-day, we scheduled our meeting for the following day. Sister Martinez and I were pretty nervous about the meeting considering we hadn't heard from her in over a week and she dumped us like a pile of coal the last time we talked to her. She was happy as could be when she showed up to the lesson and she asked "so what is the lesson today?" when we all sat down. She acted like nothing happened, so we did too. We asked her if she still wanted to get baptized and she said yes. Her mom and grandma are still really against the church, but she still wanted to get baptized nonetheless. She feels the spirit so strong and she absolutely loves this church with all of her heart!
After that lesson was over, the member that we had on the lesson with us approached us about the legality of everything. Our investigator is a little bit handicapped and if it so happened that she legally wasn't able to make her own decisions without her mother's consent, then our meetings with her would be illegal and we could have gotten in a lot of legal trouble. Sister Martinez and I freaked out a little bit and called President Schwab. He instructed us to write a big old fancy letter to him explaining our investigator's situation and then he would forward it on to the Eastern European Area Mission Presidency who would review it and then send it on to the Church's Legal Department. Pretty intimidating... Let's just say that year of AP English really paid off. We even had a lawyer come to a later lesson with us to make sure that everything would be okay in terms of the legal stuff. Everything turned out peachy and she got baptized! Yay!
There is a lady in our branch named Svetlana and she is a handful. She is about 80 years old, 4 foot nothing, and she always gets what she wants. If you are standing in her way when she is walking, she will plow you down. If she decides that she wants the table from the church's kitchen moved into the Relief Society Room for no reason, you had better not question her. She comes to pretty much all of the activities just to steal food. Of course the treats are for everyone, but at the baptism she loaded up a giant bowl full of food, left, came back and filled up another giant bowl with food, left, came back and did it a third time! Nobody really knows how to approach her about her stealing problem because she could probably kill you before you even knew what happened. As we were cleaning up the treats, we noticed that one of our tupperware containers that we brought some banana bread muffins in was missing. We pretty much knew right off the bat who stole it, so while Svetlana was in the bathroom, we went and found her food stash. Sitting on top of her spoils was our container. We took it back and ran away before she could catch us. As soon as she noticed it was gone, she went on a hunt. She grabbed our bags and started rummaging around for the container. When she found it, she got all mad at us and told us that we have to give it to her. Yeah, that didn't happen. It's pretty sad because I know she probably doesn't have a lot of food, but that does not excuse breaking the Lord's commandments. Nonetheless, it was a pretty funny experience.
I ate some interesting things this week that ended up being super delicious. I tried some sushi here in Russia for the first time and it was SO GOOD! Considering we are right next to Asia, I don't know why I thought it would be any different. I also ate a bunch of strange sea creatures. I saw little container in a grocery store with octopus, shrimp, muscles, and all sorts of other critters in it and decided that I would try it out. Literally the most delicious thing I've ever eaten. Not the cheapest thing, but very tasty!
Welp, that's all for this week folks! Don't baptize anyone illegally and don't question stubborn old ladies!
Do Svidanya!
Love,
Sister Megan Wagstaff
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