Babies and Berets

Zdrastvuitye!

Transfer calls are in! I'm having a baby!!!! A new missionary, that is! On Wednesday I get to pick up my bouncing new baby fresh from America! I get to be a trainer!!!! I am literally so excited! Sister Thomas and I have been cleaning the apartment like frantic house-maids to get it ready for the new missionary. It is going to be such an adventure. I am glad that I will be able to train in Penza. I love Penza will all of my heart, and it will be great training-grounds. Sister Thomas will be moving to Avrora (my birth place) and she will finish up training a sister who is going into her second cycle. I am sad to say goodbye to Sister Thomas, but the Lord has so much in store for us this coming cycle. Sister Thomas and I will be taking a train to Avrora in the next few hours and from there we will part ways. I will be working in Bezi (the area right next to Avrora) on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday I will get to meet my trainee! There are five sisters coming in this cycle, which is crazy since we've only had one new sister come in over the past 3 cycles. Man, I am so pumped! President doesn't make his final decision on who is training who until he interviews all of the new missionaries and the trainers. Of course he has them picked out already, but nothing is finalized until he prays about it after talking with us. I was originally supposed to be trained in Saratov with a completely different companion but it ended up getting changed the last 5 minutes after he prayed about it. The Lord knows better than we do!

Anyways, this week was super busy! Sister Thomas had a feeling that she would be leaving Penza, which is understandable since she has lived here for 7 months, so we spent the week meeting with her favorite members and saying goodbye to everyone. We had quite a few unexpectedly interesting meetings with some of our investigators. First of all, a random old lady showed up at the front of the church building while we were having a lesson and she ended up preaching to us about Christ. She was looking at a poster with pictures of Mormon temples on it that we have hanging in one of the front windows of the church, and she thought they were so beautiful, but she thought it was so wrong that they didn't have crosses on them. We explained to her that we don't have crosses on our temples or churches because Christ still lives and we don't need a symbol of his suffering ornamented on everything to remind us of his sacrifice, but she wasn't taking it. We ended up standing in front of the church for 30 minutes while she relayed Christ's Earthly ministry and atonement to us. In the end, she took a brochure and said she'd come to church sometime. Thankfully we had a really good member with us that kept our investigator entertained during all of that.

Strike number three! For the third time this cycle Sister Thomas and I had to have a throwdown about why reincarnation is not a real thing. The crazy thing is, two out of the three conversations were with members of the church. What?? No... just no. People get pretty defensive about their beliefs on the afterlife. Throughout my entire mission I have never, not once, had to address or clear up the "theory" of reincarnation. Sometimes people would ask, "Do you believe in reincarnation?" and we would say, "No." End of conversation. I have never come across a person who actually believed in it! We were able to get everything cleared up with one of the members, aside from the fact that she thinks her cat is her reincarnated friend who committed suicide a few years ago. Didn't even know how to go about addressing that. The other member is still pretty lost in the dark. We're working on it. The investigator who believes in reincarnation is taking everything really slowly, so she'll come to know the truth in time. They will learn.

This weekend was a really big holiday in Russia called "Paratroopers' Day" and apparently it is super dangerous for us Americans, so we had 3 lockdown days where we had to be inside our apartment by 6pm. I don't really know what Paratroopers' Day consists of, but yesterday there were a lot of men walking around wearing blue berets and some of them were waving weird flags that I had never seen before. I heard that in bigger cities they make a bigger deal about Paratroopers' Day. They roll in tanks and march the troops and have parades... the whole shabang. Penza isn't too big so, to my knowledge, none of that happened here. I don't really know though because we were inside. I am glad that we were inside because a few of the members warned us that we needed to be extra careful on the streets because of all of the drunk people. Sister Thomas and I made lots of food and studied during our lock-in time. Fun, fun.

Welp, that's all for this week folks! Watch out for cats that might be your deceased friends and don't mess with men wearing blue berets.

Do Svidanya!

Love,

Sister Megan Wagstaff