Thursday, July 3, 2014

Baptism in Poldosk!

 
So this week I got a call from President Borders on Saturday.  He called to congratulate me, and told me the impossible has happened.  There was a baptism in Podolsk!!  It was the sisters' investigator, Galina.  She was found while I was there, and they set a baptismal date with her while I was the District Leader there.  She had a couple rough patches, especially the last week I was there.  She flipped out and yelled at the sisters and the member on the lesson about some weird things, the biggest being tithing.  She had been looking at some Anti-Mormon material on the internet, and had not been reading the Book of Mormon.  They were able to keep things going with her, I had the baptismal interview with her and then I left.  And the baptism went through on Saturday!  I think President just called me because he knew that I wanted so bad to be the one who changed Podolsk. When I left Poldosk, it was still a pretty dead area :\  First baptism in Podolsk in 3 years!!!  I was ALMOST there to witness the sisters break that streak, haha.  

Well, I love my new area!!  I love my new companion!!!  My new branch has about the same amount of members as my last one, but this one is not nearly as self functioning.  There are about 70 on the ward list, and we had I think about 30 at church, with 8 being missionaries.  75% of the active members are all Armenians.  They're way cool; Armenians are very sincere and truly have a deep testimony about the church.  Armenia is the highest baptizing mission in the Europe East area.  I've recently found out that Moscow Russia a year ago was at the bottom of that list, and we were the least successful mission in Russia, but we are now #1 in Russia and #3 in Europe East!!!  That's pretty incredible, I gotta say, that that success goes to our new Mission President who I came out with.  He's killing it.