Wow another crazy week! I really don't even know where to start..
Well a lot of crazy things happened to the members of the ward this week. A lady in our ward came home from church last week and her house was burnt down.. they have no idea what happened. They honestly think that is was arson or however you spell that. But, as missionaries we had the opportunity to go over and help her clean out all of her things and get prepared to rebuild her house. It was an amazing experience! This lady, Sister Areena, is so humble. She just accepts everything that happened and is still happy about life! I couldn't believe how positive she was, she was joking around with all of us and everything. It was honestly inspirational. She even found some candy, one of the only things that was preserved in the fire, and she was just laughing saying that God had saved this candy for the missionaries to eat when they came to help. So, she gave us all of the candy haha. She is an amazing member and right now we are working on finding construction for her house. She has a small daughter and though the church offered to help pay for a temporary apt. she has decided to stay with her father.
Also Brother Andre's baby got flown to moscow this past week and we just barely found out that the baby is probably going to die. I guess the baby has heart and internal organ problems and they don't know what to do. They said that if the baby does live then she will have to be fed through a feeding tube the rest of her life.
Amidst all of this craziness the work goes on! We have had a lot of adversity thrown at us lately and we know that means that Satan is working hard to slow the work. It means that we have to work that much harder because the work here in Kazakhstan is about to explode! All of us here can just feel how close we are to finding so much success.. Right now Elder Malanin and I are doing good. We still have a lot of potential investigators. There is Arstan, the beer guy, who is doing great and is starting to read the Book of Mormon. There is Ratmeer and his friend Kostia who are wondering how they can become missionaries. There is also this man named Ulan. I don't know if I have already talked about him but he is a chinese-kazak who we can only communicate with through english. He doesn't know russian and actually we are teaching him russian right now. He is a great guy. The first time I talked to him I really didn't know how much success we were going to find with him because he always just went off on all these crazy random topics in english. He is just a really funny guy. but, as soon as we started talking about the gospel with him in our second lesson he buckled up and got serious. He told us that he loves learning russian from us and still wants to, because that was our purpose for meeting with him at first, but really what he wants is to hear about our gospel. he said that he is getting married soon and so now he knows that he needs to get things together and find out the truth. He is really searching for God and he said he has been praying to find out the truth but it is hard for him because he knows about so many churches, muslims (because he is kazak), buddhism (because he is chinese), russian orthodox (because he is kazak), and now he knows about Mormonism. We taught him the first lesson and gave him a book of mormon and he prayed about joseph smith being a true prophet all in one lesson. He seemed really excited and positive about the help that we are giving him to help him find the truth. He is a great guy! We see a lot of potential with these investigators!
Well now I have to talk about a really hard time that I had this week! So Nona finally finished the Book of Mormon and she committed to pray. so yesterday we came to our lesson and expected everything to go smooth... well it didn't.. first of all she didn't pray and second of all her and Elder Malanin basically argued during the lesson about the grammatical errors which are in the Russian version of the book of mormon. It was a rough time! It is never a good feeling when something you have been working for for six months completely falls through. Elder Nutt and I had been preparing her for prayer since I got her and that is what I have been focusing on so much while I have been here, and now after reading it she didn't pray. It was actually a really big let down for me.. her excuse was that we never explained to her how to pray which is not true. So, now I have come to the conclusion that she is just afraid of getting an answer because she knows that she will have to change.
Today for p day we went up to the mountains again where the Asian Olympics are going to be held next year and it was really cool up there. We took some really pretty photos and i will try and send them as soon as I can!
well Elder Malanin and I are doing great. We are pushing along the work and working hard toward some baptisms with a few people which is really exciting!
I love you all! Remember who you are! :)
Elder Weihing
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