Dear Family,
So, as most of you already know, I'm going to be coming home early from my mission. Ricky's going on his mission in October and if I stayed until the end of my mission, I would be coming home at the beginning of November. My mission here is actually a twenty-five month mission so I would have missed him by one month. That would have been a bit of a bummer. However, if my mission wasn't a twenty-five month mission, then I would be coming home the fourteenth of October and would have missed him by like one week. That would be more disappointing. Anyway, I say this because time is finally starting to creep up on me. It's been strange working through the mission. At the beginning you look at it and say, "I have my entire mission ahead of me," and then the entire time you're in the middle, you say, "I've still got time," and then it seems that the end just creeps up on you and it's there before you even know it!
The work is going the same here. Every week we're setting up between fifteen to twenty different lessons, and all of them would become new investigators if they'd come, but we get between one and five people who actually come to their meetings. So, it's being a little bit of a bummer right now. We don't have much of a teaching pool to work with, but we're doing well.
One cool thing that happened this last week is that we've been meeting with this one man named Vit, who comes to meetings and just talks the entire time-- not really saying much about the gospel or really letting us get a few words so that we can try and at least teach something about the gospel. Anyway, our second-to-last meeting we gave him the commitment to talk to someone that he knows about us and see if they'd have interest in meeting with us as well. Well, he came to his meeting this last week and we talked about the normal stuff for a while and to be truthful, I wasn't really paying much attention, even though I should have been. Then he started talking about how he did his "homework." He said that he had five or six families in mind that he wants to invite to visit with us. He said that two really would be promising so he went and talked to them, and they said that they would be interested in speaking with us. As for the other four, he may speak to them. Hopefully. Also, before that meeting, he and his wife had some free time-- the kids were off somewhere-- so he threw in the Restoration video and watched it with her. He said that she really liked it and that she reacted well to it. My thoughts are that he's not making progress now because he wants to wait until his wife is on board with him to really start taking what we have seriously. I can't really complain about that too much. He kept saying that he has to win lots of small battles until he can start winning the war. He said that his wife had some bad experiences with religion in the past, so now she has prejudices against any religion and doesn't really want to take or try anything.
Also this last week we met with a guy named Stanislav. He's a really funny old guy. Elder Bown met him on a tram one night while we were going home and they started talking a lot. When they got off the tram, they kept talking for a while and since that day, about two weeks ago, he would take that same tram home trying to see Elder Bown again. Finally, this last week, they met again and we got a meeting set up with him. The meeting was really funny and actually really good at the same time. He came to the building and we took him in and showed him around. He really liked it and said that it's modern, but mainly that it was clean. He liked that. Then we sat down and he kept telling us stories about his life, but then whenever we'd butt in and start talking about the gospel, he'd stop and listen very closely. We gave him a Book of Mormon and a Restoration pamphlet. The entire time he was treating us like we were his grandkids: patting us on the knee, patting our face when ever he'd make a joke atd. He said that he'd come to church, but he didn't come for some reason. He also doesn't have a phone, so we can't call him and see what's up, but we have his address, so we're going to have to try and find it some time. He's a really sweet old man. I hope that we find him.
Other than that, there were a few other little things that were cool, but it would take too long to write them all out. So, as for the "starting to wrap up" comment, there are things that are going to be happening very soon and they're just making me think again about how little time I really have. (Perhaps one, glancing at the blog and seeing a countdown timer. Thanks dad. :P) Things are going well, and I just hope that I'm going to be able to sprint all the way to the end of my mission.
I love you all very much, hope everything's going fine.
Starší Monk
PS - These are my beautiful companions (left - Elder Gabrielsen; right - Elder Bown).