Elder Dillon Stott - Ukraine, Kiev Mission: Week 73

October 15, 2018

Hey.

This week was super good. We got the chance to Chernivtsi, the second city where I was serving just under a year ago. It was so weird to be back in that apartment and church building. It feels like all the things and time that passed since I was there almost never existed and I'm just back on the grind in Chernivtsi. We had some good exchanges there. They were back to back exchanges with the DL. Because of some travel issues, we ended up having to take a train that left at 12:50 AM so we got there at 7:30 AM and just got right into the day of work. I spent one day with Elder Swazey and one back with Elder Cluff, one of my favorite missionaries that I've served with. We got some good work done down there and it was good to be back!

I saw some old friends at the English practice there and it was super cool. They all said that I've grown (height, not maturity) since the last time that I was there, so that was kinda cool!! It's so interesting to go back to the same place where everything feels the same except for myself. I felt like a completely new person doing new things in the same old place, and it was a cool experience for me to have one of those little check-your-progress kinda things, and man I could feel just the biggest difference. Things like missionary work and other things can shape so much of who we are if we put as much effort as we can into things that really truly matter.

During a finding activity in Chernivtsi, we just grabbed our big white board, our stand, a couple of not so expo expo markers and wrote the question: "If you could ask God one question, what would it be?" and we had a fun time with that for a couple hours. Chernivtsi isn't full of the most responsive people that I've ever met, but we had some good conversations. Apparently, we met Jesus Himself when we were there! He was very drunk, missing 8 fingers, believed that Allah was God, told us to give him money, and he swore a lot, too. haha Not at all what I would've imagined Him to be like, but what a great opportunity that was for us!!!

We got back, and basically everything else that happened was a lot of General Conference. I really truly cannot choose a favorite talk, because they were all so good. We started the first Sunday Morning session with about 5 or 6 of us, and then by the end we had 31! I kinda had to run the show, but had lots of help from a visiting family of 9 from Kyiv. They saved the day. The branch president texted us that morning saying that he couldn't come and asked me to run it all.. It wasn't anything huge or fancy, but it was a little stressful. We had a cool miracle experience with the lunch in between sessions. Elder Howard and I went the night before to buy some sausages and bread and cheese to make a little бутерброди for the lunch, and I can promise that I did NOT buy as much food as we ended up with. I bought food for like 10 people or 15 MAYBE, but the family from Kyiv helped with preparing, setting up and cleaning and the plates of food just kept coming out of the kitchen. I was honestly super confused, because we fed 31 people and didn't even finish all the food.. It made the Bible story of the 5000 being fed by Jesus a lot more understandable for me. I can just picture how confused His apostles and disciples all were hahaha.

Anyways, that's about it for this week. This next week I don't know if I'll be able to write, we'll be gone for 8 days straight in L'viv and Kyiv! We'll have a zone conference in L'viv, then district conference with all the branches from Western Ukraine, and then a Mission Conference (to which Elder Cook from the Quorum of the 12 Apostles is coming) in Kyiv the next Thursday after a mid-transfer training one Wednesday in Kyiv for all the trainers and their companions. Can you say "Busy"?? hahaha

Have a great week!