So this past weekend I was able to have quite an awesome experience but to understand some background information is required.
So here I am in Russia and have been teaching english to children for the past four months at a really awesome school. At this school there are guards who alternate every 15 days. Well the guards that we started out with were our favorites because they were always so kind, friendly and willing to help us with anything we needed. But every time there 15 days were up we were sad because the other set of guards were not as friendly and actually made us feel really uncomfortable. Now the guards we liked (sergey, Kostya, and Oleg) had become our friends even though Gavin who served his mission here in Russia was the only one in our group who could really communicate with them. The guards knew zero english words and the rest of us knew minimal Russian, but still they were our friends and occassionally Gavin would translate for us. Well a few weeks ago our group was having family home evening, and while we were there we were just discussing the gospel and how it is meant to be shared but so often we let the fear get in the way of spreading the gospel and telling our friends about it. Then LaCretia (a girl in my group) mentioned how she had been feeling promptings to give the Book Of Mormon to our friendly guards. We all agreed that it was a good idea. They were off for their 15 days at the time, so we waited for them to come back and Gavin asked them if it would be okay if we gave them each a Book Of Mormon as a gift and they thought that was fine. So we then each wrote our testimonies and Gavin was nice enough to translate four testimonies into Russian. Then we wrote our testimonies in Russian in our own hand writing which was sort of hard, we wrote it 3 times once for each guard. Then just this weekend we had the books and our testimonies in each book and gave them each a Book Of Mormon. Friday was our last day teaching with them still here, so we gave the books to them then, as we were leaving they said we could come back on Saturday just to talk again, so we told them we would and bring them an American dessert. So we had planned all day to go back and see the guards one last time. However, at the last minute Meghan and Gavin had something come up and couldn't go. So the 3 other girls in our group and I took a cake to them and talked to them through the form of charades. Sergey, the oldest guard whom we consider to be our Russian dedushka (grandpa) grabbed the book and motioned how he read our testimonies and read pretty much all night, he showed us how he kept falling asleep but kept reading, it and showed us the place and in less than 24 hours he had almost finished the book. It was soo awesome to see that. The Book Of Mormon really is powerful! I was soo excited to be able to share that book with some new people. They really are such kind guards, and they were really grateful to us.
6 days ago
