In wrapping everything up here, I cannot completely express my emotions.

On the “exciting missionary news” side, I forgot to mention last week that we found a miraculous new investigator– Yustina. She came to an English sign up a few weeks back and she expressed desire to learn more about the church. We started meeting with her and she described how she felt during the spiritual thought at English club– a warm, happy feeling inside; i just love being here. She described the moments in the Russian Orthodox church that really bother her, and we were happy to tell her about what we believe on those topics (baptism for infants, praying through icons, etc.). She is full of light and is a really happy person. She also has a husband and she told us that he’s catholic. We were suprised when he showed up on one of the meetings when we talked about the Book of Mormon and watched the Restoration. We thought her husband would not be supportive of her, but instead, when we read some verses from the Book of Mormon he opened up to us: “wow– in my life i’ve always just said “i don’t have time for religion,” but really it was just because i didn’t understand any of it. This that we just read– that’s how I feel about prayer in my heart– and it’s phrased so wisely and perfectly. I’ll definitely read this book.”

We had the senior couple, Elder and Sister Rolfe, with us on that meeting and they testified to the young couple of the love that they see within their relationship– how much Yustina’s husband respects her and how in this church they’ll find more happiness as a family and as husband and wife than they could even imagine. The spirit was super strong and crying took place.

It gets better. The next meeting they unexpectedly invited a friend, Sveta, to English with them and we had a lesson afterwords with Sveta. That resulted in Sveta asking at the end “alright, so this book… you guys sell it? how much does it cost?” (while we started to explain that it’s free, her friend, Yustina, jumped on that one: “I’ll sell one to you!”)

So that’s a little taste of what I’m experiencing here my last few days in Irkutsk.

Reflecting back on these past two years I’m simply in awe. I feel like I’ve just experienced first hand one of the most beautiful, simple, complex masterpiece. Simply looking at how things were in the beginning and how they ended up– it’s all so perfect. I think that’s one of the major lessons that I’ve learned serving on a mission for the Lord Jesus Christ– His hand is in everything; the hardest times and the happiest times. It’s only a matter of patience and faith, and then he’ll show us. Life has meaning, everyday things have meaning. All it takes is the right perspective– trying to see through “heaven’s eyes” (to quote a song that Elder Sage Petersen likes a lot), following the footsteps of the Savior and everything becomes clear. We are built to understand things and to learn, and we can know truth– God intends us to learn truth.

Thank you all for your support and thanks to anyone who read this since I’ve left home. Thanks to those of you who gave me some advice and encouragement these last few days/weeks. Thank you so much for all the letters and packages you sent me– there was no way to respond to everything you all sent. Some of it i tried to respond to and I have a stack of unsent letters– sorry. But know that your testimony and written thoughts gave me strength and reasons to smile when things were hard on the mission.

So…

…i guess I’ll see you guys in a few days….

*shrug*

–Elder Tyler Froelich

Wow, so much stuff has happened, I don’t even know where to start. Here we go– for starters, I talked to the office and they told me about some complications in my flight plans home– so I’ll know dates and times soon, but as of right now I’ll get home probably on either the 20th or the 21st. But I’ll have concrete information hopefully by next week.

It’s really wild serving in Irkutsk having so little time left on my mission. There are lots of things that weigh on my mind lately and I find myself generally more tired. I feel pretty stressed; not going to lie, but things are doing really well in general and I’m really enjoying this last bit of time on my mission.

I just got back at midnight from Zone Leaders’ Conference. I flew to ZLC with my companion and the elders from Ulan Ude. It was quite a mind blowing experience for me.

For starters, as we drove through the city of Novosibirsk my heart rejoiced in seeing all the familiar streets, buildings, monuments, etc. I was really lucky and was able to make it for the last part of English club!
I walked in right when they were starting up closing announcements and was welcomed by a round of applause. I was greeted by familiar faces of great friends who I missed dearly. It was so awesome to be back and get to talk to everyone again (there were some people who weren’t there that I really was hoping to see…. but just in general if any of you end up reading this who didn’t get to see me while I was in Novo– большой привет вам!). (And a special shout out to Kostya, who, I found out, reads this blog. He’s a great friend and I was really lucky to be able to talk with him for while while I was in Novo. Thanks, man.)

And then the next day ZLC started and I was able to see all the zone leaders– all my great friends and old companions and old zone members– shuffle in to the mission house. I can’t even express how great of an experience it was to get a “one last time” at ZLC. I could go on writing about it for the rest of the email, but I won’t.

And then we got on a plane back to Irkutsk. This time it was a propellar plan that creaked when we turned and that vibrated and roared loudly for the 4 hour flight back to our area. And now I’m back.

It’s hard to find what to write about, even. I’m overwhelmed with gratitude and awe for the way that God is so involved in everything. All of the rough times in life are definitely worth those precious moments when you see unfolded before you the reasoning and the intention of it all. It’s such a beautiful plan and it’s such a beautiful Gospel.

–Elder Tyler Froelich

Are you guys ready for this?

All sense and logic would point to me staying in Krasnoyarsk for the last 20 days of my mission with Elder Petersen, but….
nope! I got off a 24 hour train ride this morning at 6:00 am and arrived to Irkutsk to be a zone leader with Elder Smith!

No one saw that one coming.
It was a bummer that I had to leave Krasno, right after forming some strong relationships with all the people there. It was especially unfair that I had to leave Tuesday morning– before I was able to say goodbye to any of the people from English club
And I was asked not to bring all my luggage to Irkutsk because I’ll have to fly from Irkutsk to Novosibirsk to go home and the planes here are smaller and charge more for overweight luggage. Mom– you’d be so proud of me. I got rid of so much unnecessary stuff and managed to pack all of my things for the rest of my mission into one suitcase, then I packed my smallest suitcase, put it inside my bigger suit case and filled in the gaps (those two suitcases will be shipped by train to wait for my in Novosibirsk for when I come home to America).

So I got on the train on Tuesday morning, said goodbye to an amazing zone of missionaries that I have grown to love with all my heart (Elders Petersen, Byers, Lilinquist, Sodja, Whiting, Sisters Filatova, Clark, Fesenko, and Lyudmila) and had a great train ride with a lot of cool missionaries: Elder Larkin, Zanger, Taylor, Ahuna, and Birtcher.

Being zone leader means that next Wednesday I may or may not have time to email because I’ll be going to Zone Leader’s Council by plane with my companion to Novosibirsk for a day.

I had some super emotional and spiritual days before leaving Krasnoyarsk. I really love the people there and I just keep getting the overwhelming feeling of things working out how they needed to. I’m beginning to understand the concept of having no regrets on the mission. I thought for a long time that it was impossible– you could have always talked to one more person about the Gospel. But now I’m beginning to see how “having no regrets” is possible, but only if God plays a role in the process. I’ve seen God’s hand more and more clearly as I serve longer and loger on a mission and I see him filling in the holes– compensating for my weaknesses and mistakes, and I have really felt successful as I’ve looked back on my service over the past little while. It’s a very beautiful merciful gift that comes from the Savior’s Atonement.

I really don’t know what awaits me here in Irkutsk. It’s right by lake Baikal, so maybe I’ll make it there. I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do here for a grand total of about 20 days, but hopefully I’ll be able to figure it out and make very good use of my time here.

I made it to the “East”.

–Elder Froelich

Well i’m running low on time because of these stupid computers (i spent too much time trying to attach photos for you guys).

This last week was really good– lots of difficulties and lots of success.

We went to an opera for culture night on Saturday– Madam Butterfly. That’s on my bucket list (things I need to do before I die) and I was really happy to be able to cross that one off on my mission. I was super impressed by the opera. It was so intense– so much emotion. I think I’ll be getting more into that kind of stuff later down the road.

The big thing this last week was an experience that taught me that when we do all that we can and pray hard and search the scriptures and have a righteous cause– things work out. We had a difficult meeting with Leonid that really weighed down on my mind and stressed me out a lot. I didn’t know what else to do. The next day when we met with him, it seems that he had been thinking a lot about things that night too, and he really had a change of heart. He actually even expressed his desire to be baptized!

We’ll get transfer calls on friday and i’ll find out what my last group of missionaries is that i’ll be serving with. I’ll probably stay here in Krasno, i’m assuming with my current companion, but we might be in a 3-some.

Thanks for letters– i got one from zoe and one from Grandpa Harlan. I really appreciate the support!

(we didn’t end up going to the zoo. i’m pretty bummed about it. hopefully i’ll pull it off before I finish my mission.)

–Elder Froelich

A few events from the past week:

We had a Woman’s Day district activity on Satuday. It was like a talent show where guys performed for all the women and there were lots of little entertaining things. At first I was honestly scared that it would be awful, but it turned out to be really successful and fun– we had a great turn out (there wasn’t enough space for all the people that came, even) and it put everyone in a great mood. We had investigators show up and lots of less active members of the church who hadn’t been to church in years showed up. My good friend Kostya Tolomeev has the whole thing recorded on video and I told him to friend me on facebook, so you may be able to watch some of it somehow. It may or may not involve a dance party presentation that my companion and I may or may not have gotten roped into.

My highlight of this last week was when on Sunday, after being let down that Michael didn’t make it to church, showed up for the later meeting (again– but because of an unforeseen problem that took up his entire morning). The last time we had met with him we gave him the book Gospel Principles and asked him to read some parts in the book to understand the doctrine that is required to understand before baptism. He showed up on Sunday (two days after we gave him the book) very happy and excited and lively and came up to me to tell me that he had finished reading that book. He went on to elaborate on things he had learned. He especially loved the order of the priesthood and he pulled out a little notebook he carries around, flipped to a page and showed me how he had it all written out for reference: deacon, teacher, preist, bishop– aaronic priesthood; elder, high priest, patriarch, apostle– melchisedec priesthood. It’s amazing: he now has been exposed to every major piece of doctrine of the church of Jesus Christ and he’s excited to learn more. He fully intends to attend church every week– it just made my day to see him so involved and making so much progress.

A really tough part of this week was with an investigator named Valentin. We’ve been meeting with him for a while, and have been hopeful when we noticed that he’s been more serious lately during our meetings and has been paying more attention to what we’ve been saying. This last lesson we had though, was a rough one. We talked with him about the importance of preparing to meet God, about repentance, and about the Atonement of Jesus Christ. I really put all of myself into this lesson; we both love this guy a lot, but he just hasn’t been making very much progress. I put it all out on the table and told him that we really have been thinking and praying a lot about him and how we could help him come closer to God and how we decided that he needed to pray every day about the Book of Mormon and read from it. He then very directly told us that he would not do that; that he was more inclined to the Russian Orthodox church; that he is already a pretty old guy and has lived most of his life and is not interested in making any vast changes, but that these conversations about life are interesting to him; he loves talking to people with different views of life, and that we could continue our meetings.
It was a pretty crushing experience.
Something that I’ve noticed now that I’ve been a missionary for a while is that I have begun to get easily upset when people have very faulty logic or excuses about why they aren’t interested in hearing our message. It was especially hard for me with Valentin because of the invitation that he rejected: to come closer to God. He doesn’t understand very much about the scriptures, God, Christ, the Atonement, and he feels like the tradition of him being Russian Orthodox takes more priority than bridging those gaps for his own personal understanding.

It’s hard for me to write about this b/c it’s all still settling in my mind, but by way of application of this story, I thought of a general question that I could ask myself: what things in my life do I let get in the way of me understanding more about spiritual things? I think we probably all have little things that for us seem out of the question to change– because they’re just a part of our lives– but that are really getting in the way of us coming unto Christ. It’s like something I remember hearing in the MTC– a question you could ask yourself every day “what can I give up to come closer to Christ?”

There we go; that’s my spiritual thought for the week. We are going to the zoo today. I hear there are 3 giraffes (I have really come to love giraffes over the course of my mission) here and I’m really excited to say that I have seen giraffes in Siberia. (yeah, isn’t it wild?! who in the world decided that they could do that? bring some giraffes from africa to siberia and keep them there so that people could look at them. poor guys.)

–Elder Froelich (Tyler)

English continues to be successful: lessons continue to be fun, people continue to increase, and spiritual discussions continue to take place after English club.

I’ve been working on getting through “Jesus the Christ” before I finish my mission (I definitely will make it) and it’s really illuminating my life recently. It’s really humbling to learn and think so much about the Savior and his example for us. The more that I live the Gospel and study it and am engaged in it on so many levels the more I am intensely grateful for the soundness of it all.

I had a very spiritual Sunday. On the way to church my thoughts turned to Olesya– a girl who I started teaching in Tosmk, who later got baptized. Then in church that day, right before the meeting was about to start, Olesya walks down the row and sits right next to me! She came to visit a friend in Krasnoyarsk for a couple days. The last time I saw her was when I convinced her to come to church to see me before I left Tomsk. And now I found myself sitting next to her, singing hymns and partaking of the sacrement– both of us renewing our baptismal covenants. There are a lot of moments on the mission where God has shown me his love and mercy towards me. It was a very sweet experience that I will never forget.

Well, I’m about out of time–

I’ll get mail in a couple days probably

I love you guys!

–Elder Tyler Froelich

Today Russia celebrates Man Day– a day devoted to men- the defenders of the country.  On this day girls give stuff to guys and say “thanks for being a guy” and everywhere women (like in the grocery store today, after we bought stuff) say to men “happy holiday!” and guys hit the bars hard in the evening.  It’s a good idea for a holiday.

My most exciting news from this last week happened yesterday.
It’s been hard coming from the English clubs in Novo, which I tediously reconstructed, to the English clubs here that are kind of just barely holding on.  Somehow, for some reason, we’ve been getting a crowd of newcommers lately– and they keep inviting their friends, and they keep inviting their friends. It’s magical.  And so, with the beginning of the transfer I decided to take English into my own hands again and we (the 4 of us Elders in charge of the English club on the Right Bank of the city) met together to plan out how we can change English club to make it an exciting, uplifting, happy, and spiritual experience for everyone who comes.  Yesterday was the first implementation of the plan.  The lessons all went better than we had expected (we planned really hard for them and were very happy for such a good result) and I stood up and announced the purpose and how we organize english club, including an explanation of why we share spiritual thoughts and the option to not listen to them.  Then I shared a spiritual thought about (since there were lots of new comers) “what’s up with the Mormon church?” (that’s a translation of how the question would be phrased in Russian) I talked briefly about the membership of the church, the growth of the church, the core beliefs of the church (including, i threw in, how most of the world knows us for our standards– for example: we don’t smoke or drink alcohol, coffee or tea), and then I talked for the rest of the time about what the church means for me personally: that through this church I know how to turn to my Heavenly Father for answers to my prayers, and how the teachings of the church have helped increase my love towards my family.  After the spiritual thought we invited people to stay and talk, and more than ever before people came up to missionaries, mostly asking the question “why don’t you drink tea?!” and “what do you drink, just water??” and “well, do you eat dairy?”   I talked to 3 curious (and super awesome) university age kids and my companion talked a lot and answered other peoples questions– it was really really cool.  I realized as we walked out of the building that night that this was one of my most favorite feelings on the mission: leaving English club knowing that you nailed it– you made people laugh, helped them speak and learn english, showed them something new about life, raised questions in their heads, and made them leave feeling uplifted and happy.

I spent a little too much time on that stuff, maybe, but I felt really great about that experience.

Other than that– we’re continuing to look for an apartment, work with investigators, talk to people about the church, and– like Ryan Edmunds recommended to me– having fun.

Thanks for emails and mail (I should get mail in a week or so, fyi). I got letters last week from Caitlin, Zoe, Grandpa, Bishop, and Hadley. Thanks guys!

A note from Babooshka (the awesome, crazy old lady in the branch who adopts every missionary who serves in Krasno) that she says ‘hi’ to my fam– and isn’t going to let me leave Russia, because now I’ve got a Russian grandmother, so I can stay here. (I read the Book of Mormon with her every morning over the phone to work on my reading skills)

Alright, that’s all,

–elder froelich

Photo Comments from Tyler (double-click to enlarge):

Here’s my friend: pig. I could have bought him for 250 rubles, and probably less than that with bargaining.
And this is my castle.  I decided to try to compete with Chris’s photos from Estonia.
And last but not least– a pretty good dichotomy of foxes.

This last week was a pretty amazing one. I can’t remember for sure, but I’m pretty confident that I can say that I’ve never achieved “Standards of Excellence” before on the mission (largely due to the fact that for the majority of the mission I’ve been a zone leader, taking care of lots of things throughout the week that get in the way of missionary work) until last week. My companion and I set some really high goals and had an amazing planning session on Monday where we figured out how we were going to get everything done– get all the meetings in place and the amount of people we wanted to talk to and find to hear about the Gospel. On Wednesday we saw the first miracle– we just happened to be at the branch building that night when a guy named Roman came by behind us. It seemed at first that he was just a guy who was trying to sneak in behind us to get warm, but after talking to him for a while it turns out he came to the English club years ago. He decided to walk by the branch building that evening to see if there was any way we could help him find a job for a few months. Since the last time he came to English, he has gotten married, had a daughter (and one more child on the way) and has quit smoking. We talked for a while and I immediately felt a great connection with him. He’s a humble guy and he’s very honest and real. We talked for a while about God and prayer and invited him to meet with the branch president about work and then to come to our church service on Sunday. He since then has called us several times– we haven’t met again yet, but we will soon to talk more about prayer and how he can find more spirituality in his life.

Come Saturday night we had seen lots of miracles, but when we called our investigator Michael and found that he couldn’t come on Sunday we looked at the number of meetings that we’d had during the week and things just didn’t add up– there was no way we were going to make our goal– to make standards of excellence. Feeling a little defeated, but feeling like we had done all that we could (we worked very hard and non-stop all week), we just decided to face our Sunday and we’d take what we could get.

On Sunday we got to church to find that a man named Denis had showed up (he’s not a member, but his wife is). He stayed for the Sunday School part of the meeting and since he was the only investigator there, we had a one-on-one meeting with him with a really cool member of the branch. Denis has met with missionaries before but nothing really clicked– he never had the desire to take it seriously. Somehow something has changed with him. During that meeting we talked abouth is serious concerns of his and he decided that he’d like to try it out again and to seriously consider baptism. After church we then had 2 other out-of-the-blue meetings that suddenly made it look possible for us to reach the goals that we had set. After getting home we had one more thing to do to reach these standards– we had to contact 3 more people whose phone numbers we had received. One of the three didn’t pick up his phone. Since he didn’t pick up I looked farther up on the list of people we hadn’t called yet and my finger landed on this guy who we talked to several weeks ago about English club. He’s got a family– a wife and a 1 yr son and I decided to give him a ring. He answered and was very happy that we called and he “of course” remembered us. It turns out that it was his 25th birthday. My companion and I sang him “Happy Birthday” over the phone and he was elated. He told us he’d really like to meet with us, and we set up a meeting for this next Saturday.

Sunday night my companion and I sat in awe not quite understanding how everythign worked out this last week. We felt on top of the world that we had reached this awesome goal, and we ate a lot of ice cream.

I can’t even start to count the miracles on the way to that night that added up. It was a really amazing time for me on my mission– I’d probably say I worked harder last week than ever before, and things worked out last week better than ever before.

———————————–

*ahem*

transfers:
I’m staying with Elder Sage Petersen! We didn’t move into that apartment, so we’re still living out of packed boxes and bags– it’s awful. Hopefully we’ll find an apartment soon. (?)
Also, I haven’t gottn mail yet– that should be tomorrow.
also, nothing really interesting happened with transfers other than that. other than Sister Clark is coming here– my companion was friends with her before his mission, so that’ll be interesting

I’m overwhelmed with what you guys have all helped me realize more than I have before– that yeah, this is my last transfer… that’s really weird… I still don’t quite grasp that. Thanks for all the encouragement to work harder than ever before– I need it a lot.

I’ve had lots of desire to write letters lately, but really, I guess it doesn’t really matter. If I wrote you guys letters you probably wouldn’t have time to write me back even.

Wish me luck– pray for me to keep going strong until the end!

happy weezer day (feb 14th)

–Elder T Froelich

Our zone has set a big goal together, which is requiring a tough working schedule for my companion and I.  We’re trying this week to leave the house before studies to be able to talk to fathers who are on their way to work, to hopefully get their phone number or address to return later in the evening and teach them with their families.  So far we’ve had some really interesting conversations, including us being told an incorrect address which in turn lead to us walking into a pretty shocking apartment building (shocking because of how dirty and dark it was, the amount of young kids sitting around doing nothing, the amount of activity of furnature going in and out of the place, and the number of girls walking around the place wearing not very much clothing), discussions about why you don’t need to baptize your cat, friendly people who were scared to meet with us but loved talking to us in the cold, and some promising contacts that we’ll go and try to meet with later this week.

We had a short meeting last night with an amazing man named Valentine.  He is very smart, calm, and — he’s just the kind of guy that you’d love to have a civilized meaningful conversation with.  We discussed that we lived with God before this life, and that God created a plan that was perfect enough, with enough rewards at the end that we would agree to come down to this crazy world– fully knowing the kind of suffering and the chances that we would have to return and “make it”.  I love imagining being part of the group of God’s children that realized the risk of the situation and that decided that there was enough hope that our older brother could atone for all the rest of us to go to Earth and follow the plan.

I tend to think a lot about things I’d like to do when I get home these days. It’s something that I really haven’t had to seriously deal with up until this point on my mission.  It’s not a bad thing, but it’s just another one of the millions of ridiculous mental games that serving a mission includes.

Thanks for emails, pictures, songs, talks, support, news about Architecture in Helsinki, wishes for me to have a happy Weezer day, and lists being created of things to do with Elder Froelich when he gets home!

–Elder Tyler Froelich

Hey, PS. Last week after I emailed you guys, my companion and I went to a moving dinosaur exhibit! IT WAS AMAZING! Maybe I’ll attach some photos– i don’t know how much time is left in this email session.  But I got to see moving plastic dinosaurs last week– that’s enough of an update for you, mom, about how i’m doing mentally, emotionally and physically lately.