Deliverance

Casting Off Suffering, From Within and Without

“Therefore we plead before thee for a full and complete deliverance from under this yoke;

Break it off, O Lord; break it off from the necks of thy servants, by thy power, that we may rise up in the midst of this generation and do thy work.” — From the dedicatory prayer of the Kirtland temple as recorded in Doctrine and Covenants 109:32-33

Kyivskaya Street is a major road that cuts through Simferopol—the city I lived in for the entirety of my mission, as I never transferred. It’s also the setting for Part One of what I believe, without concrete evidence, is a two-part story.

Simferopol is the capital city of the Crimea, and although the entire peninsula is an East Europe tourist hub during the summer, the landlocked capital doesn’t attract as much traffic as beach resorts like Sevastopol, Yalta, and Sudak. Summers, then, meant hard work for full-time missionaries. The folks we were teaching left town for vacations, and with peak temperatures and humidity, there often weren’t many folks on the streets. It was all we could do, some days, to have full conversations with anyone other than fellow missionaries.

One hot, sticky Sunday, my companions and I passed hours attempting to find anyone to speak with. We kept to the main roads, hoping they’d have more foot traffic, and passed out one or two vizitki—small cards listing the Church’s name, plus the times and address of local worship services and English classes. On the back of each vizitka we had scrawled our names and phone number. On good days we could hand out stacks of vizitki; that day was not a good day.

Exhausted, but trying to keep the faith, I saw a pedestrian yards ahead on Kyivskaya Street. I silently promised God that if the woman didn’t cross the street before we crossed paths, I would invite her to church. I slipped a vizitka into my hand and watched the woman’s figure as she approached.