Not Just Pretty Music
By Brandon Boey

Author’s Note: Today’s missionary story comes from Denice L Hurlbut. If you have any missionary stories to send, please send them to me at missionary@meridianmagazine.com.

The grandmother pulled my face down to her level and kissed my cheek three separate times the day Jenya was baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She was at least a foot shorter than I was but very forceful, as Russian grandmothers tend to be. By the third kiss, I felt comfortable enough to ask her why she had permitted the baptism.

I was serving a volunteer mission for the Church in Omsk, one of the largest cities in Siberia. Several months before, a challenge had been issued to the teenagers in our church group. They had been encouraged to invite a friend to a church meeting.

Sasha, a 14-year-old girl who had been attending church for more than two years, accepted the challenge and came to church the next Sunday with a shy classmate in tow.

Jenya loved the meeting and began attending daily seminary classes, where she was given a copy of the Book of Mormon. She finished the book in less than a month and accepted an invitation to meet with my companion sister and me to learn more about the Church's basic teachings. It was not long before Jenya wished to be baptized. My companion and I only had one concern with Jenya's decision — the 14-year-old girl’s grandmother. 

Jenya and her grandmother lived alone in an apartment at the edge of the city. The apartment had three crowded rooms — a kitchen, a bathroom, and third room used for sleeping and living in.

For months we met with Jenya and her grandmother regularly, sitting on the edge of a foldout bed in the third room as we shared the principles of the gospel and studied the scriptures together.  Although Jenya's grandmother came to look forward to our meetings, she continued to believe that if Jenya were baptized into any church other than the Russian Orthodox it would be an act of betrayal to her country.

Occasionally my companion and I encountered Jenya's neighbors in the hall of her building. They spared no efforts in making it known that we weren't welcome. At one point a drunken man even stopped us to tell us that Jenya was a bad girl and that we should stay away from her. He said that bad things would happen if we came back, but we were used to harmless threats from drunken people, and we ignored him.

The next time we met him it was late in the evening. Jenya was our last stop of the day. As my companion and I approached her building we noticed a group of men sitting in a streetlamp's beam. Just as many such groups of young men, they loitered near the building's entrance in thick, dark sheepskin coats, exhaling indistinguishable breath and cigarette smoke into the winter air.

We recognized the drunken man from the apartment building as he stepped out of the group and approached us. I didn't understand what he said, but I knew something was wrong when my companion, a Russian native, grabbed my arm and pulled me closer to her.  I also didn't notice the rest of the men until they were standing around us, some holding bats and poles.

The drunken man continued to talk, but all I recognized was Jenya's name. It was the first time in months that my Russian had failed me. My companion later told me that a sister missionary shouldn't understand the kinds of things he was saying, and never offered more of a translation than that he was threatening to do something very bad.

As he continued to talk, my companion leaned in closer to my ear and whispered three of the only words I ever heard her say in English: "Run very fast." She turned around and ran, breaking through the back of the circle and dragging me behind her. The group didn't follow us very far, but shouted that if they ever saw us again, they would kill us.

When the president of our mission heard the story he asked us not to return to that neighborhood. We continued our meetings with Jenya at her friend Sasha’s apartment. 

One afternoon Jenya arrived with her arms and face covered in cuts and bruises, some the size of baseballs. Some of the older boys in Jenya’s neighborhood had told her that if she didn’t stop associating with the Americans and their church, they would teach her a lesson. When Jenya didn’t listen to them, they pinned her down and beat her.

It was one week after the incident that Jenya arrived to our appointment 45 minutes late, gasping for breath. She carried a note from her grandmother, asking us to please arrange Jenya’s baptism.  We did so with pleasure.

At the baptism, I saw Jenya’s grandmother for the first time in two months, and I asked her why she had changed her mind. She explained that after Jenya’s beating she wasn’t going to let Jenya meet with us anymore. The day of our appointment, they were listening to the 2002 Winter Olympics on the radio.

Between events, a clip of the Mormon Tabernacle choir was played and Jenya’s grandmother changed her mind. When I asked her what she meant she said, “At the beginning of the song, it was just pretty music. At the end, I knew that Jenya needed to join your church, so I wrote the note and told her to run because she was late to meet you.”