From Russia With Love

Dear Family and Loyal Blog Readers,

Well this was a pretty good week for us, mostly because it started out with General Conference! For missionaries, General Conference is akin to the Superbowl. We all got together on Saturday and Sunday, bought a ton of chips, cookies and soda and spent a combined time of 10 hours in front of a TV. It was really funny for me to see everybody get so excited when speakers were announced, like when Elder Jeffrey R. Holland was announced as the first speaker for Priesthood session. I thought we were all going to explode because of how excited we were. And what a great talk he gave, it fired me up a ton to go out and work. I hope all prospective missionaries watch that talk again and again to get ready for the work. Also Russia got mentioned twice, and both times we were super excited, to the point of standing up and cheering!! What a great General Conference. We are so blessed to have living apostles and a prophet on this Earth today who give us such wonderful direction and council. I took so many notes from their talks, I think I understand now when the scriptures say "Feasting on the word of God," because I was definitely feasting. I think my favorite talks where Jeffrey R. Holland's in Priesthood Session, President Uchtdorf's in Relief Society Session (yes we watched that too), President Monson's in Priesthood Session and President Eyring's talk on Sunday. I also really liked Elder Bednar's call for the youth to become involved in Family History work. If I was home right now I would be all over that, but I hope that all the youth heed that prophetic call.

After Conference on Sunday, we had a great contacting activity on the Nizhny Novgorod Walking Street, which is basically like an outdoor shopping mall. We set up a table with a big piece of paper and had a large sign that said "If you could ask God one question, what would it be?" and then people could write it on the paper. It was a huge success, unfortunately me and Lantuk showed up late because we had an appointment (that was incredibly unsuccessful) but for the 3 hours that the other missionaries manned the table they gave out 50+ Book's of Mormon and had 27 people give their phone numbers for more information. That is a huge success for Russia! I was a little disappointed though because I got absolutely no success in the hour I talked to people, but as I was walking home depressed, we ran into a group of people performing Hare Krishna, which was incredibly awesome, so it cheered me up substantially!

For the rest of the week it was pretty normal missionary work. I've been a little sick recently because I drank some bad water. I distinctly remember the moment too. I drank some water and thought "Hmm... that water tasted like rust, I hope it wasn't TOO dirty..." Yeah, I guess it was pretty dirty. So I was sick from Tuesday to today, and now I'm feeling a little better. Unfortunately I haven't been able to work too hard, and I really was only able to work really effectively yesterday where I concluded the day with a three hour door tracting session where a white supremacist (not sure on the spelling there) threatened to break my nose because I was American. It was pretty awesome. Also me and Lantuk are getting more people interested in the gospel so that has been really nice to start really teaching again. Our relationship is getting better, but still struggles. I am trying the best I can but he can be really tough to work with. It's been making me really miss working with Dannenberg! But alas, I still have to push onward because the work is more important than petty differences.

Anyways, that's about all I've got for now. I hope everything is going delectably wherever you are when you read this blog post. Keep doing what you are doing and remember that God loves you and cares about you individually!

From Russia with Love,

Elder Zachery Brasier