Black Listed Visa

Dear Family and Loyal Blog Readers,

As I woke up today I noticed that the sky was bleak, dark and overcast. The sun ceased to shine! The lack of sunlight thrilled me beyond relief! I have hope that the bleak mundane storm clouds will be coming any day now and the fall will once again be upon us. As exciting as my overcast morning was today, it was not nearly as exciting as Tuesday, when I woke up to air-raid sirens. In an inexplicable turn of events, air raid sirens were sounding in our area of town all Tuesday morning during random times. A decision faced me. I was tempted to take this air raid alerts seriously but when I looked outside I noticed that everybody was just happily walking along minding their own business and thus I figured that this must be a rather normal occurrence. Once outside I did look up a few times just to see if there were any bombers overhead. There wasn't. Thus I assumed it must have either been some sort of test or a secret air raid that failed to do any damage at all to Ryazan. I am banking for the second one.

Otherwise, our week was not extremely exciting. All of our investigators left town to their "dacha's", little cottage retreats in The Middle of Nowhere, Russia. Our amount of teaching appointments dropped significantly. In the Samara Russia Mission they have a saying: "The road to hell is paved with dacha's". Their saying is a lot less direct than one of our branch member's saying: "Satan lives on the dacha." I guess these might both be true.

Due to the sudden evaporation of our teaching pool, it became necessary to try to find some new people who were interested, and try we did. We called contact lists. We called former investigators. We street contacted. On Tuesday we met Sasha, who might be most relaxed and kindest person ever to exist. He is from Uzbekistan and came to every activity last week. His main interest is learning English but he also likes to come to our activities. On Wednesday we are going to go over to his house and eat "plof'" which is an Uzbeki curry rice dish. I make it a lot for lunch but Uzbeks make blow me out of the water. Thus I am excited.

We also found this great African man named Felix on the old contact lists. We called him and got an appointment. This was one of my favorite lessons so far on my mission. Felix is a super spiritual man and loves the missionaries. He kept saying over and over again how much he loves and respects our work here in Ryazan. He literally said all of the things that missionaries like to here such as: "You know, my father was a very spiritual man, but I want more truth than he had"; "I want to learn about what you guys have to say"; and "Yes I'll read the Book of Mormon and pray about it. I don't like to make decisions and judge things without prayer." Our lesson with Felix was a pretty ideal lesson, and I hope that things continue to go well with him.

This week I also learned that God answers our prayers in somewhat unexpected ways. Last Sunday Vitaliy got offended at America and decided that he didn't want anything to do with the missionaries ever again. For the next few days, we were trying to figure out what to do in order to talk to him. Finally Elder Hunt and I prayed to know what we should do to help Vitaliy, but we really didn't get any answer. The next day we had a lot of free time in the morning so we decided to go the branch building, print of some English Club invitations and go contacting. Half way through our bus ride to the branch Sister Dick (one of our sister missionaries) called us an asked if we could go back home and get her cook book which I had used in a (disastrous) attempt to make a pie. Seeing as she would be leaving to America that night, we got off the bus and decided to walk home. On our way home we ran into Vitaliy sitting on a bench near our home and had a good conversation with him. We listened to his problems and he apologized for yelling at us, and said that he still wanted to meet and come to church. Then he told us that we were now on a secret mission to discover if he had been black listed for the reception of an American visa, but that is wholly incidental. The point of the story is that I learned once again that our prayers are usually answered in a different way than we wanted. When Elder Hunt and I prayed, we just wanted to know if we should call Vitaliy that night, and how to help him, but we didn't expect to run into him the next day. The whole experience was another testimony builder for me that this is the Lord's work, and he will make things happen in his own time and his own way.

Overall, I think that the lesson of this week was that even in hard times, the Lord still blesses us. The hard times that we experience on the mission turn into opportunities to grow and learn how to be better missionaries, if we allow them to. I guess that that is the same in life. We all experience rough times and bad situations, but in the midst of it all, our Heavenly Father is always prepared to bless us and teach us something new, something that we couldn't possibly learn if things were going well.

I hope everybody has a good week. On Friday I'm going to Riga, Latvia to renew my visa, so I'll let you know how that goes. Incidentally, I looked up some Latvian phrases that I could use on our trip, but I can't really get the hang of the language. Good thing they speak Russian!

Live Long and Prosper!
Elder Zachery Edwin Brasier

PS- Ryazan has now become a greeny city! We just got a new senior couple straight from America. Also, on Wednesday both of our sister missionaries left the city (Sister Dick to America and Sister Nelson to Kazakhstan). This was rather disappointing for me, because they were both such great sister missionaries and did such a good work here in Ryazan. It is so nice to have helpful sisters who work hard and do their best, and we were so blessed in Ryazan to have such capable and good sister missionaries. Fortunately, we got two new sisters, one from Moscow and one straight from America. Thus half of our missionaries here are new!

You should post this link on the mission blog: http://www.lds.org/church/news/elder-christofferson-visits-growing-church-in-eastern-europe?lang=eng
This is about Elder Christofferson's trip to Eastern Europe!