Well what to say, what to say. This week has gone by pretty normally. Elder Hunt is gearing up to go to Tver and I am getting excited to receive my greenie. On Thursday we'll be going to Moscow to drop Elder Hunt off and so that I can attend the new missionary training meeting. I am pretty excited for that, partly because I get to see a lot of my old friends, like Elder Eliason and Elder Barker who are training, Elder Olsen who has been sitting in Nizhniy for forever and a day and also Elder Stegeby who just received a transfer call to the office (I called him for a little bit of friendly needling, but to my surprise he is incredibly excited to be an office Elder. I must say he has a much better attitude than I did about that transfer.) We will be getting so many new missionaries in our mission over the next few transfers, so the missionary work in this part of the world will be picking up. It is really cool because I can see the Lords hand in how the missions were split and then combined and now the Moscow Mission is taking off. Every missionary and every event of the Moscow West Mission played a critical role in further establishing the stake in Moscow and strengthening the church.
In the mean time things here in Ryazan are going along quite well. Right now Elder Hunt and I are trying to emphasize finding and contacting new investigators, since a lot of our old ones have started falling away. This has lead to a plethora of contacting adventures, the least of which being when I contacted a pirate the other day. The man was literally dressed like a pirate, carried a cane, spoke how I imagine a pirate would speak in Russian and also took a Book of Mormon! As I asked him for his number he produced a "business" card with his name and phone number, introducing himself as Adreas von Lepioschkin and garnished with his pirate crest. If I don't end up teaching him I think my mission will be a total failure. Otherwise the contacting is going well and we have found some great people that will be excited to hear the restored gospel.
Sasha (the awesome Uzbek who we are teaching English/gospel with) is still doing great. Last night we watched the Joseph Smith movie with him, and the Spirit was so strong in the room, and then Sasha started asking tons of questions about our religion, which was great since we got to explain to him the difference between our religion and other Christian religions. Sasha is amazing, he is so receptive to the Spirit and such a great overall guy. His whole goal in life is to build parks and hospitals for children! Right now he is pretty set on remaining Muslim, but meeting him has really strenghtened my testimony that there are amazing people from all countries, all religions, and all walks of life.
Vitaliy is doing great too. He gave us a few letters that we need to forward to Mitt Romney through our contacts with the American embassy here in Russia (we are still working on that....) and has also started to bring his girlfriend to church! It has been so great to see member missionary in action! His girlfriend Angela gave the Sister missionaries her number and they will be meeting with her shortly. I really hope that things work out for them, since Vitaliy is one of our best friends here in Ryazan.
Otherwise, the only exciting thing that has happened this week is that we went out to an old monastery in Solotcha, a small town about 30 kilometers outside of Ryazan. In our mission we now have culture nights once every other transfer, and for our culture night, we decided to go out to Solotcha and see what was there. Honestly, it wasn't anything too interesting, just like every other Orthodox monastery/church which I've seen, but the highlights of which were two low level passes of some Il-76 transport planes (of which I got awesome pictures) and an awesome cemetery, which I also loved and took copious amounts of pictures. Next culture night I hope to go to a symphony orchestra.
Well, I hope you all have a great week and keep being awesome. Congratulations to Ronald Francis McGhin III and Matt Doxey for finishing their missions! Those guys are awesome!
As Always,
Elder Z. E. Brasier
Moscow Time
No comments:
Post a Comment