Elder Andrew Gwilliam: End of Transfer #1

It's crazy that I've been here a whole six weeks. It's crazy. So here's my week. On Tuesday, we were pretty busy. A good change from the last few weeks with lots of tracting. We had 2 meetings. One with an investigator really close to baptism, just wants to finish the Book of Mormon first. We just meet and pump out some chapters and talk about them with him. We started up a weekly FHE for our branch, and we had a few people show up. One of them was a member from Pskov who got married and moved to Moscow. She's here to find a job, so we just got another active member added to our branch. Sweet. Also, I had my first slip on the ice. We leave our nice shoes at the branch building so they don't get wet and dirty, and we change shoes whenever we go there. We had a meeting set for right after FHE, so we were in a hurry to get out the door and forgot to change back into our boots. So I was the unlucky one who figured that out, with the help of a nice big patch of ice. Nothing too bad. Just funny. We met a man who believes that Christ has already come again, in the form of a woman (I forgot her name) and wrote a book. He only wants new religious news, the bible is old news to him. So that was interesting. Wednesday we tracted into a really nice lady who was willing to listen to us, and even let us pray at the end, at her door! That was sweet. Taught English class, had another lesson that night with an investigator who is different every time. Sometimes he is really sincere and asks good questions and all, and sometimes he goes all communist/athiest on us. Wednesday was the latter, so that was an interesting lesson. Thursday we read more chapters with that investigator, and I got a sweet video I'll show you later. Our Branch President has been visiting his mission for the last little while, and he came back that night and shared stories with us and gave us his gameplan for the branch. On the way home, at the bus stop, there was a drunk man who wanted to get some money to get home. He grabbed Elder Kartchner's nose, that was pretty good. On Friday, we went to Novgorod for Zone Training, and that was fun. Novgorod is a bigger version of Pskov. It's nice there. We met a very nice man while contacting and he offered to show us where the grocery store was (that's what we asked him about) then he gave us his number. We had some really good Shaverma. If you want a taste of something Russian that I eat, find a good Shaverma recipe. It's like tacos here. There are taco stands everywhere there, here, it's Shaverma. Good stuff. Saturday morning took a bus home then we went out on a few appointments that our branch president set up for us with less actives. That was really cool, to meet a few new people. On Sunday there were 14 people at church, a record for me! More members than ever too. Busy Sunday, then some good ole tracting at night. So I didn't email yesterday because we went to Печоры for our p-day. We were going to come home early, like at 3ish, but we missed the bus... because 30 minutes before it came the Sisters wanted to eat at a diner type thing. It's about an hour out, and we got home at 5:30ish. There is a really cool monastary there. I'll send a few pictures.

One thing that I've been doing lately that I like a lot and maybe you can try is to mark and write down phrases in the scriptures with some power. Just short phrases that you can remember easily that could come to your head in a time of need. For example, in Luke, just "Lord I believe; help thou mine unbelief". Just little things like that. I like that a lot. I remember them easily too.

TrAnSfEr NeWs: I'm staying here. With Elder Kartchner. So is our whole district. Not too much shakeup in the mission.

Also, we'll have a special guest in Pskov on December 12th. Not from the church. See if you can find out who it is.

Love ya all!