Great Week!

Hello! It was a great week here, I'll just get down to the business as usual. On Monday night we had a great lesson with the Grandma investigator who we visited a few times last week. It was great, and she agreed to be baptized on October 5th! She really really wants to get baptized, she's just feeling sick. She's going to be in the hospital for a while, so we hope that after some resting and relaxing that she will be feeling up to baptism. It's really cool, I like teaching her a lot. We like to hear stories from her life as well. She was forced to move to Leningrad when she was 24 to help rebuild the city after the war. She was paid very little, and things were so hard that all she could afford was a bottle of water every day. She said that was the hardest part of her life, because on top of that she had a young daughter and a husband who drank and beat her. It was sad to hear that and sad to realize that these stories most likely won't be told or remembered, they aren't written down. We're trying to think of a way to help her record these stories. On Tuesday we had lunch with the Glausers at a nice italian place here, they wanted some tips and tricks on learning Russian, and wanted to just chat with us as it turns out. It was fun to talk to them and get to know them more. We had a good district meeting after that. Then we met with a less active man who lives in an awful apartment. There are large, small, colorful, brown, you name it and that bug is probably in there. Wow... It was so bad. I tried to squish as many as I could with my feet. On Wednesday we had service at the Hermitage. Let me say, service here in the fall is better than in the summer. There aren't as many people, and the people that do come were really fun. There have been lots of American tours lately. That night we had a stake missionary meeting with the ward mission leaders from the stake and the other Zone Leaders. It was a good meeting, the only bad thing was that our Ward Mission Leader was the only one who didn't show up. He is a soviet grandpa, and I'm not sure how commited he is to the church. I guess we'll have to meet with him and find out. He asked us to help him clean out his shed this last week, and we were super busy and told him that we would call him when we could. He's called us and others multiple times asking when we would help and complaining that we hadn't come yet. On Thursday morning early we went to Novgorod to do Zone Training. We basically just retold and taught was was said in the Mission Leadership Council. It was fun. After that, we went on splits with the Elders from Novgorod. It was a blast! They're doing great. One is from Texas, the other from St. Louis. It was fun to be with them and to be in a small city again. That night one of the Elders and I went to a less active family's dacha and dug up potatoes for 2 hours. That was a good work out, lots of squats. We had dinner with them afterwards, that was really good. On Friday we were still in Novgorod and we had so many meetings. We went running around like crazy and I spent so much money on the buses. I'm glad that I got receipts. Whew. That night we came home on the train. On Saturday we did weekly planning. That was good. Then we had a lesson with one of our good investigators who's pretty new and has good questions. He's a younger guy. We tried to review the restoration and introduce the book of mormon but he got caught up on a question that young Joseph Smith posed in the restoration video that we watched.. He wanted to know how a man could know if he was saved. So we talked about that FOREVER. We spent way too much time on that topic, and it was crazy. We got home super late that night. Sunday was great. Really good. I forgot that in the city there are usually too many people to keep the meeting to an hour long, that is great. I translated for our senior couple too. That was a good test for me. A really really really cool thing that happened. So we have three areas, and we have too much to do. Last week I expressed a little bit to Mom that I was nervous that we were forgetting somebody. Well, we were. But the ward wasn't! There is a lady who is an investigator in one of the areas and we didn't know that she had been meeting with the sister missionaries. The RS sisters in the ward did, and they TOOK HER TO CHURCH!! ALL BY THEMSELVES!! It was a great miracle, it was actually this woman's first time at church. She had never come before, but the sisters in the ward have been meeting with her and chatting and got her to come! It was soo cool to see. And our friend from Peru, Juan, came to church looking good in a suit! I hope that he's back in church to stay. I am so happy! There are so many great things happening here, I am so glad to be where I am. I love you all!

Andrew