Ё МОЁ!

Hello everybody! Thanks for the great emails. Like always, I can tell that all is well in the US of A. It was a good week here for us. We were very very busy, we were busy inside the Childs apartment and not out in the rain, so it wasn't so bad. We started off with the North Zone conference on Tuesday. So actually we had North then Center (my zone) then South all back to back to back. We were at all of them because we had 25 minute teaching portions. So I'll just run you through the schedule of the Zone Conferences once instead of 3 times. So we started off with President Childs teaching and testifying of Christ to invite the Spirit to the  meeting. Then we handed out flash drives for all the missionaries as the gift from the mission. Then President spent some time talking about a few area rules and the spirit of the rules and commandments and things like that. Then Elder Doxey spoke for a while about How to Begin teaching. We then had a short break and then I spoke about teaching clearly and effectively. It was really fun to use the last week to study this topic. I'll give a recap about what I found at the end. Then Sister Childs spoke about proper Elder and Sister relations (DON'T FLIRT) and other such good things. There was this rumor that got out that this Zone Conference was going to be a little awkward, so all thought that was the awkward part. They were wrong. We had lunch after that chat and it was good. We had some ham and funeral potatoes. Fruit salad and other goodies too. Then we separated into Elders and Sisters and had the real awkward part about the Law of Chastity. For the sake of the readers, I won't dive into that one. It wasn't really that awkward, it was just a really big surprise for us the first time. Then we had the Christmas celebration part of the Zone Conference, we watched the video of the world's largest live nativity scene that was filmed in Utah, and the Church's He is the Gift video. Then we read a Christmas story called A Christmas bell for Anya or something like that. Then we shared our testimonies and had some goodies at the end. It was really fun to have that over and over again, it never got boring or repititious. It was just fun! Tuesday was the day the ruble really took a dive. The banks had lines and they turned off their conversion boards so people couldn't see how bad it really was. It's a really sad thing. On Thursday we met with an interesting man who is very well... interesting. He always comes to english group and is an eternal investigator. He invited us over for a discussion and tried to make us rethink our beliefs using science and other secular knowledge. It was so dumb! He kept telling us that we needed to use our modern knowledge to think about the bible and how because time has changed, the bible has too. It was weird. Anyways, friday was crazy. We set up chairs for the nutcracker production of the stake members. Then we spent the rest of the day in the office working out problems. That night was the nutcracker play, we had a good time. There was a lot of confetti and I felt bad for the poor guys who had to clean that up. Saturday morning we're informed that we need to go clean up after the play... I wanted to say no, but I  knew that if we didn't nobody else would and there would be lots of problems that would need to be dealt with. So we showed up and NOTHING had been cleaned. There was confetti tracked throughout the whole building... we spend a good chunk of saturday cleaning that mess. Sunday was really fun and refreshing. We drove up to Vyborg with President and Sister Childs and there was a special guest.. their son Chandler! He's pretty cool, he went on a mission to Wisconsin and thinks that the weather is weak here. It was fun to go up there in the morning and have church then the devotional by us and then drive home. So yeah. That was the week. It was a good one!

I taught about 3 things that the Savior does as He teaches...
1. He has a knowledge of what He is teaching
2. He understands the audience
3. He has a KNOWLEDGE (testimony) about what He is teaching
So that's what I taught. I used scriptures and such to help and encourage participation. It was really fun.

Love ya! Have a great Christmas and talk to you soon!

Andrew

Russian Nativity (the birth of a collection)

Vyborg