Always and forever

Hello y'all! It was a good day! And a good week! Here goes! On Monday night we met up with our new convert friend and made some Root beer floats. He's having a tough time at home and he sometimes just needs to talk. So we just had a good chat and drank some american goodness. Tuesday we had our district meeting, meeting with the office visa guy, and then stopped by some addresses. We got some people to answer, but the person we were looking for wasn't home or they didn't want to talk to us. It's really hard here to have just an address and a name, because if you aren't expecting guests you generally don't answer the dom-a-phone. It's kinda a bummer, but we do get lucky sometimes. Wednesday we had more meetings in the afternoon with President, we actually started going over the next transfer which is nuts! I feel like the last one just happened. I then went on a split with Elder Saxton in Nevsky that night, we went to their English group and that was about it for the day. We met up with our normal companions the next morning, and Elder Butters and I went to the Hermitage to do our service. From there I went on another split in Shuvalovo (North part of the city) and had a great lesson with a less active man who's very physically worn down. He's very skinny, but he's a funny guy. He loves America and has jet black hair slicked back. He looks good! Both of those splits were Zone Leader splits because the coming weeks are going to be pretty crazy. We'll have 2 MLC's, some zone trainings, and zone conferences with Elder Bennett from the Area Presidency. So the next day we met up again, and while I was gone we got a new investigator! A man I had called that was on a sheet actually showed up for the meeting! He's an artist and we're going to go to his house thursday. We had our own English group Friday night. It was good, we had our crazy investigator who wants to become king come and we met with him and president. He asked President Childs for money to help him prove that he is the heir to the throne, but of course didn't get anything other than moral support. Saturday was good. We did some much needed weekly planning to get ready for the upcoming weeks. We had a meeting with a guy set up, but he didn't answer the phone and we didn't want to waste time waiting around for him. So that was a bummer. He hasn't answered since. Sunday was good. We had a talk from one of the Ukrainian members that has moved here and let me tell you that is a strength to the church in Russia as a whole. They are so spiritual and are just great members. The stake priesthood meeting was last night and we got the new convert to go with us. We had one of the area seventy guys who lives in Moscow with us. It was a good meeting, our Stake President is awesome. Today we're going to go to St. Isaac's cathedral with the same new convert pal. He is awesome and making some good progress. He is going to get his patriarchal blessing pretty soon here. Hopefully within the next two weeks.

The gospel has really just come alive for me in the past few weeks! I'm starting to see that there are some things in life that need to come first and have more attention than others. It requires sacrifice. As we sacrifice, we feel true joy! It's a weird thing but it's true. I feel like I'm happier than I've ever been on my mission in the craziest assignment, with a relatively dead area, and it's because I am starting to get a grip on this whole thing. I wish I would have done this sooner and I know that I have a long long ways to go. Thank you all for being such great examples for me. Love ya!

Andrew