We have been busy here. I wish we could spend a bit more time in the Branches, but I admit I like going from one to the other as it does not get old on us. The members are coming along, and we are getting to know them well. We still spend a lot of time working with the District President and his auxiliaries. I gave a lesson yesterday on Believing Christ. It was a fun lesson. I hope it didn’t go over the heads of a few who were there. Next week mom and I speak in church again and will need to polish up our Russian for the talk.
Had a great lesson with a young man who has graduated college and seems well adjusted (future leader type). Elders showed him a video about the Book of Mormon. I had a driving impression to talk about Enos. This person had not prayed nor had he read the Book of Mormon for them. The spirit was strong. We discussed Enos along with a similar experience of mine. It was a very candid conversation. He said he felt warm inside when asked about what he was feeling. He promised to read Enos. He said the closing prayer without any hesitation. Elders said he talked with them the next day and had read Enos. We will see where it goes from here.
We are hoping to see some growth in our Old City Branch. It only has a couple of Priesthood holders and could likely get consolidated into other branches. They do have many grandmothers and we decided to do a monthly FHE for them at our place. We will get that organized, and I hope that gives them something to look forward to on a certain day. We have been trying to visit a couple of the grandmothers, babushkas, each week. This week we visited an 86-year old, Sister Svetlana, who we enjoyed getting to know and will definitely go back and see. She lives alone in her apartment and is as spry as can be. She has many stories to tell of her teaching days during World War II. Fortunately, we had our friends with us to help translate, but we could actually understand some of what she was saying. She even scolded our friends for correcting our Russian when we spoke saying that she could understand us just fine. No wonder we like her so much! Not really, she just has a great spirit about her and was very loving.
District meetings every Friday keep us in touch with our missionaries. They are lots of fun to be around. It has been a delight watching one in particular come out of his shell and become a solid missionary.
We love working with the youth. We do FHE for them twice a month. We are also helping the newly-formed student council become established here. We may decide to go to Moscow with them for a conference in the summer. They are great kids. A few are preparing to go on missions this summer. We have been helping them get ready and making sure all papers are proceeding forward.
We set up a FHE with three families on Monday night, two of them with a non-member or less active member. We received a phone call at the last minute and the FHE fell through. We were kind of bummed but went to our backup plan and made an appointment with a person who we met on a bus and went to McDonalds to talk with him. Not a lot happened with him, but when we were walking home, we passed a family on the sidewalk. I felt impressed to go back and talk with the dad. He was a really nice person and we talked for about 15 minutes—in Russian only!--as we walked. Afterwards we exchanged phone numbers and said we would like to get to know them better. A couple of hours after we got home, he called us. It is very difficult to communicate in Russian over the phone, much harder than in person. We survived though, and we are setting up a meeting with our missionaries and us to get to know them better. It was a blast. We prayed that we would find someone that night for the missionaries to teach, and we know this family is an answer to that prayer.
We have met with one of the branch presidents at his “Photo Salon.” He works long hours every day, and it has been difficult finding a convenient time to meet with him and his family, so we decided to go to him. It was actually a good thing because I have been wanting to get some pictures printed to put up around the house. His 8-year old daughter is always there because she goes there after school so we have gotten to know her too. So now we have made a connection with President Klimov, as well as brought our family into our apartment in living color!
One last comment because it was a day in history!!! Monday the sun was out, it was upwards of 40 degrees and we actually went to the store without our heavy coats! We thought we had made it through the winter—until it snowed again on Tuesday!
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