Monday, June 25, 2012

Good Mornin to ya family! Ready set go!
Off to the races to throw a week into a letter.  Man it's been so good down here in the Zavodskoi.  There are some good things goin’ on round these parts and the work is just good.  Thanks for sharin’ some of Brayden's letter with me.  That is so fun to read about a bro doin’ well.  It is funny to try and look at Spanish...I can't even fathom to think in Spanish right now.  Any other language that comes to the head is this weird Russian thing I'm tryin’ to speak.  Isn't that cool though to picture all of us just talkin’ in all these different languages.  Pretty cool.  I actually got a great letter from him last week at zone conference it was so darn good to hear from him.  It's fun to think and picture all the bros out just doin’ the good work.  I am definitely blessed with a cool group of buddies. 
  Well it's been just a solid week goin’ on here!  We have had some great ups and good stuff goin’ on around here. We kicked off the week celebrating Elder Cowley's big 20th birthday!  I like it when my companions have birthdays.  We went and got some McDonalds to celebrate.  There are McDonalds in about every large city out here, they are just so darn expensive that I've only experienced the Russian Mickey D's twice.  You would think you were right back in Highland across from Lone Peak.  Funny side note, the McDonalds' here are so cool.  People dress up to go to McDonalds pretty much.  It's pretty fun, quite the treat.  So you better believe that I celebrated Elder Cowleys birthday with a couple Big Mac's.  It's the least I could do.  That was fun, we had a couple members come with us.   I had quite the experience with them the night before.  There is a member named Nastya in the branch who is 19.  She has kinda had a rough go at it but is such a sweet person.  She is currently living with a guy named Tolya (who is investigating and comes to everything) and they have a lil’ baby.  Not the most prime of situations.  Anyways Elder Cowley and I have tried to talk about how to talk to them about this situation because that just doesn't fly.  But on Monday night we were walking with them and some other members and Nastya goes "Nielson, come here" just as we were walking.  She kinda pulled me back behind everyone and I thought she just wanted to ask me something for Elder Cowley's birthday.  But instead she just starts goin’ off about how Tolya (her “boi”) and her have had a bunch of conversations and that he actually wants to have a feeling that the church is true.  I was pretty stunned.  She said that he knows and understands that it's true, but wants to feel it.  So, they want us to have a meeting and things. Of course, that gave me an opportunity to talk to her about their living situation because they can't feel the Holy Ghost when they are doing that.  It was pretty cool because she was like "I know, I know.  I wanna first talk to the branch president and then we'll talk about meeting."  It was a pretty cool experience, we have not yet had the chance to meet but were able to eat at McDonalds and go to sports night with them.  We were very happy about that.  
Elder Cowley also got a good lil’ birthday present on Tuesday night.  We had a meeting set up with a lady named Tatyana who was from the area book.  She had come in contact with the missionaries about 4 months ago, and that was it.  So we met with her and Bro. Potrunin at the branch.  Turns out, she's gettin’ baptized on the 14th of July!  It's raining in Zavodskoi!  It was a pretty dang cool lesson and we are so excited about her.  We were able to teach her the plan of salvation on Saturday and she is just awesome and so accepting.    
As far as the rest of the week went, it was a pretty norm missionary week.  We had the zone leaders come to us on exchanges which was a party.  I got to work again with my old comp, Elder Christensen which was so fun.  It's cool to see how each of us have progressed.  We also had a lot of time to chat just about the area and our companionships, it was a good couple of days.  And it's fun to be the recipient of exchanges.  Having been with the district leaders before, we were always having to go to other areas.  So that was very fun.   Church yesterday was just a party as always.  We unfortunately had nobody show as far as investigators, but it was a fun day at church.  Yes momma, I got up and played some prelude out of the good little book you sent me and won the hearts of some of the members.  Had to let you know that one.  ;)  They are so funny here, I think we started like 8 minutes late and then ended about 15 minutes early.  We were crackin’ up.  I guess they were just running on the timetable of the Spirit.  I had the funniest thing happen after Sacrament meeting.  I took the trays of bread to the other room and was just going to dump the extra pieces of bread into the garbage can.  Holy cow that is a no can do here!  It was so funny, Bro Potrunin and Dima were just like "Elder stop!  What are you doing! AHHHH!"  It was so darn funny.  They wanted the leftovers and threw them down after the meeting.  They scared me so bad though we laughed for about 5 minutes about it.  They sure know how to conserve here.  After church, it was pretty cool.  One of the members needed a blessing and Bro Potrunin grabbed me to help.  I had only done the annointing part in Russian before, but Roman (who we were giving the blessing to) asked me to seal the annointing.  It was pretty darn cool to give a blessing in Russian to somebody.  Man it was such a good and very fast week.

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