Hey there everybody!

Glad to hear things are going good, things are just going awesome around these parts as well. It has been one of my more favorite weeks on my mission and there are just good things.

We had a sweet week kicking off with a couple of good lessons at the beginning of the week, especially one good one with good ol' Svyetlana. She is doing super well and is ready to get baptized. She leaves today to Germany to meet her daughter coming out from America and will be there until the 1st of June. She will talk to her about being baptized, but she will not really be stopped. She seems to just have a little more of a light in her eyes- I'm going to be honest I think this is the first time that I have experienced that on my mission. It was a blessing to sit next to her yesterday and just talk to her after church- she is happy with the gospel. It's a pretty cool thing to see and feel. She has a strong testimony, so we will wait and pray for her till she gets back.

Anyways, we took off on Wednesday morning with our driver, Roman, and headed up to Tol'yatti and picked up the zone leaders there. Elder Glavatski and I got dropped off in the city Ul'yanovsk and Elders Taylor and Whittemore continued up to Kazan. So, we spent a few days there in Ul'yanovsk and probably had a few of the best days of my mission. There are two companionships there in the city, both with a senior companion and a trainee- that was so fun to work with a "newbie" and just be pumped up with them. Anyways, Wednesday was spent working with Elder Tippets, one of the newbies. From the get go, we just had people stop and talk to us and just listen. It was so awesome, there must have been something in the air. After about 20 minutes, we stopped a kid named Dimitri and talked a little about the Book of Mormon. It was so funny, I would kind of explain something, then turn to Elder Tippets and give him the nod. It's like I would hit the play button on a cassette tape and a little tid bit of testimony would just explode out of him, then hit pause and explain a little more, explain what I said to him, then push play again and he would just testify. It was such a funny picture. Anyways, this Dimitri kid was just a cool guy and had about an hour so we went and sat down on a bench, prayed, taught the whole restoration and invited to be baptized, and prayed and got on our way. It was probably the coolest thing that I have had on my mission, Heavenly Father was definitely looking out for us.

We had the same thing at night when we were on our way home and had a kid stop us at about 8:30 and say that he wanted to know what we do because he felt like he couldn't get away from bad influences and he just wanted to get free of it...that tickled our fancies. We asked if he had time, so we plopped down on another bench and had a repeat from earlier, we taught him about the Atonement and Book of Mormon and gave it to him. Pretty cool. We ran home to make it home after that- anyways we just had things like that for three days out there in Ul'yanovsk. It was so darn fun…and fun to just get them pumped. That is probably my favorite thing to do. Anyways, we had a good time, and it was fun to be with Elder Glavatski, you will have to meet him some day. Me and him go home on the same day, he is the most humble just cool guy in the world.

Anyways, things are going super good around here. We are happy to be working with Svyetlana and others and just making a lot of good things happen. Good times. Hope you all have a good week, love you all!

Love

Elder Nielson