Old New Years

И одного ещё не хватало!

What's up friends and family? Christmas and New Years round two was pretty tame, compared with round 1.

Tuesday, Elder Richardson and I were with the assistants on exchanges. I was with Elder Kelly. We sat in on their district meeting, had a lesson, and had a long discussion about how to do effective less-active work. We sprinted out the door the next morning carrying about 10 water filters for the rest of our zone, to make it to the center of Moscow in time for our interviews with President. From there, we went to our own district meeting, and had a dinner appointment with two families, where we had a discussion about the power that comes from keeping covenants.

Thursday was a busy one. Our building was actually broken into on Monday, after someone tarred all the door handles on Sunday. So we had to go through this big long process of getting new keys for our new doors, and we barely made it to our evening appointment on time. We took Elder Smith with us to meet with the bishop's family. Since our bishop is from South America, he and Elder Smith just started going in Spanish. A gospel discussion in three languages has a really interesting dynamic, let me tell you. We closed our meeting asking the bishop to check out chapter 13 of PMG (Working with ward and stake leaders) and get back to us about how we can better combine our efforts with those of the ward.

Friday, the Tula/Kaluga Elders came in for exchanges, and I was with Elder Heywood. One of the cool things about being a zone leader and going on so many exchanges is you get to see what the gospel does not just for the people you teach, but for the other missionaries. It was a special opportunity to see how much Elder Heywood and I have both grown since we served together.

We were really looking forward to Sunday, since Ilia, Marat, and Ira were all supposed to be at church. To our disappointment, none of them were there. Marat had come down with some kind of bug, so he didn't bring Ira, and Ilia didn't even answer the phone. However, we did see a miracle in that a member used his only day off THIS MONTH to come to church. Andrei is a superstar.

In other new, the book is blue, the gospel is true. Keep it classy.

Elder Wilkins