June 23, 2009

Hey everyone, how is everything going? I just read your email meg, that is so awesome about the book of mormon! Tell Anthony I said good job and that he is one brave little boy. I sent you a letter and I sent it to Iowa... hopefully that works out. I'm glad the first half of the move went good. When will you actually get there? Can you believe you finally are moving?

Mom and Dad, how are you enjoying life on the road? Hopefully you don't get sick of it yet, you still have a lot of traveling to to in the next little while. I hope you guys are having fun though.

I wrote everyone a real letter today, the temple is closed for cleaning I think so I had some extra time. I'll send them off today. They aren't very exciting but I know it's not fun to send letters to people and have them not reply so I'll try to write more often.

This past week has been good. Not a whole lot of exciting things happened but it was still a good week. The district 6 weeks older than us only has two weeks left until they leave. When you get down to two weeks, you make a commitment to only speak Russian until you leave. We have been told that it is recommended we start doing that even earlier than two weeks so we'll see what we end up doing.

Yesterday was the day they started and one of the guys over the Russian missionaries, Brother Reynolds (everyone calls him czar Reynolds because he's a Russian genius, he is actually leaving soon to begin getting his P.H.D. in slavic linguistics if that tells you anything.) anyway, he asked us to help the district out by commiting to only speak Russian for the rest of the day. This was at about 11 o'clock so it was a pretty long day. We all did better than we thought we would and it was pretty fun. It was really hard and we couldn't say hardly any of the things we wanted to say but the cool thing was, for me anyway, I realized I know a lot more than I sometimes give myself credit for. I actually am learning so that was pretty cool. It's still really hard. Somedays I just wish I didn't have to learn this language but I know I'll be grateful once I know it. There's just a lot more to learning a new language than I ever thought, but it's fun and we have really good teachers.

Another cool thing about this week was our devotional last Tuesday night. It was one of the members of the presiding bishopric and his wife who spoke. They gave good talks but nothing really stuck out to me. After the devotionals we go to our class and talk about stuff and kind of have a testimony meeting I guess. Before we got started I commented to Elder Guynn about how that wasn't really my favorite talk and that it was good but nothing really hit me about it.

Our district meeting started and as I was listening to Elder Guynn talk, I was just thinking a little more about the talk. He mentioned the scripture in D&C 18 about how much joy we will have when we have brought people to the gospel. That wasn't really his main focus but while I was thinking about it, it just hit me. I remembered back to giving the book of mormon away on the airplane and how good it felt. I began to realize maybe just a small fraction of what the joy will feel like when we actually help someone become converted to the gospel.

The rest of the meeting I had one of the most powerful feelings I have ever had. I realized then what the spirit of missionary work was like and what the spirit of the MTC was all about. Since then I have been able to feel the spirit very strongly during things I might have just kind of ignored before. The next day Elder Guynn and I were practicing teaching the first lesson in English. When I got to share the Joseph Smith story I could feel the spirit so strong. It's like I have had a sort of spiritual block for a while where I haven't really done anything that has really broght the spirit. It seems like now that I've realized a bit more why I'm here, the spirit keeps testifying to me that this is the place I need to be. It's awesome!!

There is no devotional tonight because the mission president seminar is this week. The devotional will be on Friday where the rumor is President Monson will be speaking... that's the rumor every week but it is fun to hope for. There is actually a really good chance it will be him this week though so hopefully we make it in and get a good seat.

I saw Thurl Bailey, if that's how you spell his name, in the cafeteria yesterday. I'm not sure why he was here but it was cool. Other than that, not a whole lot has happened.

Elder Guynn and I are getting along great and we have recieved many compliments on our teaching. The volunteer we last taught told us how well we work with each other so that made us really happy. We are teaching the first lesson in Russian this thursday so we have a lot of work to do before then.

I love you all and hope everyone is doing great. Thanks for everything you do for me. All the letters and packages really make a difference.

Love, Elder Geddes