Mission Experiences

Hello everyone,

Wow, mom, I can't believe you! Ha, I hope you are okay and nothing serious happened, you need to be more careful! There is a girl here teaching English and she was recently with her friends taking pictures outside. She was walking backwards to try to get a better picture and slipped and fell forward. She tried to do the same thing and save her camera instead of her face and she had the biggest fat lip even the next day. She knocked one tooth loose but as far as I know it is fine. Anyway, the moral of the story is, prioritize. You need to save your face before you save your phone or camera! It sounds like you are having a good time there other than the fall, so that's good. Say hello to the kids for me.

Well I just got back from Moscow again this morning. I can't remember if I told you but our zone conference was yesterday in Moscow. It was so much fun and so spiritual. We had Elder Schweitzer of the 70 and his wife speak to us. I got a lot of motivation and promptings from the spirit of how to be a better missionary. I love when we have such powerful meetings like that. After the conference, Elder Traasdahl had a zone leader meeting so me and some of the other companions of zone leaders went out to do some contacting. We did some Dan Jonesing if anyone knows what that is. You probably would recognize the painting of Dan Jones if you saw it where he is standing up in front of a bunch of people just preaching. We did that outside the metro. We split up into groups of two and one person would yell for a few minutes while the other person was trying to talk to the people who were interested. It was scary but a lot of fun. Also, it wasn't that effective so we only did it for a few minutes. The trains were actually pretty good, I slept really well on both of them. We got back this morning at around 7:45. I thought for sure I would get the package you sent me but for some reason I didn't. I think the next chance I have to get it will be in about 2 1/2 or 3 weeks when my companion goes on a visa trip, if we are still together. Transfers will be at around the same time and a lot of stuff could happen. I'm not sure if president will just leave me and Elder Traasdahl together since it will be his last transfer or what. Anyway, I'm excited to find out. Our baptisms are still on but we had to move them back a week. They had a holiday called men's day so people got off of work and school for monday and tuesday. For some reason, that means they have to work on saturday so we had to move it to next saturday. That will be good though, it will give Sergey a few more lessons so he has a better understanding. That's really pretty much all that has been going on this week. I still have those times where I feel very inadequate and feel like I'm not doing anything here. I have never wanted to quit and I never will but I just have been having to work through some down times feeling like I just wake up every day to do the same thing but I think these two people getting baptized will help me realize that work is getting done. Also, we have reactivated a woman! I forgot to tell you about her. Her name is Anna and she hasn't been to church for a really long time. She has nothing against the church but her health isn't all that great. The solution to the problem though, was that she just didn't want to travel all the way to the branch building alone. We worked through the branch council and finally have gotten the branch president to start picking her up every sunday and taking her with him. It has been two sundays in a row now and I am pretty happy about it. It's things like that that help me push through the not so fun times. Anyway, that's about it. I hope you are all doing well. How are you hanging in there dad? Are you about sick of being in session? Hopefully Megan and Mica are having a good time in Vegas. Have a good week everyone and I'll talk to you later. Love you!

Love, Elder Geddes