Pitidisyatniki

Walking Margerita's dog.

Hey! It has been going great! Seriously, miraculous week this week. Elder Williams and I are doing great. We ended up having a real good discussion together on Friday during weekly planning and it went very well. It is just hard for him adapting to being a volunteer and to the Russian culture. Like it was for me. He is doing great. We are working better together and he is contributing a lot more. Great progress this week!

I will start off with my studies. I recently read a talk given by Elder D. Todd Christofferson entitled Justification and Sanctification. I have learned so much from this talk, and it has been tied into my studies about grace. I recommend that you all go find it on lds.org and read it. (:

Still walking

Let me give a bit of a background to the story I want to share with you. A girl named Daria got baptized a month ago by the Sisters in Severney. Last week, she brought her sister to church in Severney, though the sister lives in Novocherkassk. She was just visiting. The sister's name is Oksana. Oksana liked the people from church but was not sure about the meeting. For one, the microphone was not working on the pulpit, but also the meeting differed a lot from meetings she used to go to when she was younger. She used to go to the pitidisyatniki when she was younger with her mom. (Sorry, don't know the English name for that. Something amongst the lines of Fifty . . . not sure) She told Daria she didn't want to look into the church very much and wanted to go to the pitidisyatniki.

Rockin out at the music party

On Friday morning, during my opening prayer for studies, I had a very vivid thought. Text the sisters and ask them to have Daria invite Oksana to the music party in Rustov. Also, tell her she can ride down with the Novocherkassk branch to the party. I hurried up and sent that text. In the end, it all worked out and Oksana met up with us Saturday morning. We took her to the music party and she got along with the Novocherkassk members pretty well, though she did get separated from us and she went and sat with her sister.

Epic solo

The party was interesting, like most Russian church parties. One person forgot their lines and it was sad and awkward. There were problems with the sound the whole time, and there was a play that had a battle scene with an angel and a bad spirit fighting with swords. Really entertaining if you go in with the right attitude, but I was worried Oksana would be a bit frightened of us now. I spoke with her after and she said she was going to stay with her sister in Rustov, so I didn't have a lot of time to know what she thought.

The next day I get a text from the sisters and they tell me she came to church again with her sister! A few hours later I got a call from Oksana that went like this:

Oksana: "Hey, is this Elder Weston?"
Me: "Yes!"
Oksana: "When are you guys going to start teaching me the lessons?"
Me: "Whenever you want to!"
Oksana: "Great. I am free Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Does that work?"

Pretty much the conversation every volunteer wants to hear from a potential investigator. It turns out she woke up Sunday morning and decided she wants to start coming to our church! We are so excited to start teaching her! Right now we are deciding between Margerita and President Mozel to have with us on the lessons.

Cool Russian temple

​Also one last quick miracle. We had a goal this week to teach seven lessons with recent converts/investigators/less actives. We worked hard but during nightly planning Saturday, we had only taught three lessons. As we planned, we noticed we could get three more the next day, though we still needed one more to get to seven. We set a goal to have four of those lessons. We knew we could get the fourth if someone new came to church. Well, a recent convert/less active we had lost contact with came. We had a lesson with her, and all our lessons worked out. We got the seven!​

Love you guys!

Elder Weston

After the concert. Oksana is the blonde in the middle.