Hey, how's it going. I did my email to President first today and I noticed that I wrote way more and more detailed than usual and it took me a while, so for the sake of time, I'm just going to send that to you too and that will probably be the bulk of the email.
This week has been really great, we got Elder Davis moved in and all of the new missionaries oriented fairly smoothly. Elder Davis and I had a few good days at the end of the week to work in our area and we have been having a lot of success, including baptizing Aleksei yesterday.You always talk about how when we get a new assignment we are bombarded with revelation and that is exactly what has been happening to Elder Davis concerning the whole mission and our area. We need to make member work our top priority. We spend too much time finding and teaching street contacts who are just weak investigators. What the church needs here is for members to be strengthened by us teaching them and for us to find quality investigators through them. Obviously, we will not slacken our contacting efforts, but put much more effort into teaching members, and working with them to find investigators. We made some great plans and goals about this on Thursday during planning then and we were both very excited and optimistic about it.
This week we did the regular new missionary thing. There were a ton of them, about the same as when I came in. Saturday we also had a great experience. One of the members has his girlfirend in town for a month from Kazakhstan, and we taught her and it was the best first lesson that I've even been on so, we are going to see how that goes. Sunday was amazing because we had 5 investigators at church, the most I've ever had, and of course Aleksei's baptism was awesome. At also worked out well because Elder Anderson was supposed to have left earlier in the week but his visa got delayed so he was able to stay in the city and baptize Aleksei before he left. It was a really powerful baptismal service. Sorry, hopefully I'll have more time to write next week, I had a lot that I wanted to say.
We haven't done anything culturally recently.
We memorize a ton of scriptures in Russian, some are the same as scripture masteries and when I work on them in Russian it helps because I already have this English framework in my head. So I don't know to what extent, but they help.
Elder Topham
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| This is a picture of me out in the boonies where our Armenian investigator lives. |
Various pictures of Aleksei's baptism...
