Russian Rappers and Breaking Tombs

Aloha!

Fun week, we got some more snow and did some fun service.  Our friend max showed us the parts that he bought for his computer that he is making himself and he bought all the most expensive parts he could.  This world was completely foreign to me but Lawrence seemed to understand what he was talking about.  We got fed twice this week. I honestly can't think of a Russian who has fed me who isn't a great cook.... everything I have got so far has been magically delicious.

We had to take down the Book of Mormon this week.  All the paint melted off and left his eerie blue ghost color on it and most people that passed thought it was a tomb stone.  It was a labor of love when we made it and it was sad to see her go down after all the hard work that we put into her.  We basically just javelened our ice breakers and shovels into her until she broke at the bottom and then a bigger problem started when all the surrounding snow was covered with blue paint. We had to shovel it all out and hope that a big snow plow comes and takes it away.  

One of our members brought her friends to game night. He is 16 years old and an aspiring rapper.  He showed us some of his stuff and despite the fact that I understood nothing that was said, it was pretty good.  Apparently rap is taking over Russia right now.  But in Russian you don't rap rap, you read rap.

I took part in an interesting service, we showed up at a cross country ski race thinking we could help by giving out medals or something but we ended up wearing huge animal costumes and they just wanted us to go around dancing and take pictures with people.  I'll try to send a picture!  I was a hedgehog, it was fun!

Well, that about does it for this week, I hear some big changes are coming up for use related to our schedule.  Hope you all have a fantastic week!  

Love

Elder Wilding

I'm the hedgehog with the big glasses, the head didn't come off unfortunately.

Picture with both of the constructors... Elder Wilding and Elder Lawrence

 

SNOW HAS FINALLY COME

What's Up Everybody,

This has been if not the best, then one of the best weeks of my whole mission and quite possibly my life.  It started off being really really cold that provided the perfect environment for us to re-paint the Ice Book of Mormon. It froze on almost immediately after we applied it.  We finished it and I'll send pictures.  

Then after many miracles N was baptized!!!  His service was spiritual and uplifting and he told us that whole day after his baptism he felt indescribably happy.  One of the miracles we saw teaching him was the 21st of December when we committed him to quit smoking.  He would of been baptized in the past except for the fact that he just couldn't quit. On his way home after our lesson somebody asked him for a cigarette and he just gave him the whole box.  From that day he hasn't smoked.  We see how God prepared him becasue he said that this time it was easy to quit. Prayer and fasting really does work.  Then he got the gift of the Holy Ghost on Sunday, but he scared us to death because he showed up 20 minutes late and his phone wasn't working.  Everything worked out in the end though.

We finally got our first blizzard, honestly probably still less than you but the snow hasn't stopped yet and we'll see where that takes us.  I have so many pictures I need to send. I hope that makes up for the shortness of this letter.  As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Love 

Elder Wilding  

BAPTISM!!!

Stages of Ice Book of Mormon

Final product!!!

BLIZZARD!

Giant Snow Book of Mormon

The new year seems just as good as the last with high potential to be even better.  Most of our free time this week was spent on the title of this email.   A week ago revelation was received to build this thing, we built her out of snow and water, block by block until she stands in her majesty about 10 ice blocks high and 3 ice blocks wide.  I will make sure to send a picture.  

​​The giant Book of Mormon seemed absolutely perfect, all we had left to do was paint the outside cover blue and carve in "Книга Мормона".  And this is where everything went wrong.  We painted it and within 30 minutes almost all of it came off creating a huge mess of blue snow all around the base.  We tried a few other methods but that just made it worse.  It became a nightmare of a mess to clean up. Most people just ended up thinking that it was a grave stone, we are going to try to spray paint the "Книга Мормона" letters this week.

Nikolai is still doing awesome!  His baptism will be this Saturday.  Along with him we got a new investigator named R.  He has came to church like 4 times already but he has always been too busy to meet. He just loves sacrament meeting.

Our sacrament meeting was interesting to say the least, it was a fast and testimony meeting and a few people threw out their political views but the spirit was brought back into it at the end.

It is a great blessing to have the Severpuxins serving with us.  We do a mini MTC meeting with them every week.  They are the first senior couple to come out from our mission ever.  

The promises of Sakhalin snow have up to this point been nothing but lies. God is just teaching me to be patient I guess. I have been told that February ALWAYS gets tons of snow.  We'll see.

Hope everyone else had a great start to the new year!

Elder Wilding