Well this week was a good one as usual. I unfortunately don't have much time to write today, because the computers here are slow and a half. But I will try as fast as I can! Pardon my not understandable language! Bear with me here. I am going to try to send some pictures too by and by.
It's getting warmer! The river right outside my window has officially melted. But the weird thing is that it still gets cold occasionally. Like last night and Saturday. The winds were so intensely strong. But today it's beautiful, calm, bright, and hot. 40 to me is hot now.
We had another pretty awesome miracle this week. On Wednesday, the sister missionaries in our branch set up a meeting for us with this man named Artyom at our institute building. He gave him a call and he was set on meeting and wanted to talk. We get there and we end up waiting for 15 minutes and he never shows up and he wouldn't answer his phone. So, kind of bummed, we left to go find. The first person we talked to right outside the building was this man named Alexander. We asked if he had some time to sit down a talk. He agreed, so we went back inside with this man and shared with him the message of the Restoration. He actually knew the Bible really well and understood that there were some parts missing. We asked him to be baptized on May 12th by someone holding the proper authority of God, and he agreed under the condition that we help him quit smoking. Well of course we will. So being stunned that Alexander more or less landed in our laps to work with, the next day, it was about 8:55 pm and we were right outside our apartment ready to go inside, but I wanted to talk to one last person because we had 5 more minutes. So the first person I talk to is this young man. I asked him if he knew or seen missionaries like us and told us that the Sisters met with him recently and he had a meeting set up on Wednesday that he couldn't go to. It turns out it was Artyom! I was again in shock and we exchanged our numbers and he was really eager to meet again and apologized about the previous meeting. Not only do we have Artyom to work with now, but also Alexcander. It was just a miracle!
So we had a Zone Leader Council this last Thursday as well. One of the most spiritually strong councils we had. We had to talk about Standards of Excellence (our mission goals every week and what they mean). The mission is having a hard time acheiving those weekly goals and we had a very awesome council about them. It basically came down to keeping them and learning how to achieve them, or to change them. THe Spirit was strong, and in the end we got down on our knees in prayer to have Heavenly Father guide is in our answer. The answer that we all unimanously got was that we need to keep our standards of excellence. We need to learn how to acheive them, and to acheive the goals we set. "If you lower your expectations, you lower your effectiveness and your desire to be successful!"
Easter Sunday was great. We had a few speakers from our branch speak and their talks were amazing. It's weird that a year ago that I could hardly understand the most basic Russian. Because of Heavenly Father's help, I can understand this crazy language. The Spirit was definitely strong as well during Sacrament meeting. One of the talks caused all the babooshki to cry.
I gotta get going as always. Got lots of stuff to do! We are discussing with President Clark this week about transfers and organizing the mission some more. I can't believe it's another transfer. Time is really just flying by, I can't believe it.
Well, I love you all!
Love,
Elder Tekulve
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