Missionary Service of Elder Benjamin Moore: First day of Fall, The Zone is on Fire!

Happy P-Day once again,

This transfer is working up to be the busiest, most successful transfer of my mission. I don't know if It's Novosibirsk, if something has just clicked, if everything is just timing together nicely, or miracles are just being multiplied here. Probably a mix of all of the above. It's an amazing thing. I'm back into one of those times where I haven't nearly enough time to study all I'd like to study.

Personal Study projects:

-The daily topics for investigators.

-The Book of Mormon(essential for every day)

-A study of the Gospels in order to study how Christ was humble.

-An effort to increase personal humility.

-A study of the attribute of Faith. Committed by our district leader.

-Old Testament (has kinda dropped off the list for a while, It's not essential)

-PMG chapter 13 "Working with Ward and Stake Leaders" in preparation for this weeks MLC.

We had a lot of lessons this week. Not as many member presents as we would have hoped. This area has struggled with that for some reason. I'm going to turn that around. We were stopping by a less active last Monday night, and we didn't know exactly where it was. Ended up tracting a stairwell in a last ditch effort. We traced into a man from Uzbekistan. He doesn't speak much of any Russian, and no English what so ever. No German either. :P Elder Jacobsen knows a few phrases in Uzbek. Just like Hello, Goodbye, My name is... He happily let us in, and we tried so hard to communicate with him who we were and why we were there. He had no job, and was looking for work. We pulled out a pamphlet and tried to use the pictures along with basic Russian to get across our message. He just seemed super happy and grateful that we were there. It's hard to explain. We had no way actually communicate, but some things got across. We said we'd come back in a few days and left him with a challenge to pray. (We think). We went back a couple evenings later, and when we came over, he got a friend from an apartment above us who could translate for us. He told us to wait in the stairwell. Out come Ulubyek (our new friend) and two big Uzbek guys. Once they figured out that we were missionaries, one of them said "they're fine!, just volunteers from some company" and he went back into the apartment. We talked with the two guys for a little bit. They ended up being super muslim. I still haven't figured out the best way to crack that one. It's got to be an adventure serving down in Kazakhstan. The translator said that he had met missionaries a year ago in Berdsk, and then he pulled out a mormon.org card from his pocket. It threw us for a loop. I don't know how or why he still had the card. We ended up parting ways. They made it clear that they didn't want anything else from us.

It was my first week at church in Novosibirsk. There are twice the number of active members than in Omsk. At about 85 active, it's a full house. There are kids running around all over the place, and it kinda felt like America in that regard. Sunday nights are call in reports. Elders Stucki and Hodgson are the DL's in Omsk, and they are both from my MTC group. It was great talking to them. The zone doubled their numbers from last week. Lots of miracles are happening. In Omsk, a woman walked into conference last week, and afterwards asked to be baptized. She's met every day with the missionaries since, and has a date for the 13th. Yesterday, another person walked into church in Omsk and stayed for all three hours.

I'm running out of time, so I'll skip to the pictures

We were in the big park, and there were Reindeer, and camels.

On exchanges with Elder Hendryx, we taught Charles Manson, and his friend Fred. They are from Columbia. Go to school here. Charles is great and believing! Fred has a wife and a son. They have a friend who is German. We were walking down the street with them, and the German guy came up. He started talking to me in English, so I started talking with him in German. It was fantastic being able to speak with a native again. My German is a bit rusty, so Carolin, you'll have to help me out a bit when I get home!