It is about time for another installment of the lives of Sister Packard and I here in Moscow. It has been very nice weather here as of late... in fact more than nice. It has been a little rainy but we surely need that in order to clean up the streets and sidewalks. I is supposed to warm up again this week and get back into the 70's.
We have had such great blessings happening to us each and every day. It seems as if the Lord has no other place to care for other than here and blessings keep coming and coming.
Many of you ask periodically about how we are adapting and how the language is coming. This language is hard and that is all there is to it. I now know why Elder Larry Gibbons laughed at us when we asked him how his language was doing after being here on assignment for 3 years! It truly is the gift of tongues to learn any of these syrillic alphabet languages. I am so impressed that the young missionaries are able to communicate as well as they do after just a few months of being here. Sister Packard and I are doing our best and it is a true statement that we are learning some and are able to pick up on bits and pieces of conversations but we have a real challenge in our communication skills. One of the challenges is that "everyone" wants to speak English to us. And, here in Moscow, many many many people here speak some amount of English. I am confident that if we were in the other parts of Russia which the locals call the "real" Russia it would be different for us.
We have had many of our investigators that have progressed toward baptism and others have let go of the iron rod completely. The challenges of tradition and change are paramount here in Russia. Some accept the needed change and see the light that the gospel brings and move forward. It is very interesting to see that some investigators are truly the "elect" while others are not quite so "elect."
This two weeks have been packed with so much stuff, I cannot condense into a letter that you will take the time to read. I know how busy most of you are. Just to give you an idea, I spent most of the morning this Sunday morning writing 5 full pages of information on one day of activities! It makes it hard to get out and really "do" the work when it takes so long just to write about the events of the day. This one particular day is quite unique though.... It is about a funeral that we were invited to. I think I will go ahead and send that day in my next email sometime later this week so you will still have time to read and ingest this letter.
Today I want to take a portion of a day this past week and let you see what we have been doing recently with one of our investigators named Vladimer (emphasis on the "i"). We in America pronounce the name incorrectly with the emphasis on the "a". Just a little Russian lesson for you all. Anyway, Vladimer is an investigator that is planning on being baptized on teh 12th of June. He is in his early to mid 70's and is not your typical Russian. He has a beautiful smile and his eyes just light up when he does small. We say that he has "happy" eyes. He is a retired military engineer and worked most of his 40 year career building rockets/bombs for their "Mig" fighter jets here in Moscow. One of the comments he made last week was "I never in my wildest dreams ever thought that during my lifetime I would have people from America give service to me preparing my summer garden." Last week and this week we have gone out to his "Dacha" or summer garden and been digging in the dirt and transplanting flowers, strawberries, and just cleaning up. Below is what I wrote about in my journal that happened this week at his Dacha (Daucha).
Day 95 Moscow Tuesday May 25th
We had a great day today. We had another opportunity to go back out to Himke to work with Vladimer on his Dacha. Again, we left quite early and met the Elders out at the end of the Green Line in Rechnoy. It was a repeat of the day last week that we did the same things. This time we had an extra set of missionaries in that Elder O’Bryant and Elder Bogdonov came with us. We worked hard getting more of the Dacha cleaned up and tilled under. In fact, that is really all we did. We didn’t burn anything because everything was burned last time.
We had lunch just like last time and below is a photo of our group having lunch just like last time.
Just prior to leaving Elder Kadirov had a Spiritual Thought and it was all about “Faith.” During the last portion of the thought Vladimer noticed a bug crawling by his foot. He took the bug with his toes and moved it onto the sidewalk. Just then he took his big toe and smashed the bug and wiped it on the sidewalk with his toe. It was noticeable enough that everyone except Elder Kadirov saw it. Elder O and Elder B both started to giggle and snicker and that kind of got the rest of us to notice more and it got Vladimer to smile…remember, he is a 73 yr-old man and is not a member of the church yet. Once we got through the thought, we all opened up a little and giggled a little more and then Vladimer said the following in his slow and somewhat broken English… “I killed…, a bug…, but I still can because I am not baptized yet.” Below is a photo of Vladimer and I after we finished for the morning.
Keep you thoughts and prayers coming. We love you and we love the Lord.
Sincerely,
Elder and Sister Packard
