August 7th, 2010

My parents with Red Square and St. Basils Cathedral behind them

Hey Everyone,

By now most of you, if not all of you have heard of the wild fires that have taken the lives of scores of people and made life miserable for millions of people in around Moscow and across vast lands here in Russia.

Today, we have been advised by the Area Presidency to stay indoors unless you must be out for legitimate reasons. While indoors, keep your windows closed and fans going... if you have no fan and no A/C (very few people here have A/C), open your windows but drape wet sheets over your openings of your windows and allow cooler air to penetrate the house but inhibit the smoke. You guessed it, it's a mess here in Russia right now and many people are suffering horribly. An interesting sight yesterday however, many people are wearing masks now to minimize inhaling this smoke. I mentioned to Bethany in the Metro that it would be amazing and funny to see a person smoking who was wearing a mask as well. Sure enough, within about 30 minutes we saw a guy walk across the street with a mask draped over his ears with the mask under his chin and he was smoking a cigarette. Lot's of smokers here as most of you know.


I am going to include a few pictures of the smoke here in Moscow but if you want to see all of my photos, as well as get up to date info on what is going on here in Russia, please go to Facebook and check things out. Chad N Bethany Packard is our name on Facebook.

the Cathedral about 300-400 yards away

Other than the fires and smoke the work has been progressing. In the mission for the first time in years we have had baptisms every single week for the past few months and into the foreseeable future. One baptism that did not happen today to keep the streak going was one that we have been teaching in our home. I will spend the bulk of this letter discussing Ivan and his story during this letter and then I will attach the photos of the smoke.

Ivan is from Cuba and has been here a year in Moscow. He speaks Spanish of course and very little Russian and even less English. Since I served my mission in Ecuador over 30 years ago, I was asked to help the missionaries translate for him. We had great discussions with Ivan and he had a great command of the scriptures. He joined the Pentecostal Church in "Cuba" about 11 years ago and has been a preacher for them for quite some time. He loves the Lord and the scriptures and when he was given the Book of Mormon, he was enthralled with it. He had no problem reading it and had little difficulty accepting the prophet Joseph Smith as a prophet. As we got to finishing our lessons with him over the past number of weeks I could see that he may have had some other ulterior motives to learning, one of which may have been to get the Church to help him financially to leave the country and get to another country possibly a Spanish speaking country or even the U.S. He did NOT want to go back to Cuba and Cuba wouldn't take him due to the fact that he had been gone for more than a year... (not sure the significance of that but he continued to refer to that issue). The other possibility may have been that he wanted to be a preacher for the Church because that is what he did at the Pentecostal Church. Regardless, there was something that wasn't right as we continued to teach. Turns out that as we taught he continued to say that "all" religions teach the same as we were teaching, except for the Book of Mormon. He continued to press us as to what made us "different. We finally had to tell him that the real difference was that we had the "whole" truth and the "authority" to administer the ordinances of salvation and that these other churches, although well intentioned, did not have that authority. He didn't like that. He thought that we were trashing other religions but we made it very clear that all religions had some good in them... He did like that either and he began to kind of trash the Catholic and the Russian Orthodox Churches, (Interesting). What later came up was that not only did he believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet but that all of the other churches had prophets and apostles too! That is where the "rub" came and we just couldn't get past that. Both sides agreed that he was not ready to be baptized and then ultimately he said that he was going to quit going to "any" church and was just going to go around and preach from the Bible and The Book of Mormon... It was a very interesting situation. All of us bore strong testimony to him that as he continued his search for truth, that he was going to end up here again some day. I sincerely hope that this will be the case. He is a good man who loves the Lord, believes in miracles and also in latter day revelation. But he also believes that anyone can be a prophet today. He doesn't understand that in ancient times, the Lord needed multiple prophets, but that today in the age of the internet and open communication networks and things that the Lord has his "order" and has prophets, seers, and revelators, called to do the work.

This was difficult for us to let this baptismal commitment go but we also felt that he was not ready and may not be ready for quite some time.

It is great to be here in the mission field. We love the work of the Lord. It is difficult to do out here but we continue to work through the challenges. We need more missionaries, that is the bottom line. We appreciate your prayers and thoughts toward us and other missionaries in the world who need those prayers to sustain them.

Sincerely,

Elder and Sister Packard