Taking Care of the Basics

Hey there! 
Artyom is pretty good.  We had a good week, lots of work to do. We have been meeting with all of our members and trying to figure out what’s going on with some of them. Many haven't been coming. Just taking care of the basics :)  This week was a good week at church. There weren't a ton of people at the beginning of Sacrament meeting but more showed up during the opening hymn.

The goals that you read are from the Europe East Area Presidency. They created them for us. They sent them to us and we told our branches about them and now we are all working on them. Hopefully we can keep our members interested and excited.   There are pretty good friendships already made here between some investigators and missionaries and also between some people that we stop by often and some store owners. I think it’s pretty great that the missionaries have worked so hard here in the past that makes our job a whole lot easier now. Of course not everything is easy, there are plenty of people who don't really like us and want us to leave but that happens everywhere.

Our daily routine hasn't gotten a whole lot different with the new calling. Of course we have new things that we have to do but I am not worried at all. We are learning and it really isn't too much to take care of.  I am very thankful to Elder Anderson though. He is very helpful and we wouldn't be able to do everything without his help.  Hopefully he sticks around long enough to teach me all his secrets – ha ha. We had a crazy P-day today and there was a ton of snow everywhere.  Before now there has been dirt and stuff everywhere and we were joking how we wanted to make a snowman out of dirt but now we can actually make one out of snow:) I don't think that I have made one out of snow yet on my mission! Now would be the perfect time.

My Russian is pretty good.  Being able to speak fluently definitely helps develop relationships. I am learning a lot about parenting because there is little of that that goes on, too.

Oh by the way Elder Vincent says hello :) I am with him right now in Vlad, we came down for the day to see what we could get out of our suitcases. We went to Vlad but got stuck there for awhile because there was a lot of snow today. The buses were running late. 

My new companion is good, I am learning patience and how to be a better teacher/leader instead of just doing everything myself. He’s great!

The spelling of Artyom is spelled in Russian is --------- Артём ----------- The A is an A. The P makes an R sound. T is a T. E with the 2 dots over it makes a "yo" sound. And the M is an M. So sometimes you would see different spellings, they don't have one "correct" translation for Russian words using Latin letters.

I am excited for Dad! The Legislature is always the fun part right? How many bills are you trying to get through? I am glad to hear that the Cardinals won! I told some of the missionaries here but I don't think they care very much. Haha

I miss the Farnsworth’s, how are they all doing? Is Sister Farnsworth’s neck still bugging her?

I remember researching the translation process of the Book of Mormon a lot and it is so impossibly intricate that nobody could write it in such a short amount of time. That’s pretty great that Brother Farnworth talked about that from the pulpit. Even though our belief is based on faith, it is nice to have some logic to back up what we believe.

We have lots of exciting things coming up, hopefully we can get some good results out of this Artyom branch.

I love you all and hope you have a great week :)

Elder Gardner