August 19, 2013 ~ Rolling with the punches...

First of all, here is a  little announcement from our office secratary:

Dear Elders and Sisters,

I need your help with a problem. I emailed your parents the following and need you to tell your people too not to send packages to the Mission Office. I have been serving here almost a year and we have never had this many misaddressed packages so I am calling in the troops (asking for your help too). Packages sent to the Mission Office address almost never make it to the missionary! They must be mailed to the address below. We love you and want you to get your packages!!!

Italicized is what I sent to your parents and the correct mailing address for packages:

Dear Parents,

Two days ago two of our elders went to pick up something from the post office. The employee recognized them by their name tags, and gave them quite a lecture about all the packages for our “sect” that were sitting in the back. She said she had gotten sick of looking at some of them and returned some. We were able to salvage 5. Everyone of these were addressed to the wrong address, the Mission Office. I hate it when missionaries don’t get their packages. The wasted money for the people who sent them and the disappointment for the missionaries who wait and wait. I am sure it’s really disappointing for you too. I do not know whose are being returned. If you used the address below you will be fine. Lately those sending it to the wrong address have mostly been either extended family or online orders.

PLEASE, tell your family, friends, the person over the ward bulletin, the online place you place an order with to ONLY use the address below and substitute your missionary’s name on the bottom line where it currently says “Christianne Jacobsen” (do not use Elder or Sister):Russia St. Petersburg 190000

a/Я 122

CRO The Church of Jesus Christ of LDS
Christianne Jacobsen (your missionary’s name here)

Ok now to my actual part of the email...  As you may have noticed, this week was rough!  Lots of disappointments this week.  At the beginning of the week we had 7 lessons set up with investigators  or potentials this week.  I know all of you may be thinking that we are just sitting on or hands all day and not doing anything, but that is actually a really good number for us!  I think I only had one week that had more than that and that was when we met with our investigator every single day for a week.  Usually its a little lower than that.  So anyways, as you can imagine my companions and I are just off the wall so excited we have the best week ever planned and we are going to baptize the entire area this week, and then we hit a little bump Monday night (the first day of the week).  The guy we were supposed to meet with didn't show up.  We called and he said he was still at work... the hung up.  Then anyways long story short we only had 1 of our appointments not fall through.  And it wasn't even a very good lesson.  We couldn't find a member to come with us and yeah, it just wasn't good.  But he was super nice.  Just not really excited to meet again.  Even all our meetings with the progressing investigators in the area fell through.  None of them could come to church   yesterday.  It was just rough.  But this is the real kicker.  Our new investigator from last week.  The coolest kid ever who seemed to have SO MUCH potential, didn't come to his meeting and his phone has been "unavailable" every single day.  We have called him so much and nothing all week.  The one time that it wasn't unavailable and it actually started ringing, he didn't answer.  So frustrating!  We spent a lot of time going through the area books and calling people this week to try and make up for our fallen through appointments, but nothing!  Satan controls the Russian phone companies I'm pretty sure.  But he's not going to win!!  We are just going to have to out work him this week!  It'll be a fun challenge.  But really, it was one of the most discouraging weeks ever.  Plus working in a 3 some is not quite as easy as it was in the MTC.  Way harder to keep 3 people united and perfectly obedient.  Another challenge, but its sill fun, cause now we can go visit all the babushki.  That's nice.  They are so sweet and every single one of them LOVES the missionaries. 

Hmmm this was a funny story this week... oh wait let me back up a little bit.  Try to contain yourselves, but you will never guess what I had to eat this week... a хот дог.  and for those of you who don't read Cyrillic, I ate a hot dog.... yeah.   We were in the middle of the city and we were starving and we were about to go to the hermitage and stand for 2 hours so we decided we'd better get something to eat quickly since we hadn't had lunch yet, but we didn't have a lot of time so the only thing that the little street vendors were selling were hot dogs.  Some of you will appreciate that story and others won't but that was a real struggle for me this week.

Anways back to the real story.  We had to take our nametags off to go to the hermitage and so we did and were walking and I see this guy with a salt like city shirt on so I was like "hey, have you been to salt lake??" and he doesn't speak Russian very well and tried to say something to me in german for whatever reason and turns out he speaks that just as bad.  Anyways finally it ended up in English and he was like "I'm a Mormon" just straight up and I was like "whoa, cool!" and I like feel for my tag starting to be like "no way I'm a Mormon missionary here!" but I couldn't find it cause I had already taken it off (so I'm sure it looked like I was just awkwardly feeling my chest) and was like "hey.. yeah, me too!"  Turns out he's from the philippenes and is like working there or something.  I don't know he spoke bad Russian, german and English so we  just kinda ended it and it was awkward, but still, funny story. 

Cool thing at church yesterday!  We passed around a paper in Elders Quorom and asked everyone to write down when they were availiable this week to help us and almost everyone had some time that they could help us this week! Huge miracle!  Ususally it's like pulling teeth to try and find a member to come so that's awesome! 

Anyways, maybe you all remember when I talked about Elder Busche's talk but one of the things he said was that whenever we feel like we lose something or God has taken something away from us, it's because he has something better in mind that he is preparing us to receive.  So, this week was hard, but amazing things will be coming!!

Love you all!  until next week!

Elder Robison