May 27, 2013 С днем рождения Санкт-Петербург!

Well as you all might have been able to guess from the title, today is St. Petersburg's 310th birthday!!  So all wish St.Pete's a happy b-day please...:)

Besides that, this week was so amazing!!!  So many cool/funny things happened!  I am torn between my 2 favorite events of the week though, I can't decide if it was the fantastic meeting with our almost investigator from English, or if it was the incredible Zone Conference that we had this week.  Both defintely the highlights of the week.

I will start with zone conference because that happened first.  It was 6 hours long, but so worth it!  I wish we had them more frequently because the spirit is always so strong there and I always learn so much!  We started by watching a clip from youtube (hadn't seen that in a while haha) that someone made from a talk that Elder Busche gave a long time ago.  I can't remember what it was called, but I think if you go to youtube and look up "advice from elder busche" it should come up.  The one that we watched had the words going on top of pictures as he was speaking and then some nice music in the background as well.  It should start with something like "Embrace this day, no matter how it looks" (although this is the end of his talk so if you look up the whole talk which was a BYU address given in the 90's it won't start with that).  Anyways, it was so amazing and I LOVED it! 

Then we watched a part of President Eyrings talk at the BYU women's conference given in the past few weeks (which I would suggest all of you watch) (BYU-TV website you should be able to get there - that's how we watched it).  In it (I think about half way through) he talks about missionaries a little bit, one in particular.  Sister Eyring - his granddaughter - who happened to be in the zone conference with me.  The grandaughter that he is referring to the whole time is the one in my mission!! She came in one transfer after me.  So the Mission, Mission President and everything that he refers to in his talk is MY mission and MY mission president too!!! How cool.  It was a little strange to watch it with her in the room since it was all about her, but so cool at the same time.  You should all watch it just to see that part.  Just think of it - here is a general authorities talk that you can all personally relate to since you all know me and I was sitting in the room with/ know the missionary he was talking about!  Sorry, I've gone on wayy too long about that, I just thought it was cool.  The rest of the conference was awesome as well.  We mostly talked about talking with people instead of too them.  I just loved it so much, even the practices I liked, which I normally don't.  So good.

Now to Dennis - our wonderful friend at English!  Gosh I love him so much!!  He is so cool!  After the thing was over, he stayed and talked with me again (Elder Abbott was talking with our friend who always takes us out to lunch).  He asked me all about families and what we teach about families and everything related to that.  He asked me about how my parents raised me  - luckily, like Nephi I could proudly (but not in a prideful way) say that I was also born of goodly parents and then he asked for specific examples of lessons that I had been taught by them (thankfully I have a myriad of them to tell) as a result of being raised the way that I was as a member of the Церковь Иисуса Христа Святых Последных Дней.  He loved it.  I was also able to tie all that in with some other priciples like the need for prophets and commandments and scriptures.  We we read the Proclamation to the Family and he really liked that.  It was just so awesome, he had so many questions and the spirit was so strong as I was able to share and testify of the truth to him.  Finally I asked him if we could meet with him sometime during the week to talk more but he said he is really busy, but he'll call if he has time.  I didn't invite him to church yet cause we need to work with the members more on fellowshipping.  They've offended the last couple people we brought to activities by being terrible fellowshippers!!  So frustrating.  I don't want that to happen with this guy, so I think we are going to do a couple practices with them..  hopefully.  We'll see.

Anyways, that was the 2 most amazing things that happened this week.  Some other amusing things/funny stories.  I was walking through the part this week and we passed a group of people and I just happened to look at one of the guy's shirts and you'll never guess what it was.  He was wearing a U of M basketball shirt!!!  I was so shocked I didn't even know what to do.  I just stared at it as they walked by..  I wanted to talk to him, but by the time I thought about it, I would have been chasing after them which would have been strange.

Then we were contacting on Thursday and I said hi to this lady as she walked past and she turned around and got so mad at us, telling us that we were baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church and wanting to know why we left and joined a sekt.  Well there were two problems with her false claims.  I tried telling her, first of all that I was never baptized into the orthodox church and she kept insisting that I was saying she was sure of it.  I finally was like "look lady, I'm american!  I wasn't baptized into the orthodox church!"  (nicer than that of course) and that kinda shut her up.  Then he turned and walked away and I followed her and asked why she thought we were a sect.  She said that the "just knew" and I told her that we weren't and asked if she had read the BOM.  She didn't respond, so I just wished her well and let her keep walking.  Lets keep in mind that this woman was about 50-60 yrs old and had bright pink hair...  (not a rare thing here actually).

I think thats about it this week.  It was so good!!!  Hope you all had a great week too!

Elder Robison