November 11, 2013~ St. Petersburgs 2nd stake conference!!

We had stake conference this week and it was so awesome!!  I loved it!  We also had a broadcasted conference for the eastern Europe area - St. Petersburg is one of the only 4 stakes in our area so I felt pretty proud!  We seriously have absolutely the best members here ever!  I love them so much!! It was so fun to see all the members from my other areas that I had been in!

So yes, we did have the broadcast, but they somehow messed it up and only had the recording of it in English hahaha.  It started playing and everyone was like uhh... hahha so we had some surprise speakers while they were getting the Russian version.  Our stake president gave a powerful testimony about the future of the church here, specifically in our stake!  Right now its kinda tough, but there is such a bright future.  Then they finally got the recording and we watched it  so our stake conference was about 4 hours long, but so good.  There was an incredible spirit the whole time!  I loved it so much!  Also fun fact, everyone know Bruce Porter of the 70?  Well he gave his talk in Russian.  The whole thing, with no translator.  I was way impressed and quite shocked.  He was one of the last people I was expecting to be able to do that hahha.  Pretty interesting and it was an amazing talk! 

Hmmm what else.. we are going to hopefully start working with this less active kid and his mom soon.  Son is a  member, but the mom is not.  We got him to go with us to stake conference on Saturday and found out that his dad died about 2 weeks ago and his mom is having a really hard time.  We talked with the branch president and we are going to try and work with them if we can.  Hope that works out.

Last night was so awesome.  This cute little family here that just about every missionary that has ever served here is in love with, couldn't come to conference yesterday cause they have no money.  My first branch donated them tons of clothes and stuff for winter and we took them to them last night and had a little lesson and talked about what they talked about at conference.  It was so awesome.  I love this family so much!  They have the cutest little kids that were just running around the whole time and trying to get us to play with them.  We had an awesome spiritual little lesson then at the end we all sang some primary songs "я хочу быть звёздочкой" (Jesus wants me for a sunbeam) and "Следуй пророку" (Follow the prophet - all 9 verses!).  It was so much fun, the spirit was so strong, I never wanted to leave!  I just love the people here so much!  It's kinda funny cause I had been on a split here in like march I think and I did not really like the area - I didn't want to serve here.  Then I was a little bit relieved (sad to say) when this area was closed over the summer due to violence towards towards the missionaries, but then it opened again and 2 transfers later I was sent here.  I have to admit that I was not super thrilled, but this area and more specifically this branch just has this magic about it and you can't help but fall in love with this place. So bascially I'm glad that I've been able to change my opinion about this area haha.

Also, sorry that a lot of this has been so vague... apparently they are really restricting what we can say in letters home as a result of I'm not really sure what - probably cause there is still lots of hostility towards the church - no specifics at all basically... so my letters will be vague, but when I get home my stories will have a lot more specifics haha.

Have a great week!

Love
Elder Robison