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On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 10:48 PM, Lawrence Gavin
wrote: Hey all! Sorry, little late writing today, so not a ton of time. But I'll attach a plethora of pictures to make up for it!
This week has been a blur, but it's been great! One of the funnest things this week (and also one of the most time-consuming) was repainting the entire sacrament hall with a new coat of white. It was a blast, but a bit of a hassle. Aleksei, the first counselor here, was over the project, and it was awesome to get to spend some time with him this week. He's a great guy and a really solid and fundamental part of this branch.
Since we've had some pretty substantial success with this tactic in the past, we went this week to a chess club that the other elders found. The great thing about chess is that if someone sits down with an American long enough, they're bound to start asking questions about why we're here and what we do. And that's when we can swoop in and volunteer the heck out of them! We made a lot of friends and we're really hopeful about getting them to church. Some of them were genuinely interested, it was definitely a success!
This Sunday was a district conference, and one of the craziest technical rodeos of my life. We had a broadcast set up from Novosibirsk, and everything on Saturday worked great. But when Sunday morning rolled around, EVERYTHING BROKE. It was crazy. But worry not; after lots of combined prayers and some frantic redoing of computer setups, we ended up with video from the conference running through the original broadcast, sound coming from a group Skype call, and our whole branch in a semicircle around the family history computer, due to some problems with the projector. Crazy how even when everything seems to go wrong, the Lord can still turn everything into a learning situation and people can still be uplifted. There was definitely some divine help there, otherwise we would have been completely left in the dust with no conference. It was great!
In terms of investigators, this has been a bit of a rough week. We got through to Hoang, but he says that he needs time to think and for now doesn't want to meet. Aleksandr has been out of town all week, but he should be coming back soon! Keep them all in your prayers, I really am hopeful that everything will work out.
Thanks for everything! Love you all!!
Elder Lawrence