You may already know this but if you go back to the roots of the sounds that make up the word “Chelyabinsk” it means “Elders Uchdorf and Anderson are coming here for a mission conference!” It’s Big News! We haven’t gotten an Apostle in ten years when the mission was new.
P-day was supposed to be yesterday but it was still the holiday weekend so it was likely that internet would be closed, and we had someone call us and ask for some help at their little garden plot outside the city, and another meeting worked out so it just ended up being better to do P-Day today. That service was cool because it was from this guy who live in the next building over and we invited him to English club, and he comes and we’ve met with him twice but he kept saying he was busy remodeling his apartment to meet, and we kept asking to help and he still declined but I guess he eventually took our offer seriously to help him because he called us out of the blue and asked if we could help his Aunt and Uncle with their garden. So we did, and now I’m slightly pinkened and my back hurts. I’m pretty sure my skin change is not from the sun but from the enormous pile of burning weeds, grass and wood we had going. They kept telling me to keep it from spreading so I had to keep way close to it with a rake and I could feel my skin cooking. I don’t enjoy drawn out periods of fighting my reflexes, especially the ones that are telling me to get away from the fire that is cooking my skin. I now feel I have some firefighter street cred, well maybe a forest-firefighter, OK a weed-firefighter. All I’m saying is that it was hot!
Also yesterday was our first meeting with Artyom’s girlfriend Lena. Which is a very good thing, one, because we were worried about her being kind of against the church, and two because any missionary can tell you that a romantic partner against the church can take down even the strongest of members. And oft times they’re good before baptism, like the church is just a new hobby and once the member starts getting more active they become more against the church and thus you have another less-active who falls short of salvation because of an ornery spouse. But the meeting was great, Artyom was there of course and we also invited an amazing recently returned missionary who is way excited about the work and is great at befriending investigators. They’re already pals. And it was great to hear Artyom testify about things we didn’t even teach him that he must have gained a testimony about through his own study. Not that he was testifying about far off advanced doctrine, it was just his testimony of the first vision, it’s just that he testified in such way that it was obvious he wasn’t just regurgitating things we had taught him, he had thought it out bore his own testimony.
With the end of the cold it’s the start of a new… cold. Yes it’s that magical time of year again where winter is over and the highest grade quality pipes that communism has to offer have rusted through their seasonal replacements and they’ve turned off our hot water while they replace them again. The ladies at our local grocery store say it will only be two weeks this year. We’ll see. I’m not looking forward to those Miass sponge baths again, and we don’t even have a big pot anyway! I am pretty confident, almost resolute actually that I, Wells Robison Magleby cannot take a cold shower. I don’t know how other missionaries do it! The same reflexes that tell my body to walk away from super-heated piles of garbage that sauté my flesh will not let me spray myself down with super-chilled liquid nitrogen water. I hold the shower handle in my hand, and try, but the second I feel how cold it is, I freak out and throw the handle, jump out the shower, or turn into a green gamma radiated Hulk monster. In each case, a shrill yet manly scream can be heard by my companion or neighbors. Some elders do a series of fast push-ups to heat up their bodies for the trauma, alas this is another thing I’m confident in my inability to do. It’s a lose-lose!
It was nice to talk to ‘yall. Good to hear all is ship shape as it should be: I’m getting my basement room back, my old job is not only definitely taking me back, but with an increase in salary and hourly praise, Puppy mows the lawn, Spider-Man 3 never happened, and the only thing keeping me from my diploma at BYU is a Godzilla appreciation/theory class. Thesis statement: “Godzilla is both the cause and solution to global warming”
A+,
Elder Reality Check
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