Hello! It's great to hear from ya again.
Thanks for the pictures of Codski and Sky and Grandma. Grandma would have been 87 today? Wow. You look like grandma in that picture, Mom from when she was really young. Tell Skyler hi for me. I haven't heard from her in a while, and haven't sent a letter to her in a while either. Oops. I'm backed up when it comes to writing letters to people so I don't hear from people as often anymore. I did hear from Matt, Nate Reidhead, Liz, and Kels about a month ago. If I've gotten any letters recently, I haven't been able to grab them from the office. I sent Kiddo a birthday letter just for her last week, so hopefully she gets it in time. The little monkey can't wait for her birthday, can she? Wish I could be there for it but I will be next year.
The weather here is slowly starting to warm up, if you can call it that. Snow is melting slowly, but it still snows every other day and ice is still everywhere. I heard that it will be like that until at least the begining of April.
First of all I just want to testify about the power of prayer, the scriptures, and the peace that comes from the Holy Ghost. Today I had a really cool experience. You are right, Mom, and Dad. I have been putting too much pressure on myself. I think it is because we aren't seeing results like we did last year, so President hasn't been very happy with that and asking missionaries to rethink why they are here on their missions. I think I took it all too seriously and put way too much pressure on myself to get results and forgot to work more with the Spirit. I have been praying about how to better do missionary work, and about how to better recognize the Spirit. I've also been kind of down, asking myself if I can really do this as we work really hard and no results? Today I prayed to have Heavenly Father just tell me what He wants me to know. I then opened my scriptures randomly and it was on Doctrine and Covenants Section 50. I felt a sense of peace come upon me as I read the words in this section. It talks about how satan tempts us, about how we can recognize the Spirit, what we should ask for in our prayers, how we can't bear all things. As we grow from grace to grace, we learn how to bear all things.
This last week we had a split in Novgorod, and I was with Elder Nielsen. He was Elder Gerard's trainer. He is a really good missionary! I don't quite understand why Pskov and Novgorod are in the same district. It's a 4 hour bus ride between each other, so every other week we take turns traveling to each other for district meeting. It takes a lot of time...
We had a meeting with a pastor from a church here in Pskov. He invited us to meet with him and we didn't know that he was the pastor of a church, and we showed up to the address and walked into the building to find out that it was a church and he was the pastor. I was reminded of the scripture that says to go into their synagogues, reasoning with the people. We had a good lesson, and he was very nice and polite and didn't argue with us, but said he couldn't believe it just yet. His friend was there too and he really liked it.
Sorry. I wasn't able to type half of what I wanted to say. The internet took forever to get started here, and is going really slowly. I will start writing more letters home so you can hear more from me.
I love you all! I need to run. Thanks for everything. Miss you.
Love,
Blake
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