Transfer to Where I began!!! May 29, 2012

My Dear Family!!

We had quite a week! There was an open house at the church this Saturday!!  There were several glitches with organization, but overall it went really well. One of the members is an artist and she painted a super awesome rendition of the Plan of Salvation that we put on the wall.  We made a pyramid of Book of  Mormons, and had a family history part.  After that there was dancing and games!  We were in charge of the Plan of Salvation and Book of Mormon part. And we also planned the dancing and games! :)  There was a man who had just walked by and saw the announcement on the side of church building and came!! He also came to church the next day!


We got the call on Friday night and I will be returning to the same area where I started my mission!  And I'm going to be serving with Sister LeBaron and Tunney!!  It will be SO great to see all of the people that I served with before!!  And now I'll actually be able to talk with them!! :) Well, as much as I can understand and say now!!

After church Sister Ivanova had planned a surprise for me!  all of the members gathered together, sang one of my favorite songs and then we had a little meeting where some of them got up and just shared their feelings about missionary work, missionaries, and their gratefulness that I had served there.  President Einer said that I had the biggest smile in the whole district!! It was SO sweet and they had put together this little book with letters to me!!  Sister Ulya said that I need to take the love of Russia back to America!

The best part of this week was Sunday night.  We went over to the Lesitzen's house.  They are the ones with 5 daughters! I love their girls SO much!  We had a lesson where we read about how when Nephi was commanded to go back and preach to the wicked city that he'd just been kicked out of, he found another way to get into the city.  We talked about how God sometimes asks us to do things that are hard also, but that he wants us to be creative and find ways that we can keep those commandments. We then made American pancakes and the only rule was that they couldn't be normal circles.  We had suns, snowmen, turtles, mickey mouses, hearts, etc.  You couldn't really tell what they all were, but it was SO fun and yummy!  We then thought of creative ways for the girls to study the scriptures so that we can enjoy studying them and be creative!  It was SO amazing to be with them and hard to say goodbye!  Lena (the mom) sewed me a pink heart pillow that said "love" on it!  I will miss them!  As we left Vika looked at me and said in a very stern voice, "Just remember Sister Cunningham, you promised that you'd come back!"  I love those girls!

So, a funny story to end.  We went to the rinok today and I was trying on sunglasses.  We'd met our favorite Brat Dmitrii (the one who had a stroke several years ago and he rarely makes any facial expressions and can stare anyone down with the creepiest stare for like 10 minutes at a time!  I have him trained though... ok... a side funny story.  I had a surprise talk on Sunday--aka i got told 5 minutes before church that i was talking--and so I was sitting on the stand.  I looked at brat dmitrii during the meeting and gave him a thumbs up. barely lifting his arm up he threw me a thumbs up back!  I've always trained him with a peace sign and the alien hand sign thing...).  He'd wanted us to go with him to go and meet someone, but we had other things to do.  Well, as I'm trying on sunglasses he just comes up behind me and stares at my reflection with the sunglasses and told me if they looked good on me or not!! he kept this up for about 5 minutes and probably scared away any other customers because they were scared he'd stare at them too, but he helped me know which sunglasses looked good on me!! haha!!  I love him SO much! And I'm going to miss him! Tonight at FHE we're going to do a little play together for our lesson, he just doesn't know it yet!!  Well, I love you all SO much!! have a FABULOUS week!!!


love,
Cectpa Cunningham