All is Well Here

Hey Mom!

This week has been pretty good. We have been playing a bunch of different sports at gym times against another German district. A few days ago we played soccer and within the first 20 seconds Elder Kinghorn hit the ground after somehow hurting his knee. We found out yesterday that he has a torn ACL and some other things and will be delayed at least 6 weeks I think. He might have to go home to recover, but we will see. We didn't end up winning, but I got an assist on a goal which was cool. Anyway, yesterday we played softball and it was a lot of fun. I'm not the best at batting because my golf swing makes me swing under the ball all the time, but I got one decent hit that got us a run from someone who was on 3rd base. Our district has a couple kids that like baseball a lot and are really good, so we ended up winning 8-0.

In terms of the language, this week has gone well. It gets harder every day, and it's always tough to try and teach in the language. In particular, we went over reflexive nouns and pronouns yesterday, which is probably the hardest thing I have learned so far. Basically, when the subject and the direct/indirect object are the same thing, you have to use a reflexive pronoun. For instance, in German, you would say "Sie werden sich taufen lassen" which translates to "you will yourself baptism allow." The hardest thing about it is just knowing when a situation calls for a reflexive verb. Also, we do this thing called TALL lab where we go on computers and learn by listening to native speakers say different words and phrases, and I started listening to some phrases where they didn't slow down so that you could clearly hear what they were saying, and it was so fast that even though I was reading along with it, it didn't make much sense. I feel like I'm going to be like the Elder in The Best Two Years that gets there and says, "that ain't what they taught me at the MTC."

I had planned on using my old green scriptures for all of my mission, but they were starting to get too hashed and the edges of the cover are just getting more and more worn out every day, and there were so many markings in the Book of Mormon from college classes and personal study that it was getting confusing, so I bought myself a new quad here. It's really nice to have new scriptures. I also got this marking pencil with 8 colors all in one that I was considering getting for a week and everyone who had already bought one told me it was totally worth it, and it is. It's really nice to have 8 marking pencils in one so I can mark different types of scriptures in different colors. In terms of teaching, this week has been interesting. Sis. Alder is still in Austria, where she served her mission, with her parents. We have been getting random teachers to fill in her spot, and we were supposed to pick up another teacher as an investigator, but for some reason, he hasn't shown up for over a week. We have still been teaching Bruder Luna as Karl Knoll. We have taught him 2 times this past week. The first time didn't go super well because we weren't super prepared and we have been doing more preaching and less helping, but yesterday our lesson took twice as long as usual because Bruder Luna has started taking pauses while we are teaching to show what we can work on and how we can really apply something to our investigator to make him interested. It was really awesome and helpful, and I know it's going to improve my teaching a ton. Anyway, all is well here. The only thing I'm getting tired of is the food.  I'll keep trying my hardest here so I can be effective when I get to Germany. Love You!

Liebe, Daniel