Investigators

Hey Mom!

This last week was pretty good. Unfortunately, we had to drop an investigator. I went on a split in Ramstein on the day that they had a lesson with him so I called Elder Fausnaught and Elder Jongejan afterward to see how it went. Apparently he had even more doubts than last time, and was just super against anything that they tried to teach him. At the end of what I guess you could call a lesson though, he gave us a referral to one of his friends. We ended up teaching her a couple of days ago, and even though she is moving to a different part of Germany this week so other missionaries will pick her up, she was really interested and seemed a lot more likely to make progress. Our other investigator had just applied for a second job working at Burger King, and we are pretty sure he got it because he doesn't answer our calls anymore and is just kind of never there. We are hoping he still wants to meet with us and just got busy, and didn't become disinterested for some reason.

We started teaching another girl who is not married but has two kids, and her boyfriend is semi-interested in the gospel, but our last lesson he got up and left after 15 minutes. We have been considering picking her up as an investigator since I came to Germany, but the problem was that she was just kind of there every time we went to meet with one of the older sisters in our ward, who can talk and talk and talk and never let you get a word in, so it was kind of hard getting her interested in the gospel; however, they finally picked her up as an investigator while I was on the split, and we taught her yesterday and committed her to be baptized on December 1st!

When I was on that split in Ramstein, we had two appointments with American families since that is where the largest military base is in all of Europe and is basically an American area. It was so weird to see American families again and how well behaved the children are. German families tend to have a lot of kids who go inactive or take their names off the records of the church because the parents just let them do whatever they want, justifying it as everyone is their own person and you need to let them do what they think they should do. It is really sad seeing how loud and all over the place German kids are, especially in church. That is probably one of the things I have missed most about home since I came to Germany; reverent sacrament meetings and at least semi-well-behaved children.

We had our zone conference on Wednesday, which was really cool. Elder Schütze of the Seventy came and gave a couple of awesome talks and stories, as well as some really good counsel for the missionaries in our zone. It was also really nice seeing a bunch of missionaries I had not seen in a while.

Well, that was pretty much all we did this week besides more finding time and a lot of traveling between places for meetings and splits. I hope everyone has a good week! Love you!

Liebe, Daniel

Elder Fausnaught and Elder Squires

Tanks on the Baumholder army base, the largest American military base in Europe. 
Baumholder is only a few miles (about 10 km) from Idar-Oberstein.