Things Are Going To Change

Hey Mom!

Transfers were really crazy this last week. One of the Elders coming into our district from Frankfurt missed his train. He had to take a train by himself that did not leave until much later, and it caused a lot of confusion and extra stress for everyone. After everything got worked out though, it was fine.

I was really disappointed because on a closer review of the train ticket we got in the mail, only the Elders and Sister that were getting transferred away from our zone got to go to Frankfurt for transfers. That means I didn't get to see Matt, but he called me from one of the Assistant's phones for about a minute, and then I called him today for about 10 minutes or so after getting permission from the Assistants. He is serving with Elder Hathaway, an Elder from my MTC district, and he is in Duisburg. It is a little north of where we are here in Idar-Oberstein, but he is in a different zone. I probably won't get to see him for at least the next two transfers since he will be staying there to be trained for those transfers for sure. Oh well, talking to him on the phone every once in a while is still really awesome. It will be interesting to see how things go for him in Duisburg; it has been ranked the dirtiest city in Germany for the last few years, and is nicknamed the Dirty D, so he will be seeing a lot of smokestacks and smoking people for a while.

My new companion, Elder Fausnaught, is really cool. He is one of the zone leaders for the K-town zone and is also our district leader for Idar-Oberstein, Saarbrücken, and Bitburg. We are going to be really busy.  He is legit and we get along really well, and he has done choirs his whole life so the choirs will continue.  We had some cool experiences this week in our finding time. We found an old woman on the Fuß whose husband had died only a week before. She wasn't sad though since she believes in life after death. We actually set up an appointment with her for the same day and got a member to come with us.

After our choir practice on Thursday night, we got a call from President Girra, our branch president for the German branch, saying that he had come into contact with a guy and girl who had been investigating the church through email for about a year, and that he was bringing them to church this Sunday. They came, and we taught them what is called a "zero lesson," where we get to know how they came into contact with the church, what they are interested in, and what our expectations are as missionaries. We set up another appointment with them for tomorrow. Hopefully it goes well, but they live in Trier which takes a ton of kilometers to drive to, so I don't know how regularly we will be able to meet with them.

Well, President Monson is in Germany right now and is speaking on Sunday. We get to go to Frankfurt and go see him speak. Präsident Schwartz said he his here to bless this land so that the prophecies can start being fulfilled that have been made about Germany. It will be really cool seeing him here. We had a conference call last night about it with the whole mission, and were invited as a whole mission to pray for the prophet and for the country, which was really awesome.

Aside from all that, we have set up a bunch of appointments for next week, and have plans to get this area moving since it has been really unproductive for the last two transfers. There will be a lot of finding time going on, and things are going to change.  I hope all is well and that everyone has a good week! Love You!!

Liebe, Daniel