A Sketchy Situation

Hey Mom!

This last week was nothing short of crazy. Our one progressing investigator is doing really well. We taught her the Word of Wisdom this last week, and she had actually expressed the desire to quit smoking that same morning with Sister Rausch, a lady in our branch who lives right below and who is good friends with her. She is doing really well with it as far as we know. She has a really strong desire to give up smoking, and she has been following the steps in the stop smoking workshop that we show people in our mission. We haven't heard from her in a couple of days though, but we have an appointment with her later tonight and will see how she is doing with all of it.

We had a sketchy situation with that guy that I talked about from last week. He had said that he wanted us to help him be a better person, which was really cool. Then all of a sudden, we got a text from him a few days later that said, "Pray for us all. Pray that we are good men for what we must do." We were a little concerned with what ever that meant, so we called him up and he told us he didn't want to talk about it, but he saved six girls' lives and that he had found his purpose thanks to us. It was really weird, and we were hoping that he hadn't done anything weird or illegal that he thought was our advice to come closer to God since he said he was doing everything he did "according to God's will." We wanted some clarity, so we met with him a couple days later out on the Fuß in public. At that point, he told us that he had single-handedly gotten rid of a Turkish gang in Idar-Oberstein after he broke some guy's nose off and told the rest of them to leave. It was pretty unsettling knowing that he thought he was acting after the will of God when he did it, but we tried to steer the conversation more onto gospel topics, specifically scripture. He said he didn't need the bible since it has been translated so many times and that a bunch of stuff was incorrect inside of it. I was about to show him the article of faith that talks about the bible being translated correctly, when this girl came up to him and told him "they're coming." He turned around and walked away from us, so we followed him from a distance to make sure nothing sketchy was going on. He turned around and started walking back in our direction, and when he got to us, he told us to walk with him. He started walking around saying that "they" were just trying to scare him and that he wasn't afraid anymore. When we got back to the Fuß, there was a random guy there who he gave a handshake to, and then out of nowhere, these three Turkish guys showed up and started yelling at him. We realized right away that this must be that Turkish gang that he was talking about, so Elder Fausnaught and I got out of there as fast as we could. We watched from a distance to make sure nothing bad happened and could be witnesses in case something did happen. After a bunch of threats and cussing back and forth, and after a couple more Turks showed up with some beers, the guy and all the people from this gang started drinking with each other and stopped yelling. At this point, we left and haven't heard from him since except for a text where he said he hoped to see us at church on Sunday and that he hoped we didn't think he was a gangster or something. Either way, he didn't come to church and we haven't had contact with him since Thursday, when it all went down.

Besides all of that craziness, we had some really good member appointments this week as well. Our branches are doing pretty well, and we are getting better relationships with some of the members that we haven't had a ton of chances to meet with yet. We got some good news from our mission office as well: we are getting brand new cars in the mission, so on Wednesday, we drive to Frankfurt to exchange our Opel Corsa for a new Toyota Yaris. I'm excited for it since our car is really lame.

That sums up the week. Have a good week, and I hope everyone is happy!!

Liebe, Daniel