Conference, Meetings, and a Finding Day with Pres. Schwartz

Hey Mom!

 

This last conference was great. We went to Werdau to watch it, one of the neighboring areas in the mission. The talks were all really good, especially L. Whitney Clayton's talk about marriage. It is pretty much the same in a missionary companionship, just on a smaller scale of course, and I think Elder Gautreaux is starting to rub off on me in that he would just talk about eternal marriage all the time and how excited he was for it, so I really like hearing those kinds of talks now. By the way, Elder Gautreaux is now engaged--it wasn't too long ago that we were companions in Idar-Oberstein.

Well, it seems like forever since I had P-day considering it was on Saturday the last time and not on the following Monday. We did have a birthday party for me at the Kempes, and it was really fun. We all got Kinder Eggs, and I got a really cool turtle figure. The Kempes also gave me a rice bag neck pillow, which was great.

This week was pretty good but also really hectic. On Monday, we spent most of the day at the Krause's house painting the son's (Alex) apartment. We had lunch upstairs in the parent's apartment, and also had a short lesson on the Atonement with Alex and his girlfriend, who is kind of taking the lessons right now from the other elders. We then headed to Emily Jahr's apartment, a less-active sister in the ward, who said she doesn't want to come back to church until her kids can be here with her, and they are in Africa right now, so who knows how long that will be. Then late at night we headed to Gotha to sleep over with the elders there so we could catch our early train the next morning to Frankfurt for the Golden/Trainer meeting.  On Wednesday, we had lunch with Schwester Doerlitz, which is always good. We later on went to help Alex Krause build a desk for his apartment, and then rushed to Michael Peter's apartment. We taught him, trying to help him find out how he could find out that there was a God by reading the story of King Lamoni in the Book of Mormon together. It went pretty well, but Michael tells us that these stories are nicely written, but that they are just stories to him. He also had brought one of his friends along, a religious woman named Ingrid, who has her own beliefs, but is willing to hear our message. We left them with Alma 32 to read, and we are meeting again with them tonight. At the end of the night, we went back to the Krause's for a fireside, which went well.

 

On Thursday, our whole zone and all of the zone leaders and the assistants to the President and Pres. Schwartz and his wife went to Erfurt for a huge finding day in the East. It went really well, and I got to work with one of the mission's zone leaders, Elder Billings, which was a lot of fun. At one point, Pres. Schwartz came and joined a conversation that we were having with this one guy, and it was really cool to see Pres. in action. If every missionary in our mission had his missionary skills, there would be a lot more baptisms in this mission. On Friday, we had a mini-split, meaning the two companionships here in Gera switched companions for the day, which is something Pres. Schwartz asked us to start doing every so often. I worked with Elder Waterboehr, and we had kind of a lame day. Our appointment with a less-active lady fell out, and we did some finding time and go bys without any success. Saturday was also pretty slow until General Conference. We headed to Werdau in the evening to catch the live stream of the Saturday Morning Session, then came back yesterday morning to get the rest of the sessions except for the Sunday Afternoon Session, which was too late for us and I still have not seen. And that is pretty much the story of the week!

We got some pretty cool news this last week. We are now allowed to email friends and members in addition to just the family, which is really nice because letters are a real hassle for me. They just take so much longer than emails and you don't have to pay for email. So anyone who wants to email me can get my email address from you and send me something.*

Well, that is it for the week. I hope that everyone has a good week. Love you!

LG, Daniel

PS I know that BYU finals are coming up, so anyone who reads this and has to take them, good luck!

 

*Daniel's email address is daniel.squires@myldsmail.net