Heat, Humidity and a Few Miracles

Hey Mom!

 

I am glad to hear that everything is good back home, and that is really cool about Dad's temple assignment. I really miss going to the temple. I hope I can go there all the time when I get home.

 

Well, this week was tough. On Monday we had yet another fallen out appointment, this time with a less-active family. Tuesday was actually really miraculous though. Elder Bonzo, now one of my zone leaders, gave us a call and invited us to pray that whole day that people would contact us and find us, and sure enough, during personal study, we got a text from one of the potential investigators who didn't show up to his appointment and he told us that he was in the city and wanted to meet right then. We left our apartment, picked him up, rode the street car to the church, and taught him a lesson. He became a new investigator, and we hope that he will start making progress. He is a 17 year old kid named Nico, and he said he was mostly interested in finding out what we were doing and why we were doing it, so hopefully that can turn into the desire to find out if God is there or not.

After that lesson, I went on a split with Elder Norman, Elder Hunter's golden, and we went to Jena for a street display there. There are some really cool pictures of it on the mission's blog at http://frankfurtmission.blogspot.de/, and I am in most of them! It was so hot that day though. I don't think I have ever sweat so much in my life. It was probably 100 degrees, and it was really humid. That kind of weather in a button-up shirt and slacks is not so fun. It stayed that hot for the next few days, which was miserable. On Wednesday, we had a pretty good lunch appointment with Schwester Doerlitz, and then we went to the church to have a lesson with our main investigator, Dominik. We then got permission from our Zone Leaders to go and buy some fans for our apartment, since the Baumarkt (basically a Home Depot) is in the same building as our church. That is the great part about Germany: there is no air conditioning, so the summer is awfully hot and humid, especially in missionary clothing. We then had our English class, which went pretty good.

On Thursday, we went to Nuernberg for Zone Conference. There was no air conditioning there either, and there were about 70 missionaries just packed in this chapel for 5 hours, melting. It was brutal, but we did learn a ton. Elder Kenneth Richards of the Seventy came and taught us a lot about sanctification and teaching simple, basic truths. It took about 3 hours to get there by train, and about 7 and 1/2 hours to get back. There was some bad weather somewhere hundreds of kilometers away and that caused pretty much all of the trains to fall out, so we spent quite a bit of time stuck in Weimar, and then on random connecting trains to get home a little before midnight. On Friday, two appointments (don't be too surprised) fell out, so we spent a lot of the day planning for the next week, and also planning on how we are going to improve the member work in our area.

Saturday was pretty cool. We had a Pioneer Day at the church, and we found out a lot of cool things out about Gera's missionary history, including the fact that Ezra Taft Benson served part of him mission in Gera. We later correlated with the other missionaries and with the Kempes. Sunday was also not bad. We had an investigator come to church for the first time since I have been in Gera. Dominik showed up, and he even invited 2 of his friends, but they didn't make it. It was a really cool experience. That is only the fourth Sunday on my whole mission where an investigator has come to church, so needless to say, I was pretty happy. Later on, we did a lot more planning for this member work, and tried to invite more people to come to our English class.

 

And that is pretty much the week. Not a lot of appointments and ridiculous weather, but a few miracles tucked away in all of that stuff. Pray for us this week that we can have appointments that don't fall out. We need them. Well, I hope you have a good week!

 

LG, Daniel