Staying in Gera This Transfer

Hey Mom!

I am glad that David is home from his mission and had a good experience. It is really crazy how different our missions must be. He was dealing with poverty and here everyone can just get money from the government without even having to work if they really wanted to, and they can still live quite decently off of that.

 

We didn't get affected by the flood here, but there were a lot of people who did. Our branch president, President Zaumsegel, lives in a town that got hit pretty hard by the flood, and his house was only one of three houses that wasn't affected. It has been raining a lot though, and we are hoping that it will stop raining so frequently because contacting is hard enough in Gera, and in Germany, when it is raining, Germans don't like to talk to anyone; they just want to get inside, which I can understand.

 

Well, I am sure you are eagerly awaiting the news on transfers, so I won't make you wait any longer than you have to. I am staying in Gera and will be joined by Elder Watts. He has been on the mission for the same amount of time as Elder Colson, so he is going into his 5th transfer. He is way awesome, I talked to him a few times before. Elder Goodrich is going down by Nuernberg to a city called Bayreuth (pronounced bye-roit). He is pretty excited, and I think he will enjoy himself there. Transfer day is on Thursday, so I will pick up Elder Watts at that time. Other changes within the district: Elder Hunter is training, Elder Wichtermann is being transferred and he is being replaced as zone leader by Elder Bonzo, my MTC companion, Elder Moore is getting transferred from Werdau and is being replaced by Elder Newell, and then there will now be sisters in Jena. It should be a really cool transfer.

 

Anyway, in terms of this week, we taught the least amount of lessons I have ever taught on my mission in one week: just one. It was a really cool experience though. Elder Goodrich and I were contacting on Friday and we had had no lessons up to this point, and Elder Goodrich asked me if I believed we could get a lesson with someone on the street. I told him that if we endured to the end of our contacting time, I believed we could. Right after I said that, everyone just started saying no and it was really hard not to want to stop contacting, but we kept going. We came down to the last 15 minutes of street contacting and ran into a woman that we talked to about the Book of Mormon. We testified of its truthfulness and she said that she believed it was true because she could see we were being honest. I told her at that point that if the Book of Mormon was true, then Joseph Smith is a prophet and the church has been restored, and she was kind of speechless. We tried to give her a Book of Mormon, insisting that it was free and everything, but she said she had seen it in the library and wanted to read it there. She also wouldn't give us her contact info, but we at least gave her our number and the address of the church so that she could get in touch with us to talk about it. It was a really cool experience.

 

We didn't have any other lessons. Several appointments fell out, and we had a lot of time where we had to do other things. We did service with Bruder Krause again, and also went to Jena for a Zone training meeting, where I gave a theme on choosing to be happy. It went really well, and I hope the other missionaries in my zone got something out of it. In spite of having not many lessons, Dominik, our new investigator, came to our ward activity and really enjoyed himself. I hope he can start progressing, and won't have to work so much that we never meet with him.

 

This next week will be extremely busy. Since Elder Hunter is training, he has to go to Frankfurt tomorrow, which we didn't know. We thought they would go up on Wednesday. For this reason, we have to take over all of their appointments that they won't be able to cancel or push back, so we have a lot to do.

 

Well, that is pretty much it for this week. I hope everything is going well and that everyone is happy! Love you!

 

LG, Daniel