Monday, May 14, 2012

Week of May 14 from Braunschweig

Hey grüß euch!

Wow that was a fun week this week, and what was the cherry on top? Getting to talk to my most beautiful and amazing mother last night!!! What a great day that was indeed, and for more reasons that one.

I really need to do a better job with writing down my miracles every week so I can structure them better in these emails, haha but I´ll give my best shot to account for what all happened this week.

Our biggest success this week was getting the members more involved in the missionary work. We more than doubled our joint teaches and member lessons this week, and still managed to get all of our investigators taught. We just finished dooring out the biggest student dorm building here in Braunschweig with like a little over 600 doors or something, so now we just kinda have to sift through the pan a little bit and fish out all of the gold we´ve found. I´m learing more and more every day how tough it can be to teach more and more people and try and plan for them versus merely knocking on doors and finding new people.  Normally in missionary work tracting is what you picture as the "hard work" but when you're teaching like you should be, it´s hard work as well.

This week we did a street display with our new street display equipment we recently received. We got a permit and set up down in the middle of the city and got a couple members to come out and help us represent the church. Displays are kind of a bitter sweet thing.  Yes, you can sometimes find lots of cool people, but having a banner and a table with the name of Christ and stuff also intensifies the people's feelings of hatred towards you haha. Despite the 200 cold rejections, we managed to place about 5 Books of Mormon, make out 2 new appointments, and invited a couple people to church. I was sitting there looking at our members and how discouraging things would get sometimes, and it was easy to question, "Is this really worth it?" But the words of "every soul" having "great worth" in the eyes of God were stuck in my mind... and what is the "worth of a soul?" I´ve thought about that a lot lately.  The worth of a soul truly equals the potential of becoming like God.

Yesterday was one of the greatest miracles I´ve ever seen on my mission though.  We were just greeting people in church when a kind of scruffy man came walking in and sat quietly on the back row. I hustled back and introduced myself to him and sat with him throughout the church services. I got to know him a little bit, and during the second hour of church the thought came clear, "Take him and teach him in the 3rd hour" so when it came, I grabbed a member (my companion was already teaching another class) and we went back into a little room and taught him about the Restoration. At the end the thought came, "Invite him to baptism," so we did, and he totally accepted and said he had been looking for a place to get baptised for quite some time now... HOW COOL IS THAT? Just a walk in from off the street, walks out of the church with a baptismal date! He gave us all his info and we´ll be meeting with him this week. Now that´s what we call a Plan A miracle. Plan A being praying and hoping for miracles and success where people are led to us. Plan B being working hard to lead ourselves to them. When you work on Plan B as hard as you can, then Plan A miracles still come along as well. I love Plan A AND Plan B miracles. :)

I had my last interview with President as well this week. That was kinda sad. It was great to share a few last moments of one on one time with him.  I´m really going to miss him when he leaves here soon!

Well that´s all that comes to mind right now. The Work is super hard, but I wouldn't want or expect it to be any other way! Have a great week back home, love you all sooooo much!!!

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