Week of September 26 from Dresden

Hey family and friends!

So once again it´s about time to flip the pages in the calender. I can't believe September is almost over!
So we had a pretty crazy week again this week. Had our first Zone Meeting-President interviews as a Zone Leader. It all went really really smoothly I´m happy to report, and I think the Zone was generally pretty refreshed and refocused on the missionary work. We did kind of a different thing for our presentation  Instead of focusing on one of the key indicators and trying to improve the zone purely from a statistical standpoint, we focused on teaching how the doctrine of the Atonement and Restoration can provide us with a never ending pool of motivation for the work. I got to use my favorite missionary quote of all time:

Obedience is the price,
Faith is the power,
Love is the motive,
The Spirit is the key,
and
Christ is the reason.

[Japan Fukuoka Mission Motto, 1991–1994]

Overall I think it was a super good and uplifting meeting. Afterwards I got to take a brand new Golden on his first exchange, which turned out to be a special occasion for me. This Elder was actually with me in the MTC while I was there  He didn't make it through and after 6 weeks he headed home to straighten a few things out, and well exactly a year later we were together again. I saw him and gave him a hug, and he said "Elder Ott, it has been 11 months and 2 days since the last time I saw you.  I missed ya man." It was super cool. We had a great time together and got lots of work done. I have all the respect in the world for that Elder!

Let´s see, aside from that, this week was actually a little bit rougher from a results standpoint than lots of the others I´ve had since I got here. Friday we had literally EVERYTHING fall out so we just talked to everyone the whole day long. It´s one thing when you have no appointments and you plan to do that, but it really makes for a long hard day when you´re not expecting to have to do that haha. We made out 8 appointments with new people though, and had a walk in lesson late that night, so can't complain much about that.:) We found 6 new investigators this week, which is a pretty big number that we´re happy about as well. So the work continues to go forward.
Yesterday we had a musical fireside at the Church... and let´s just say it was a "special" occasion for me. Haha, so my comp is a proud lover of singing in Italian, so we performed a duet in Italian haha. I think we were expecting about 30 people there, but around 120 showed up, so ya, I, Adam Ott, sang in Italian in front of 120 people. If that´s not evidence that a mission can change people, I don't know what is haha. It was fun though.  I also sang in the youth and missionary choir, so I had the oppurtunity to put my mad lack of vocal talent on display.:)

Hmm, what else is new? Oh, the air conditioning broke in our Opel Corsa, so we´ve basically been rolling around with the windows down all week. Nothing like rollin around a big city with the Best of EFY blaring out your speakers... yep those are the Mormons alright! :)

Well have a wonderful week all ya´ll back home! Love and miss ya so much!