Working hard...

It was incredible to hear from all of you and to even get some PRETTY ridiculous pictures of Jordo this week, meine gute, he's having lots of fun I can tell! It's cool to see how he's liking the big fab BYU and doing absolutely insane stuff.

People here do say Guten Tag, but usually you just hear the "Tag" part. I make a concious effort to say it all the time to everyone who passes, and they're already staring at us, so it's nice to say something so it's like, "yeah I know you're checking out my nametag and no I'm not all that scary!" :P

Sís. Allen freu'd herself over that picture because she could pick out her mom in an instant. I guess it's so weird that destiny/fate just surrounds the members of the church, that you somehow know her mom and we're working together, I heard that my picture was on some facebook page and everyone was freaking out about the connections?? Something about me knowing a Sis. Rassmussen or something, it's all crazy stuff on the Facebook page or whatevs! We stir up a lot of fun here in the Berlin Mission!

So like I said, Monday was crazy because it was a holiday, but we still got to teach a part-member couple, and they showed us pics from their recent trip to Tokyo and I thought, oh wow! Jordo will get to go to so many cool places on his mission! It's too bad that he can't go outside of his mission to Tokyo itself, but they had lots of fun pictures of the food! They were visiting their son and in his apt. the kitchen table had like a little grill thingie for meat because the kitchen is THAT small that they cook stuff AT the table. Cool huh?

We had just scores of awesome lessons this week. I hope Jordo realizes that this kind of stuff doesn't really happen in other cities. Cottbus is just on fire right now and we get to just teach all these people, but the other Elders in our distrikt teach maybe 5 lessons and we teach about 16 a week. We have 11 progressing investigators and we're hoping to add another 3, it's really fun and exhilirating to just have work ALL the time to do and I feel like I'm really making a difference!

We taught Evidence this week for a short time because as any other college student, he has a huge project/presentation to work on. So we showed him the Joseph Smith video and...yeah, the Spirit was really strong. He said his favorite part was when Joseph sees God and Christ, which was great because before he was having a difficulty understanding that God, Christ, and the HG are seperate beings. He was just on fire with the BoM and wants to read it as much as he can, even as a student and give it time. We were suggesting you know a chapter a day or even 10min, but he wants to give it like 30min everyday, talk about an awesome investigator!

We got to teach Anna again as well this week, she's sooo amazing! How lucky are WE when she asks us right off the bat, how one becomes a Mormon? :)) The Lord loves Cottbus, I'm tellin ya! She's already reading on her own and didn't even wait for us to really introduce it, since she technically brought one with her from home--you know, her grandma gave her one! Ack! We sent her a card of a suggested chapter, Alma 34 and she's been there, read that, and just had some fun questions. Her kids are also adorable and they like learning about Jesus, and so we hope to give her specific BoM stories to share with her kids. She says she gets chills when she reads. And the cool thing is that most of this work has been done by the Lord, we just get to go and give her more to read! She is by far the more normal of our investigators, because she's so interested, her kids are young and adorable, and her husband is pretty much okay with her investigating, and we hope to get him more involved in the scriptures as well. He's open for being really unglaublig (as a kid religion was banned in Hungary so he just didn't grow up with religion).

Even cooler, we had Zone Conference this past Freitag! We had it in Dresden, suuuper fun! There's a post about it on the blog page http://germanyberlinmission.blogspot.com and I'm even in some of the pictures! It was really cool and I got to give my "Golden testimony" since it was my first ZoKo (Zone Konferenz). I got to see Sis. Faerber and Sis. McCappin, two sisters I knew in the MTC so that was pretty exciting! We also took home 40 new BoM auf deutsch and this guy on the bus noticed it and our nametags and immediately started asking us questions about our church and what we believe. He was super curious about Mormons and was really open. He also heard us speaking english and tried using his English, which of course is probably better than my Deutsch, but he was talking a lot slower and thinking in between every little thing and we're like, "no serious, we can deutsch! (Wir können deutsch)" THAT was fun. We get to meet with him in two weeks when he's back from a work thing. Jeez. He's also named Sven! We've got two Svens!

Random note: I guess I'm a bit crazy because I'm getting into knitting, or at least doing my own projects to show Christine when we teach her this week. I finished a pattern of a star (looks a bit Christmas-y, pitures are coming!) and now I'Ve got a fun project, I'm going to make a Deutschland flag! I'm a geek, I know.

Way cool dooring experience this past week! We talked to a man on the first floor outside his balcony for almost 40 minutes about the church, basic beliefs and all of that fun stuff. All in the dark, it looked like 9pm but it was like 6:30pm, meeeeine gute. I haven't taught a real lesson before because of dooring before, so that was a real treat for me. He wants to meet further and is really nice. He's a single father with two daughters, and so he shared with us how his daughters bring him more joy than going out and partying, which is good to hear! And his name is Herr STARick, so we had a feeling he was golden. Personally for me, OYMing and dooring is getting easier and more fun for me because I know I can just share my testimony and that is my job, to just share what I believe, and if they take our cards, even better! We are also getting into contact with some older contacts that we've had to wait awhile to talk to because of work or Urlaub. We're so excited to talk to them, especially because they remember our message and how they felt when they met us!

Those are the big things from this week and it's still blowing my mind, and the fun thing is that I get to do it all over again this week and it already looks jam-packed with blessings and miracles! I think that I'm happy with all the fun stuff I get to do, but I think for anyone it's about the attitude and why you're here to serve. A lot of our investigators are eternal investigators, like 6 years eternal, but when I was at Zoko this past Freitag, one of the Elders asked me where I was serving and I said Cottbus of course. He said, "oh, I heard that Cottbus was kinda dry"--because Cottbus used to be run by dumb Elders that our ward hated because they didn't DO their work. But we're following the rules, doing our work, building trust with members and BOOM--blessings! And I love it out here, so even when things aren't exactly lovely, like people swearing at us while dooring, who cares! We're doing our work and apparantly we're doing something right. Sis. Allen says it's "golden power" but I think it's just doing what you're out here to do.

We are going to get transfer calls this Saturday, so I will pretty much find out my new companion! I really don't want Sis. Allen to leave, and she doesn't want to leave, but we both know this transfer has been a blast. I don't think I'll be moving anywhere--Sis. Allen said that there's some shrinking and closing down of cities because of the lack of new sisters coming in and 5 blitzing out, so something might go, and there's a rumor that Cottbus might be closed for 2 weeks because of it. In either case, President promised me I could come back, I just wouldn't be in Cottbus for Christmas. But from what Sis. Allen says, he's basically promising me that I'll be here for my first three transfers, which I'm excited for, we've got so many new investigators, and I wanna see them all get baptized!

I love you guys! Talking about families with Anna always reminds me how lucky I am to have mine! Forevs!