Hey-o Familie-o!
So as you can imagine, we teared up FFO and EHS (and yes, even Fürstenwalde!) this past week (but read "teared" like "turr'd" so it sounds more gangsta).
So On Monday we cleaned the WHOLE apartment, kinda like end-of-transfers cleaning so we would have enough room to rearrange everything for the minis to arrive. We then had to travel to the Berlin Mission Office to pick the girls up--and if you can imagine, I haven't been in the mission office since I first got here, so for me it felt all too weird, like, HOLY MENSCH WHERE DID THE TIME GO? We picked up Sis. Lohmann & Sis. Cziesla, both from Neumünster and brought 'em back home. Can I just say, really weird? I mean the whole experience--I've never had the "aha" moment that I really know a lot more than I do about missionary work, so it was nice for me to see "okay so maybe I'm not doing so bad after all!" :)
And then guess what? BACK to Berlin, but this time for Zone Conferenz! The whole conference was dedicated to building, strengthening and keeping testimonies of the Book of Mormon, even our own. It says in Preach My Gospel, that we have to have confidence that the promises of the Book of Mormon will work for our investigators, and that if they read and ponder, then they will naturally come to know the Book of Mormon is true, too. So it was all too wonderful. I also got letters from Sis. Stevensen (viel Dank!) and Carolina and Jeramy. Replies are coming soon! So afterwards, we all then went straight to English to teach just ONE person who came, so it was yeah, super awkward with one person and 4 missionaries.
THEN came the fun part, or as we say, "JEZT gehts los!" From Wednesday to Saturday we did splits for the week,--me and a mini in one place and Sis. Szvoboda in the other. I definitely missed Sis. Szvoboda this past week, haha. But on Wednesday was just hilarious, because it was windy and rainy and guess what--we rode bikes in EHS to make it to all of our appointments! But we were pretty cheery about it, and Sis. Lohmann totally rocked riding a bike, too. On Wednesday we inivited lots of people to baptism, and Hans, the man in the Altesheim has a Taufdatum, and I had the privelege of asking this Ehepaar to be baptized--because they've been coming to church every Sunday for 12 years and haven't been baptized! They are thinking about being baptized in the Summer. Wooooot! We also visited Jasmin and tried teaching her something, but she just doesn't have that much of an attention-span, so we would talk about random things and go back to the gospel or something.
We also did some dooring, the first time for Sis. Lohmann, and really the first block we tried, we had a walk-in--from a man who apparantly had met a lot with missionaries in the past! Pretty cool, even though I haven't found him in our area book yet. But imagine this: this guy with long hair, sitting cross-legged on his couch watching Simpsons in the dark, and he had this party bowl-sized bowl just FULL of Tabak, and during our 45min conversation (which was actually a really good one) he made like 3 cigarettes and smokes all 3 DURING this visit. MENSCH. But he let us in, and wants to meet again with us. It was, well yeah, a pretty cool walk-in! It's really random the kind of environments you find yourself teaching the gospel, and I think Sis. Lohmann wasn't expecting it at all. :)
Thursday was also another heavy day, but a great day. For one thing, Sis. Lohmann was a treat to have, because she had no problems at all talking to people on the streets or anything! She would ask, "can we talk to her?" and I would say, "of course, we just need to cross the street first!" Mensch, if I had her drive for Finding, that would be amazing. But our lessons were great. We taught Micha at Manfred (old member's) Wohnung and saw great progess--we gave him the Finding Faith in Christ DVD as "homework" for this lesson and he kept quoting as many parts of the movie as he could remember. We also travelled all the way to another Dorf on the outskirts of FFO to deliver some Backforms back to a few members and visited them. It was interesting because along the way, we saw Chanrith (YES!) and invited him a bajilion times to get over himself and just come to church ;P and we talked the whole way about the mission. She asked me a lot about how I learned to do this, and different experiences that I've had, all because she's 20 years old and wants to serve a mission, and would make a great missionary at that, but apparantly the Bischof is not very supportive of young women going on missions, and so for her, she realized that not only she still really wants to serve, but that she can really DO it. I mean, she helped me see that my work is hard, but I can do it, too. It was very fulfilling.
I mean, you know you're a dweeby missionary when worms on the sidewalk after rain remind you of missionary work. Really, it does! I thought, when it rains, the worms come out of the wet ground and they're just waiting for birds to swoop down and eat 'em, right? Well, that's how it is for us, too!
Sometimes bad weather or trials are ways that people are really led to us, or we're led to them, although I'm not a fan of eating investigators, haha.
We've been also trying to visit more less-actives this past week, or really since General Conference because there was such an overwhelming call for people to "come back, come home" and we took that to mean, that we really need to add more less-actives to our efforts to strenghthen those people, too. Granted, we didn't see all of the ones we made time to see, but we left notes and we have plans to call them or visit them again. We did however had success! We visited a Sister who we were told took medication for depression, but as we visited her, she was very nice (in German it's "sie war so lieb" and that just describes it a lot better). And if you can imagine the situation--I've never met her before, she doesn't know me, but we klingled, and she let us in. Wanna know why? It's the nametag; I'm so grateful that even though it sometimes drives people away, the Golden people or the ones who really know us, trust us, because of this nametag. We got to talk to her and ask her if she wanted Besuchslehrerinen or Heimlehreren, or how we could help her come back to church--because she still has a testimony, she wants to go to church, she has a car, she just needs the will. But she agreed to meet with us after her trip and we will continue to see how she's doing. Ach, so cool!
On Friday, we taught even MORE! But this time I had Sis. Cziesla. It's really funny, because I got a letter from Jeramy, one of my old roomates, and she actually hid it from me because she was überzeugt that it was from "mein Freund." Don't worry, I found her letter, and had to explain to her that yes, "Jeremy" is a boy name in America, but Jeramy, a girl, wrote it to me (if Jeramy reads this, sorry, I know this happens to you much too often!) But seriously, it's bad news to hide ANY form of mail from missionaries. Schluss!
Part 2 of the day consisted of walking along the Karl-Marx Staße in EHS to find a contact--one we found in our area book, and we walked that looong and lonesome road and did NOT find n.169! We actually kept walking until we saw a "Willkommen zum Eisenhüttenstadt" sign and realized we walked a bajilion miles away and almost into another Dorf. Both Minis had sore feet from this past week, and it reminded me of those months of achy feet. But we still made it back in FFO in time to teach Marcel a wenige aktiv and we're making goals for him to not just come back, but that he can be worthy for the Priesthood again. It was amazing because as I talked to him and bore testimony of the Priesthood and how valuable it is, the Spirit was SO strong. Yup, and then of course we were able to get to a member's house to sing happy birthday and deliver a card, eat some muffins, rush to Kaufland for more milk, eggs and joghurt (because otherwise it would be just bread for breakfast) (oh, and Mom, I totally know why you love German joghurt!! Sehr lecker!) and buy a Döner, and made it home--ALL in an hour! Woot!
It was the best coming home and swapping great stories of the day and hearing about the success that the other Sisters had--it just makes the work SO much fun!
Saturday I took Sis. Cziesla to Fürstenwalde to find more less-actives, but ended up not finding them, not really having enough time to do so, but ended up finding a really Golden investigator. It really is true--you can say just about anything related to the gospel in any level of German and the Golden people are the ones who stay and listen, no matter what. We talked to this man for about 45min about prophets. Just prophets, really and branched off talking about the scriptures and everything else we learn through prophets which made him very open to recieve a Book of Mormon in Russisch (I LOVE how international my mission is!). We left him but as we left, he thanked us that we stopped to talk with him and how he was grateful for people like us in the world that bring him hope. ACK, soooo toll! He had tears in his eyes and I could tell he felt the Spirit. We literally came all the way to Fürstenwalde (30min each way) JUST to meet this child of God. We then went all the way back to EHS for a bit of pingpong with the youth, which was really a silly adventure. Nina, one of my investigators said she found me on FB and that was REALLY WEIRD. But if she tries to add me, you can let her, she's cool. It's just weird when people bring up FB, yikes!
But isn't it cool how when we were looking for less actives, we ended up finding not all of them, but plenty of other miracles along the way!
Sunday was pretty intense--we taught the investigator lesson for Micha since the lesson was on temples and we thought he needed more basic stuff first, then I led the music in Sacrament, had to plan our next week, and everyone wanted to talk to me all at once (is that a German thing? I always feel like it's rude when I'm talking to someone and then like 3 other people stick their hands out to shake my hand before they leave--because then I feel like I'm being rude by diverting my attention--arg!) AND the 4 Sisters sang a song and then I gave the talk. MENSCH. And this whole week with the weird changes in weather (sometimes cold and then sometimes warm and then sometimes FROZEN RAIN) I had a really bad sore throat which evolved into a really bad cold. I was really congested the whole day and I felt so much pressure in my head that I got sick--like I had a migrane so I couldn't really function and had no desire to eat or really talk to anyone--I just wanted to SLEEP. But of course we still had an eating appointment, and Sis. Cziesla kept commenting about how I wasn't eating my food (which also just so happened to be vegitarian masterpieces from your favorite veggie member! I really do like it, but you know how I take just a wee bit more time to nibble on those veggies) but luckily Rosel, the member knows me and was like, "she just takes more time to enjoy my food!" haha, thanks dear Rosel. Becuase there're nothing I hate more than when members are slightly entäucht when I can't finish everything fast enough--I finish but just not as fast as the others. But we still had to leave our plates and rush to the bus to take back to FFO and then back to Berlin to meet Präsident so he could help them find their Sbahn back home--since both of them have work or school today--so that's how much of a whirlwind day/week we've had.
I really do wish the girls could stay because they really just had the energy to work and do pretty much everything we asked of them--from eating too much food and pretending they aren't totally stuffed to riding bikes in slight rain. But luckily I was the one sick and not them, otherwise their week here would've been harder to handle. But I hope they enjoyed their experience here, and that they hang onto their desires to serve.
Although coming home, I was really just weary in body and spirit and went to our GML so that I could have a blessing, that's how bad it was. I mean, Sis. Szvoboda was like, "we can't have Gemiko, you're practically dead." So I had my blessing, took a bunch of vitamin stuff that he thought I needed (Ahmed and Ola are very German in the fact that they're all about vitamins and minerals and totally against medicine) and then I slept for a glorious 11 hours.
So today I'm doing a whole lot better; the cold is now a cough, but I survived the week! It was really the main weekly goal I had. ;P
I promise to send the next batch of pictures home soon--you're very patient in waiting!
Thanks so much for letting me know about all the great experiences with the new temple, repreSENT! Miracles are just exploding everywhere in this family.
Love you all--bis nächste Woche!
Sis. Whit
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