Last Tuesday we had a couple of hours to go street contacting. We decided to try something new and go to another city in our area. Our area is huge. You could ride on a train for two hours and still be in our area. Magdeburg is definitely the biggest city but there are some decent sized places around too. I have wrestled in my mind for awhile now trying to decide if we would be more effective staying in Magdeburg proper like we usually do or if it would be productive to go to some other smaller places in our area. I truly believe there are people in every town who are prepared to hear the gospel. We decided to try it out and went down to Schönebeck which is only 20 minutes south of Magdeburg. Not really much of anything came of it. Hardly anyone was on the street and so then you resort to knocking doors and that is the least effective thing you can do. I think that's the problem with these smaller cities. People don't really walk around. They just live there and commute to Magdeburg or they go to work in the factories everyday. I think what I realized this past week is that we can just walk down the main street of Magdeburg everyday and have a continuous flow of people who we have never talked to before all day. We had our meeting with our branch mission leader Tuesday night. I think we made progress towards getting a branch mission plan and pushing member missionary work. We are going to have a theme every month with a regularly scheduled activity the third week of every month. The missionaries will be giving the talks in sacrament meeting on the 18th to speak about member missionary work and to roll out this new plan. We are asking some members to accompany us as well--should be good. English class turned into German class this past week. Galia has been begging for us to teach German. I copied a bunch of practice stuff out of my Missionary Training Center books for her. It was interesting to have her practice German with our churchy German books! Tuesday night ended a bit disappointing because the Turkish family that we found last week told us to not come back when we showed up at the door.
Wednesday we had district meeting. Following district meeting the Romneys picked us up and we made a surprise visit to the Jaffke family down in Barby. They had not been answering calls so President Romney was like, "Lets just go down there!" So we did! It was only a 20-minute visit but that was enough to commit Daniel for sure to be baptized on the 14th of February! We set up a regular appointment so we are going there once a week until then in order to help him progress in his faith. Coming back we had a bit of car trouble but after a prayer the car started working again and were able to make it back. The Romneys took the four missionaries out to dinner that night to celebrate New Years Eve. We had to be in our apartments by 6pm that night (mission rules) because of the craziness. We weren't allowed to leave our apartment Thursday until 1pm. It was like a war of fireworks all night, it was crazy. Surprisingly, the German government allows any type of firework you could ever imagine to be used. The last firework I heard went off at around noon on Thursday. Still loving our Christmas sweaters!!
After we emerged on Thursday it looked like a war zone. The streets were filled with trash and beer bottles. All the glass at the bus stops was shattered. The city was thrashed but no one was out by then. Unfortunately that meant that street contacting was hard. We tried out a new thing this week--a survey! The other companionships in our district have been using it and in Köthen they found 12 new investigators in one day. The one we used this past week was five questions: Are you religious? How have you come to this decision? If there is a God, and you could ask him any question, what would you ask? Have you ever sought out an answer to this question? If there was a book that could answer your question, would you read it? Then of course we begin to talk about how we have that book--The Book of Mormon. And then we testify of it and ask them if we could bring it by. I think it has got some really good potential to be a really awesome finding tool, but I just don't think we have figured out quite how to use it yet. We found only one new person with it this week. We went by a less-active member, Mandy, on Thursday. We are going to meet with her tomorrow and hopefully bring her to church on Sunday. Her excuse for not coming to church has been about how the bahns (traines) don't run too frequently on Sundays. No problem! We will come pick you up and show you there is a bahn to and from church :)
We utilized our area book this week and found two new investigators from old teaching records in the past. We are really excited about that. It is a testament to how useful and important the area book can be. Friday we went by Johanna's house and planned out her baptismal service with her. She is super excited for this Saturday--as are we!
Saturday we went over to see Marian, Galia and Rafael. They invited all the missionaries over including the Romneys! Galia prepared some really good lasagna. Galia said we are like her family--awww. We had a good lesson afterwards about following the prophet and the word of wisdom. We also followed up on temples and answered their questions about the angel Moroni. We commited them to living the word of wisdom (our code of health) and following the prophet.
I was the pianist again for Sacrament Meeting on Sunday. I bore my testimony and testified that I know that the gospel is a blessing for our families. That crazy man showed up in church again and tried to speak but Br. Wloka ushered him out. Fortunately the Spirit came back after some really good testimonies by members. Sunday afternoon we rode down to Köthen for John's baptism. We stopped in Wulfen and the Staigers fed us dinner and took us to the baptism. The service was really well done. Elder Morton and I performed "I like to look for rainbows" song as the special musical number. I was a little nervous but I played all the right notes. John was super happy. I was super excited that Elder Pilling got to baptize him. Here is Elder Pilling in his whites with John:
Monday we had our district P-Day. That night we traded companions and I went to Köthen with our district leader Elder Short. We were traveling a lot between appointments city to city and all of the appointments kept falling through. Not to mention yesterday was another holiday so everything was shut down again. We did manage to find three new investigators for them in Dessau. We rushed back to Magdeburg and went to Johanna's house so that Elder Short could conduct her baptismal interview. Everything went well and I think we are almost all prepped for Saturday. Next weekend there is a stake youth temple trip so we are going to do some family history with Johanna next week so that she can take some names of her own to the temple--perfect timing!
We are really excited to see some of the fruits of our labors this weekend! Look out for pictures next week!
I'm wishing you all the best!
Elder Tanner Germann
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