This week was an interesting week of appointments, zone conference, and study. Here's a pic of me visiting one of the Protestant cathedrals in Berlin:
On Wednesday and Thursday we had appointments with two different guys that we had randomly contacted and set up times with to get together. They both had somehow come in contact with missionaries in the past. The first one is from west Africa and has a Muslim background but is not active at all. He really liked what we had to say, especially when it came to prayer. He had never experienced a prayer where someone was really speaking to God from his heart. He even had the courage to say the closing prayer in the way we pray. He did a great job. He is trying to move right now so we are going to help him with that.
The other guy is from Nigeria and did not really have a good idea of what we believed. We showed him the Mormon Message 'A Book of Mormon Story' which he liked. We expounded upon why the Book of Mormon is important. He committed to read Alma 32 and is excited to meet again. We think institute would be great for these two guys. There's institute every week at the Tiergarten building. We are allowed to go if we have an investigator with us.
On Wednesday we met with a man that is strong in the Muslim faith but is interested to meet with us. We talked about the importance of baptism since he had asked about that the last time we met with him. I have begun studying the New Testament and I really like the way Christ's baptism is recorded in Matthew 3. We used that and John 3 in our lesson. We also used Matthew 3 in another lesson this week to talk about the godhead--we see the evidence of the three separate beings (Christ being baptized, the Holy Ghost descending in the form of a dove, and God speaking from Heaven). Beautiful. Here's a pic of me at the New Palace at Sanssouci--built by Frederick the Great 1763-69.
The girl we had on baptismal date earlier came to church yesterday! She had texted in the middle of the night a couple of days ago asking, "Why did they kill Joseph Smith?!" We met with her and our ward mission leader yesterday after the meetings and explained to her a bit more of church history. She asked good questions about prophets and the organization of the church. At the end we bore testimony of Joseph Smith and President Monson. She said she's excited to see us again this week.
Zone Conference on Friday went well. President Fingerle did a good job and is a super nice guy. The whole focus of it was the family and how that should be our focus when we are teaching someone. He challenged us to give out the My Family pamphlet every time we teach the Plan of Salvation as well as setting a goal with investigators for when they will go to the temple to do baptisms for the dead following their baptism. Usually this should be about 4 weeks following their own baptism. He also quoted Alma 37:6-7 which is something Elder Bednar heavily referenced when he was here last October. He told us to make little adjustments/improvements.
This past Monday we went to the second of the two bible groups that we got invited to. Turns out, this one is a Christian community. They live together and the women wear traditional clothes. To support themselves they make and sell wooden toys and run a kindergarten. Very interesting experience. There was a girl there on "exchange" from her community in upstate NY. She asked some questions that in turn fueled some research of mine this week. She asked us what the church teaches regarding education and work. I thought back to all those times I read For the Strength of Youth as a kid and answered that education is valuable and that we should get as much as we can. My understanding is that when we keep the commandments, God will provide a way for us to get a good education and job to support our families. It got me thinking about, on a bigger scale, what kind of role religion plays in our world today.
I found some really good recent talks by Elders Holland (Faith, Family, and Religious Freedom), Oaks (Witnesses of God), and Christofferson (Moral Disipline) addressing the world today and our freedom to exercise our religion. Essentially what we are taught is that religion has played a massive role in determining how prosperous a nation is due to the morals and values that it teaches and as our society moves further and further away from God we become less and less prosperous. We see in the Book of Mormon that the members of the church were blessed with prosperous lives and riches as they kept the commandments, etc. Prosperity is a blessing from God.
Love you all!
Elder Tanner Germann
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