Sachsenhausen, Frankfurt Oder, Baptismal Commitment, New Transfer

Hey family and friends! I hope you had a good last week of July! Can you believe it's already August again? For me, this week was all over the place but I got to do some really cool things and see some really cool places. 

On Tuesday we went to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. That was a really cool experience. First of all, there is not a lack of information. For someone to go through the whole place and read every single thing they would need about a week. But nonetheless, very informative. Aside from the sick feeling you get in your stomach when you walk through there, I was extremely surprised at how that place ran. As you learn more about it and see more of it, you realize what a nightmare it was. The whole thing is mind boggling. I'm really grateful for the experience though. I'm able to understand and appreciate what happened during WWII much better now.

The design of the concentration camp was an equilateral triangle with
all of the barracks set up in a half circle facing Tower A, the main
tower, which had a machine gun mounted on it capable of firing on the
whole camp.

We had a solid district meeting on Wednesday where we prepared and role-played for specific lessons each companionship was going to teach in the coming days. We traded companions afterwards and I went to Frankfurt Oder with Elder Allen. He is a really good guy. Just finished his training this week actually. We did a bunch of contacting that afternoon in between an English class at the university and an appointment with a member. The next morning we got up to go to an appointment with another member but that fell through. We had some really good conversations on the street and actually ended up finding a new person to teach. An 87 year-old woman was awesome. I actually heard from the Frankfurt Oder elders the other day that they went by in her and had a great lesson. They were talking about the Book of Mormon and she said something like, "when people give me something like this, I just feel like the best thing to do is educate myself and read it. Do you have a specific chapter or section that I can read?" Perfect.  Elder Allen and I also got to stop by a couple of contacts just over the river in Slubice, Poland. We got some pizza for my one year mission anniversary!

You can see that there's no border control. The missionaries are
allowed to go over the bridge when they have contacts/investigators
over the line but they are not allowed to actively proselyte. We went
by on a couple of contacts. Also, pizza in Poland 👌🏽

Friday was a great day! We committed the German girl to baptism! We decided to talk about the temple and then we led it into baptism and setting goals. She doesn't have her answer yet but she agrees that setting a goal is good so that she can work towards that. We are praying that she will get her answer in the next three weeks! We took another member to our lesson with her. He did a good job. Then he took us afterwards to two home teaching appointments. 

Our new mission president has really been laying out the new plan and direction he wants the mission to go in. The focus is to get everyone we teach to the temple so that they can partake of the blessings that come along with that. Little did we know, our lesson with the German girl went right along with that. There are no changes in our district for this upcoming transfer but there are definitely changes to other areas. They are putting more man power in the Freiburg area which is where the temple is. Also, the new trainees and those that are finishing their missions will now go to Freiburg so that they can begin and end with the temple in mind. Another big focus is trainers. The most important leaders in the mission are trainers so quite a few older, more seasoned missionaries will be training this transfer.

Interesting changes but they sound super exciting.  I'm looking forward to another six weeks in Berlin. Hopefully we will be seeing a baptism in the next couple of weeks!

Sincerely,

Elder Tanner Germann