Germany. This past week was a standard missionary week full of little
miracles.
Monday for preparation day we went up to Travemünde, the north part of Lübeck,
and went and walked on the beach and the pier. It's actually a
vacation destination with a couple of big hotels but we had the place
to ourselves.
Tuesday morning we went to zone conference in Kiel. I was pretty happy
with the lessons that we heard there. There was a solid one on the
role of the Holy Ghost in conversion. President gave a solid lesson on
repentance. And the Neumünster stake president came and gave a really
good lesson on working with members. It was super nice to hear it from
his perspective as a member here but also as the leader of the stake.
I remember listening to him speak at stake conference a couple of
months ago and I really enjoyed his words. Super intelligent guy, a
lawyer.
We traded companions following zone conference. I hosted Elder Jensen, a brand
new trainee, in Lübeck. I gave him a few nuggets of my wisdom and we
actually did solid work together. We went to see an old investigator and
ended up having a long conversation with him at the door. He has MS
which has set in pretty strongly and he's only in his late forties. He
still hasn't come to grips with why this has happened to him. We bore
testimony of God's plan for us that asked him if we could come by next
week to share that with him. He accepted! For some reason, everyone
decided to call on Wednesday saying that they wanted to meet. An old
investigator called and a less active member saying he wanted to come
back to the church.
Thursday we had our usual appointment with Br Goltz. It's really cool
to see his understanding of the gospel develop. He's been of the
opinion that the only commandants are to love God and to love your
neighbor which is true but then he thought that other commandments
like paying tithing and keeping the Sabbath day holy were not
necessary at all anymore. After studying and us teaching about it,
he's come to an understanding of why we have these commandments and
what it means to follow them.
Friday was a fire hose of appointments. We met with that less active
member wanting to come back to church. We had a good conversation
getting to know each other. He still has a testimony of everything,
but he had been offended at church in the past. How often do we see that. It
really hurts to see these people who stop coming because of something
someone else said or did. By doing that, you deny yourself blessings.
But it's good that he's reaching out and of course we want to have him
back. Following that we met with the old investigator that called. He
brought a friend who was super cool. We taught the restoration and it
was awesome to see the spirit come in as we spoke. You could tell he
was feeling it because the way he listened and responded changed.
Right after that our young friend came and we talked about the
atonement. He had a question about why God forsook Christ on the
cross. We explain that God was with him but that he had to withdraw
his spirit in order to allow Christ to experience our trials. After
that we went to the Fachhochschule and met with our member friend
there and his Hindu roommate. It had been awhile so we went back over
where Christianity came from, Old and New Testaments, etc. I used
pictures from our Middle East trip to give a better image of what we
talked about. That went really well.
Saturday morning we had a service project at a member's house felling
trees. There's a row of trees splitting two farms--that's what we were
cutting down. According to German law, these types of trees can be cut
down every seven years but it all has to be done by March 15. After
March 15 it's illegal because then birds start nesting, etc. This will
be their fire wood when it dries out. In 2018. Hah. Afterwards we
went to the church and had our normal Farsi speaker lesson. The new
friend that came last time brought her husband and kids so now we're
teaching a family! We also met with our young friend again and
discussed scripture study. We decided to do a mock-scripture study as
a lesson. We just read Alma 5:40-46 and pulled so much out of it.
No one who could translate into Farsi came to church. Super awkward
when all of the investigators come and they don't understand anything.
But yeah we need to do better this week.
I wish everyone a good week!
Elder Tanner Germann
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