Week 4 - Flight Plan Week!

Hallo Freunde und Familie, wie geht es für euch?

I hope that everything is going well on the homefront. I've been pretty busy this week and have some good stories to tell.

I finally got some pictures with Elder Heaton this week, He shipped out this last Monday. It was really cool to see him and I hope he's doing well. I still haven't had the opportunity to have a photo shoot with Jesse, but hopefully this will be the week.

Elder Heaton and Elder Spaulding

On Monday it rained and we had a blast! Our branch almost always goes out and plays beach volleyball outside for exercise time, and we didn't let a little bit of rain stop us. We had an absolute blast, and I think raining beach volleyball should be its own sport (it may be a little hard to coordinate, but I know it would be totally worth it.) The second picture is from later that day. We don't know how or who found it out, but there is a tree outside our classroom that smells like cream soda. I thought it was strange too, but it really does. The rain enhanced the smell, and Elder Seamons wanted to pose with it.

​I had a fun time hosting with these guys. From left to right it is Elder Holyoak (he has the coolest name, I swear...), Elder Hoffman with the stoneface, yours truly, and Elder Huckabay. We got to give the new missionaries a good scare. Just kidding, we tried to be pretty nice. We get to host again next week, and it sounds like the new Germans are coming in a week early and we get to meet them! I'm super excited to mess wi- I mean to help them.

YESTERDAY WE GOT OUR FLIGHT PLANS!! It's just the four Berliners traveling together, and we have more than 24 hours of traveling, but I'm still super excited. I hope Germany is ready for me.

One of my teachers shared a story with us about his mission. He served in Latvia, and he had been told that "This is a hard mission", "You'll only be planting seeds", "Maybe someday this mission will grow"... sound familiar? He took this to heart, and he went through the motions on his mission. Then he read Numbers chapter 13. It talks about how spies returned false reports and how it leads to a self fulfilling prophecy. After he read this he thought about his call as a missionary and doubled over his efforts. From that point forward the success started to come. As he did his best the Lord blessed him for his faithfulness.

I keep learning new cool words, too. My new favorite word is die Fremdschämen. It describes the embarrassment you feel for someone else.😂  Maximum Geschwindigkeit (maximum velocity) is also just really fun to say. Some other words are total tongue-twisters. Try saying Herzliche Glückwünsche (congratulations!) five times fast.

People seemed to like the story about us bearing testimony about how Jesus loved us enough to kill for us, so I have a few more stories to tell. XD

A couple of German missionaries had just finished telling the story of the first vision. Right in the middle of sharing their powerful testimonies, one of them said that they knew that Joseph Smith had found the golden plates "Hinter ein Rock". Sadly, this missionary didn't know that the word for rock in German is Stein. Even more sadly, this missionary didn't know that der Rock means skirt in German. He hasn't yet heard the end of the "golden plates under the skirt" lesson.

I don't have all the details from this one, but apparently word order is pretty important in Armenian. A few of them told us about how switching two words around in their language once changed "Jesus loves and blesses families" to "Jesus slaughters families". Be careful what you say. 😅

Investigators and TRC were also really cool this week. Next time we meet with one of our investigators he'll be baptized. I'm honestly not sure how that works since he's a teacher, but it's been really fun getting him there. We also had an interesting experience where we started teaching something that wasn't really doctrine. It was beyond our scope to teach and it wasn't necessarily true anyway. We had been talking about repentance and asked her what she knew about it. She asked if we could repent from all sins just as easily and we started talking about how we don't know if you can be forgiven for murder in this life. We didn't really think much about it at the time, but at the end of the lesson she broke character with us and told us a little about the background of the woman that we were teaching. She had been super excited at the beginning of her lesson that she could be forgiven for something that she had done, but little did we know she had had an abortion. She felt awful about it and like a murderer and we had crushed her hopes in our false doctrine. We apologized in the next lesson and shared some scriptures that talked about all sins being forgiven, including murder, through the atonement. I'm glad I had this experience now because I'm not sure how I could handle that in the field.

In TRC this week we got to Skype with a woman in Germany named Andrea Nowak. She was very kind and it was super cool to learn about what to expect in Germany and to meet with a native.

One final story and then I have to go. Sister Robison (one of my teachers) is super nice. She is one of those people who I'm not sure is capable of staying mad at anyone, but when she gives you her dissapointed look you die a little bit on the inside. I really like her and she is an amazing teacher and super fun. We had been having a really good lesson on some complicated German grammar stuff that I'm not going to bore you with, but she looked over at me and asked "Elder Spaulding, what is the word for denken. . . . Awkward..." she had meant to ask me the English word but gave me the German one instead. In stride I looked back over at her and said "I don't know the word for awkward... is it Sister Robison?" The entire class spent the better part of 3 minutes gasping for breath trying to stop laughing. I apologized afterward because I felt bad about it, but she just said it was super unexpected and she thought it was hilarious.

Anyway, Good luck to you all!

Später Gators,

Der Elder Spaulding

Week 3 - The days go by like weeks, and the weeks go by like days.

The MTC is pretty crazy. At this point it's pretty much routine though, and the days are starting to blur together. It can be pretty boring at times, but always having something to do helps. Staying sane mostly involves whistling a lot (I mean a lot).

Deutsch is pretty hard, the pronunciation and some words are pretty easy, but the grammar rules are out the window. There are so many ways to say things in English, but for the most part there is only one correct way to say things in German. Thankfully, German is pretty literal, so lots of idioms carry over or are easy to figure out. The programs here work though, and the Gift of tongues is real. I've learned more German in 25 days than I did in my year and a half of class.

There are some pretty fun words in German that I've learned. One of my favorite ones is Doch. It basically means "yuh huh!" It's super fun to use and makes my companion frustrated. He likes to say Quatsch (pronounced kvatch) back. It pretty much means Rubbish like a British guy would say. (Be careful saying it around Germans though, because depending on how you say it it can be extremely rude.)

Also, one of our teachers finally cracked and taught us the difference between 'toten' and 'storben'. I don't know how many times I've said "Jesus killed for you because he loved you." while Elder Rosborough smiled and nodded like a lunatic next to me. This is truly a message of peace and love😂

I've ran into a few people I know this week as well. I've ran into Branden Jackson quite a few times.

I also ran into Talon Heaton, sadly I haven't had the opportunity to take any pictures with him yet. I haven't seen Jesse yet, but I have another two weeks to find him.

For the most part this week has been pretty routine though, so as we part enjoy this picture of Elder Seamons doing tricks on the pullup bar, and Ethereal Elder Rosborough.

At the temple:

Elder Rosborough, Elder Seamons, Elder Spaulding, Elder Huckabay

Till next time,

Tschüss,

Der Elder Spaulding

Week 2 - 18 Days and Counting!

Hello friends and family, alles klar?

The days at the MTC are starting to blur together. To keep track of when we are, we started to keep a 'countdown to Christmas' and sing Christmas songs, much to the chagrin of our resident Scrooge, Elder Seamons.

Countdown to  Weihnachten

I've been doing my best to get more pictures of Elder Rosborough in his natural habitat, but I have to be quick so sorry for the blurriness.

​Nothing too exciting happened this week, but the lowlight was definitely moving. There is a whole bunch of construction on MTC grounds, and so we had to switch buildings as the construction zone enveloped our residency. Normally packing and moving wouldn't be too awful, but considering that we literally lived in the fourth floor last door (heh) and had to go to the same place in a new building it took quite a while. I'm pretty sure I beat your record for flights of stairs climbed, mom.

My favorite thing so far at the MTC happened this week. Yesterday we had our first TRC which is like a little home teaching visit with a German speaker. My companion and I got to teach two 20 minute lessons (we taught them both on the Erlösungsplan, or the plan of salvation). In our first meeting the guy was from Österreich (Austria). He was super nice and helped us with our grammar (he spoke English as well) and taught us far more than we could have taught him. In our second lesson we got to teach a more quiet guy, but at the end I told him a little about my dad and bore my testimony of the plan of salvation and he told us a few stories from his time in Germany when he served in the Hamburg mission.

It was really fun and I'm looking forward to doing it again. We do it one more time in person, and the last two times will be over Skype with people who are actually in Germany.

Other things that happened, I mentioned that we have 3 new investigators now (played by our teachers). We meet with each of them twice a week and we have taught five of our six lessons this week. So far they are all going pretty well. We've met twice with Olga. She is a woman who followed the 7th day advent church for a large number of years but never joined because they don't believe in reincarnation like she does. Her daughter started meeting with the missionaries and so she wanted to find out about our religion. She was a little disappointed when we told her that we also don't believe in reincarnation, but really seemed to like the Plan of Salvation.

We've met once with Frau Wolfa. She is what I like to imagine as the stereotypical dog lady with a couple of corgis.😂 Our initial progress sheet only said that she likes walking her dogs and as such has spoken with the missionaries several times. They invited her to a lesson, and so here we are. We've such found out that she is an Evangelical and she calls God "Mein großer Freund" or my big friend. So far we taught her about the restoration of church and spend a large part of our lesson focusing on the nature of God. She also seems receptive so far and wants to come to church this Sunday.

Our last investigator is named Florian. He's 60 years old, single and works at a port. We were joking that brother Klebingat, who looks nothing like a salty seaman:

(He's the one on the right) was going to come in with an eyepatch and a white beard to enhance the roleplay. Our progress sheet says that he has met with the missionaries on and off for four years and is pretty good friends with them. He helps them learn German, and they help him to learn English.

He was pretty acceptive and we went in trying to figure out what his trepidation for joining the church was. He said he just felt like he'd been talked at and didn't really understand all that much about us. We've been doing our best to make the lessons personal and to help him learn and grow.

My companion extended an invitation for him to be baptized on the second lesson and he said yes! I'll get back to you on that though, I'm not quite sure how that will pan out. He picked a date at random for the baptism and said November 1st without realizing that that only gives us two more weeks of meeting with him first.😅

Anyway, here's a picture of the entire Berlin mission currently at the MTC.

L to R: Me, Elder Huckabay, Sister Kohlert, and Elder Seamons.

Stay classy you guys. Ich wird sie immer leben.

Tschüss,

Elder Spaulding

Week 1 - Welcome to the MTC!

Hello friends and family, wie geht es für ihnen? So far the MTC has been pretty busy, as in literally every hour is planned down to the dot. It's a little much at the beginning, but it won't kill me. My companions name is Elder Rosborough and he's from right here in Provo. He's a pretty nice guy, but I'm amazed at how consistently grumpy he manages to look. He says it's the uni-brow. He loves everything history and his memory might just save me here.​

Elder Rosborough

​My district is pretty cool as well. We get along pretty well most of the time, and they all seem like pretty nice guys. I mean, they're missionaries, so how bad can they be?

Elder Seamons being slightly more productive than me.

Me looking fabulous as usual.

Elder Blackner looking nearly as fabulous as me.

Life in the MTC is pretty busy, so we look for any opportunity to celebrate.  For instance, the great day of Cinco e Octo which everyone celebrates on the 5th of October every year.  In case you've forgotten about it, I'll summarize it for you.

On the 5th of October in 1994 the people of Arminia declared war on the octopusses in the waters surrounding the island of Arminia. They aimed their ballistic harpoons into the water and fired until the water was full of the carcasses. This went on so long that they started to sink into the ocean. Seeing this, the Arminians yelled out' "Cinco de Octo!" into the sky in triumph.

To celebrate, our entire branch brought out the excessive amounts of food that our families seem to keep sending us and we shared it with everyone. You can imagine how wild the parties at the MTC get.​

Cinco de Octo.

Meeting with Becky has been hard. (We are done with her now. We meet with our first "investigator" four times and then we get three new ones that we meet with for the rest of our time here. Becky was actually a teacher, and now we will be teaching her and our other two teachers as investigators as well.) She was incredibly quiet and she seemed almost resistant to the spirit. She loved answering our questions with as little information as possible. We could bear our testimonies (in caveman German) and read powerful scriptures and she would say she felt absolutely nothing. We did our best, but it didn't seem like we were making any impact. When we met her as a teacher however, she told us a little about each of our meetings with her. We hadn't had any good reasons or feelings to give the lessons that we did, but we did our best and trusted our gut. She said that we did amazingly well for our first lessons and that she noticed us getting better and bolder each time. I bear my testimony that if you do all that you can and just try your best to listen to what you feel, Heilige Vater will bless us and make our efforts sufficient.

Anyway, for the most part the MTC has been pretty great.​

My beautiful t-shirt that doesn't quite fit.

Nametag official.

Elder Spaulding, signing off.

MTC - First Lesson

Yesterday morning we were able to (attempt to) teach Becky in German, and it didn't go so well. The language barrier was pretty high, and she wasn't prone to asking many questions or responding to our statements. We will meet with her again on Monday, and probably a few more times next week, so I am going into conference hoping to find something that can help me to relate to her or to help me teach in simple phrases.

Yesterday evening we were able to go to the Provo temple, and I really enjoyed it. The temple was gorgeous (my favorite part was a big mural of Jesus teaching in the chapel) and the people inside were super nice.

It's General Conference and I still need to go switch my wash, so this is as long as I get to write for today.