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.
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| 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.
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| L to R: Me, Elder Huckabay, Sister Kohlert, and Elder Seamons. |
Stay classy you guys. Ich wird sie immer leben.
Tschüss,
Elder Spaulding
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