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.
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| 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
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