Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Es geht ja schnell vorbei!


Hallo wunderschöne Damen und Herren!


Too much surrealism folks! There are not many weeks left and I can't even tell myself that I still have time left. Because then everybody reminds me anyway that I don't have much time or if anybody says anything about home then I am immediately involved in it as well. Haha I guess that is what happens when you are serving in a district full of missionaries that haven't even reached there six month mark yet. So I guess it is to be expected. Naja!


Well, this week was a whole lot of something and a whole lot of nothing to say the least. I shall begin by saying that we did a lot of finding this week. I haven't done this much finding for quite a few months because for the last little while we have had plenty of people to teach. But as I have come to find out the university is my favorite and least favorite place. Because every time we go there we find some cool people to meet with but then they never have any time to actually meet with us. That is how it is. We managed to get a whole grip of phone numbers this week, which means I will be doing a lot of calling in the next week to see if we will actually meet with any of these people in the near future. It is alright though because we still had some great experiences.


So there are two guys that the sister have been teaching every once and a while for the past couple months but they never really made much progress. But recently they went to General-Conference and then to another regular Sunday day of Church. And the sisters once again couldn't find any one to go with them so they could actually teach them. So they asked us because they thought maybe they should give them to us because they can never find anyone to go over and teach them. And we go into this lesson completely unsure of where these guys actually stand or whether they are very serious or if they just came to church out of curiosity. But not trying to talk myself up or anything or to put others down but...they are young missionaries so that is just how it is. I am pretty sure I was the only one in the lesson that understood everything that was going on but it turned out to be a great lesson, I had to lead and push it along. But I didn't try to take it over so the other missionaries had the chance to say something. Anyway, they said they would get baptized if they got an answer which is a lot more than you might think, considering most will say no even if it is just hypothetical. Haha it is safe to say the sisters don't really want to hand them over now. But they can't really teach them without us so yeah...Naja. They came to church again this week too.


The other exciting news or at least event that we had this week was when we found a guy named Emmanuel. Who we literally found on the street and had time right then and there to meet with us. So we just followed him back to his apartment and taught him the first lesson which also went great and he said he would get baptized as well if he got an answer that the Book of Mormon was true. 


So exciting things are happening everywhere, there is just a lot of downtime in between. And to be honest I still need to work on the whole charity thing. I can still get rather annoyed by people who just treat us so rudely on the street sometimes. Then I think up lots of sassy things that I should have said to them but never say them because then I remember that I have to leave them with good experiences and not bad ones. Honestly you would think a lot more people would be curious about why two random American guys in white shirts and ties are doing this stuff. Although almost the entire city of 100,000 people sometimes act like they already know us and know everything that we are going to say. But we are still having great experiences everyday. Simply when you go out with faith and with good cheer, which I recently found out is a commandment. Or at least I remembered that it was one. So remember that everyone! It is a commandment to be happy! So try to smile every now and then. :) Anyways back to a couple more examples of experiences that we had on the streets of Cottbus and simply just going out with faith and a little bit of joy. Okay so the other day we were in our apartment and we were getting ready to go out side and we only had about 45 minutes to go and do finding before we had to go to an appointment. And although there wasn't a whole lot of time to do finding, we just asked simply and sincerely in our prayer that the Lord would lead us to some people that would receive us and that were ready. And then we actually stopped a lot of people that were actually friendly and willing to talk with us for a little bit. And then as we were on the last little stretch we talked to a lady and she was really cool and really interested and she even told us that at one point she wanted to get baptized, not in our church, but then she saw what other churches were doing and that it was all about money that she wanted no part of it. However that didn't bother me at all because I know we are not like that and she could find that out for herself. So it was awesome and we got her number and set an appointment up not next week but the week after. And then we ran into a small family from Syria that could speak English, German, and naturally Arabic and they were Christian already and they even knew Mormons before back in Syrai with whom they worked with and even met with and talked about gospel stuff. That was a really crazy but also cool experience. We left them with our number because the father wasn't too crazy about meeting with us. It was still a great little meeting there on the street. And Folks, this is a great example of how the Lord listens to our prayers!


Well that is all for this week folks. I hope you all have had a nice pleasant week and that all is well. I love you and I pray for you as always.


Tschüss,
Elder Foster