June 13, 2011

Stephans Dom.

      
           Hello from the Rainy city of Waiblingen! I'm glad to hear that you are enjoying Snowbird, even if having a Gilmore Girls marathon isn't exactly what I would consider a vacation... but yes I got the package, thank you very very much, I have missed the taste of American peanut butter! So I've been enjoying the package a lot, so thank you. Don't worry about the whole e coli thing, we are being very careful. 

As you noticed I'm sending quite a few pictures, some of them are from the MTC, but I hope you still like them. 

          

Well this last week has been interesting. We have been working way hard, and we found 2 new investigators from old investigators. One is Ziyad, he is from Iraq, is Christian, and doesn't speak very good German, and the other is Frau Klein, she owns a restaurant, is from Hungary, and her son died like 6 or 7 years ago. Hopefully we can help them remember the gospel of Jesus Christ and progress towards making covenants. We are having a hard time finding investigators off the street though. The people are way way nicer than in Wien, they actually stop and listen to you, but they just say that they have no interest and or that they already have a church and don't want to change. I guess I am going to have to come up with some more clever things to say, and do a better job of testifying to people so that they can feel the spirit.

Roman arch at Welzheim

            We have had some cool adventures this week though. On Wednesday we had an ausstellung, which is a street display thing, in Heilbronn, which is like an hour north of us. A pair of missionaries that are in our district work there, so we went there as a district to help out. Unfortunately, like it has every day this week, it rained. So that made it a little bit harder to talk to people, but it also made it more fun. I ended up talking with some German who believes that we need a strong leader, like Hitler, to make all the decisions for us because people are dumb, and that Christ was crucified because Pilate was a weak leader. It was a really interesting conversation, and in the end he just walked away because he couldn't convince me we needed another Hitler. Lovely Germans!

            Anyways, we have had some little successes with a few Muslim people we have found dooring. Muslim people are actually the nicest in my opinion, and I've kinda learned what things to say to keep them talking because as soon as they see that we are from Jesus Christ they totally tune out. But we found a young man dooring, and we ended up talking about what happens after this life, and he seemed genuinely interested, so explained what we believed and then talked about the Book of Mormon, and he wanted one so we gave him one with some chapters to read. Unfortunately he is going on vacation for 2 months, so it will be a while before we can have contact again.
             We also found another Muslim young man who was interested in learning more and said that he would love to meet with us sometime and talk about religion. So that was cool too. 

This coming week is going to be a lot busier though, we have a goodbye to Pres. Condie zone conference tomorrow and then I'm going to Heilbronn for a companion exchange for a day with our district leader, and we have a service project planned for this week. I know that as we continue to work harder and harder and trust the Lord that the blessings will come, and whether we have 4 investigators or 50, we are engaged in the work of the Lord, and it is AWESOME!  I don't know what you could say to Adam to help him remember, but don't hesitate to share your testimony with him. The spirit is what is important, not your words. Like Elder Pearson told us in the MTC, everyone here already knows the gospel. They all chose it in the Pre-mortal life. And at the end every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is the Christ. So everyone is somewhere between knowing the gospel and knowing the gospel. The secret is that only the Holy Ghost can help people remember what they know. So just bare testimony to Adam and the Holy Ghost will bring it back to his remembrance. I love you all and enjoy your time at Snowbird! 

Liebe 

Elder Terry