January 5, 2024: Chaos giving orders

 Everything is upside down

This week was a little crazy. Jus a lil'

I'll start with some exciting news: we were able to make it to Mike's baptism!! It was such a miracle, really. A newish member Felix baptized him, and he's not super well versed in baptism yet, so he got him under the water and then didn't pull him back up... Mike was just in the water for a couple seconds flailing his arms and legs and then Felix got him back up. But what counts is that he went all the way under, and 'eventually' came all the way back up.

The experience was amazing to see though, because the ward just took him under their wing after that. He has such a great connection with all the people there and you could feel the joy in the air. I feel so incredibly blessed to serve in this ward. Some say its the best in the mission. 

Quick tip- the city I serve in is spelled "Wesel", but it's pronounced  "vae-zull". Now you sound German

Crazy stuff:

On Friday (the day before the baptism), Elder Hill was still in quarantine. We were at home, and we got a doorbell ring. We came down and found two members of a family in our ward, the Bäders. They gave us some Lasagna flavored spinach (it was like 75% spinach and a thin layer of Lasagna on top) from Schwester Klucken, which they delivered to us, along with some Quark. We were already like "wow", especially considering all that we've already received for Christmas. We brought it upstairs and came back downstairs, and BOOM, they brought two large baskets FULL of tons of food and things. It's all like the expensive brand stuff that we never buy, and a lot of it is American food too. I was just blown away, and quite frankly a little overwhelmed with the generosity. We won't have to do shopping for 2 weeks probably. And the best thing is, it's all non perishable. They really thought ahead. We hardly ever even talk to these people at church either, and here they are doing 2 weeks of shopping for us and just leaving it at our door. It still feels unreal, and I have to pinch myself to make sure I'm not dreaming sometimes. 

I won't be eating the canned fish or pickles though.

Sunday night was New Year's Eve, which also blew me away. We were sleeping, and then we hear what sounds like a heavy rainstorm outside in the distance. I got up to check out what it was and the entire horizon was filled with all sorts of fireworks! We live in the middle of a farm so we had a super cool view of the city, and the never ending barage of fireworks. We heard some noise downstairs so we went outside and joined the Oma Schwester Ebbert and watched the fireworks from the driveway for a few minutes (definitely not allowed to be with an old lady at midnight, but worth it). "I've watched the fireworks alone for so many years" is what she told us, so we were glad to be there. 

We had a mega P-day on Monday for New Year's and also there were some terrorist threats in some cities due to current World events so we weren't allowed to proselyte. We went to our stake center and played chair soccer, along with watching a zoom talent show put on for the mission. We also went to Five Guys

Right after that we went on an exchange with the Mönchengladbach Elders, and I went with Elder Berndt, the German one! We actually didn't speak much German together, because he's trying to practice English. But what we did do was put on face masks. I'd never done that before and I'm a little confused what the point is, but it felt good I guess?

We had interviews the next day, and I got to chat with Sister Cropper (president's wife), and Elder Berndt took some portraits of me for a thing he does on Facebook. 

We hopped on the train back home, which was already super delayed. We got about halfway there, and our train decided that it was not going any further, and we had to get out. There was something wrong with the tracks, because there were 0 trains going to Wesel. They also weren't planning on this, because there were not replacement busses. There was one normal bus that went to Wesel, but there was a horde of people going there because of the lost trains, and we couldn't get on. We were stranded there for about 2 hours, we went and got some lunch, listened to Jesus Rap (God Is by Kanye West), and eventually decided that it was impossible to get home that day. We also had Zone Conference the next day at 9 AM, so even if we were to get home, we wouldn't be able to make it to Zone Conference (we live too far away). So we hauled over to Krefeld, and found a place to stay the night there with the Elders. Unfortunately we didn't plan on staying so long, so we had no clean clothes with us for Zone Conference, but luckily I didn't have to hug too many people so I don't think anybody noticed. 

Oh yeah, and it was my birthday! Everybody at Zone Conference sang to me which was really nice but I wasn't sure exactly what to do. Does anybody actually know what to do when people sing happy birthday to you? I just sat there awkwardly, but there's gotta be a better option. 

We finally came home, picked up a couple birthday packages, and did studies. We hadn't been home for 4 days, but it didn't really feel like a vacation. Just missionary things.

Today we tried to go laser tagging, but it was super expensive and kinda lame, so we went to the Chinese buffet again with the district. 

We've got two people who are looking into baptismal dates right now, so despite us not doing any work in our area, good things are happening :)

Much Love!

Elder Tage Rex