Elder Tage Rex: Germany Frankfurt Mission

  and nothing to doubt This week was good! I'm not sure if I said this last week, but Thursday night I was assigned to give a talk by our Branch President, and my district leader asked me to lead a spiritual discussion/lesson for D-Rat on Friday. It's really weird, for some reason specifically with church things I feel like when I get one assignement , like four other things happen on the same day. Anyways, we had our D-Rat. The Zone Leaders and Sister Training Leaders were both there, so that added a little pressure for me, but all went OK. I talked on how we can help others endure and "thrive" until the end. It's actually very interesting, The definition of the word "thrive" is "to make steady progress". It's super important not only in our temporal lives but also our spiritual lives, that we are able to "make steady progress" or "thrive". It's super easy to get caught up in things in the moment, but its important ...

  Or you show and prove  Another week! Only 2 left in the transfer already! Not a whole lot happened, but here is the week! We started out with a two hour train ride to Heidelberg for exchanges with our Zone Leaders! I was with Elder Deivelbiss, and we had a good time. It turns out that both of our ZL's are twins, and they both have girlfriends still waiting on them back home. That's impressive because they both went to BYU and only have a couple transfers left. Heidelberg is a really nice city, and it's a university town so there's tons of young adults which is the best for missionary work (because we are also young adults). I always find it a miracle when older people listen to us, because we're two 19 year olds with no adult life experience in a foreign country where they speak another language trying to tell you, a stranger on the street with things to do, how to live a better life.  I tried a 5 Guys shake for the first time. Wondrous. The sisters in our distric...

  -You're chosen out from the rest We had a Wunder (miracle) this week!!  On Friday my companion and I were feeling a bit down about things. It can sometimes feel like you're swimming upstream here with missionary work. Missionary work has its own unique challenges everywhere in the world, and at least in Germany one of the hardest things is just getting people to talk to you. It's exhausting to be on the streets for hours and hardly get half a conversation or a number. It's different in every area and with every companion, but finding people has been a struggle. While we were in the depths of conversation, trying to understand our purpose here, we decided to go visit an inactive member instead of do more street finding. We said a prayer, asking Heavenly Father to help us have faith and hope that we might be able to fulfill our purpose. We eventually arrived to the house, and the inactive member opened up the door, and told us how heavy the church had been on his mind r...

  This week wasn't super eventful, but it was a good week! We had Drat on Friday last week, and it just so turns out that our district has a tradition to wear Crocs at every Drat! They all have PizzaHut Crocs, and I got to pull out my Minecraft Crocs. They seemed pleased.  We had an activity with a member who wanted to play MarioKart with us, and we expected more people to be there so we asked President Cropper if we had permission, and he actually let us play MarioKart! Unfortunately nobody actually showed up so it was just kind of us and the one member, but it was fun! We took part in a lesson with the sisters here, and basically their friend is a huge star wars guy, and so we invited a member who was also a huge star wars guy, and they taught the Plan of Salvation using an analogy of the life of Anakin Skywalker. Glorious.  We had church on Sunday and I got to meet the German branch here! It's almost bigger than Wesel, but for some reason it's a branch here and a ward ...

  All your stars out in the sky Another insane week! On Friday I told our bishop that I was getting transferred, and his response was "great! Now you can give a talk on Sunday!", so thanks bishop. That same day, we got kidnapped by the resident Polish Oma in our ward. She had planned on people picking us up, which meant she could keep us there for as long as she wanted. We were there for over 4 hours, which is a terrible waste of time, but we couldn't do anything! She made a super good fancy cake, a potato meat cake thing, and an insane soup. In one moment Elder Hill was taking his time eating a cucumber salad (neither of us like cucumbers) and she broke character and yelled "Why are the cucumbers not eaten up!!" except in German and in a thick Polish accent. It's a core memory between Elder Hill and I now.  Elder Hill convinced me to ask Schwester Ebbert if we could have one more meal together before I leave, and so I did. And then I realized that we had ju...