February 14, 2024: This, I guess, is to tell you--

 -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 recently, and how much he wanted to come back to church. He told us that we were an answer to prayers from him, and that we were the exact push he needed to make the step and come back. He'd felt inadequate because of choices he'd made in the past few years, but he was ready to put it behind him now. He bore a beautiful testimony and told us his conversion story. Little did he know, that this whole time he was also the boost we needed to our day! We could feel the spirit so strong, and it brightened up our countenance enough to keep going, and press forward. Also, as we were leaving, we were like "OK, we gotta talk to the very next person we see, we have to use this boost of spirit we just got!" And so we did. And we ended up attempting to street contact the member's wife and daughter!! I can't make this up, it was amazing. They committed to coming to church on Sunday, and they showed up! We visited with them afterwards, and they felt whole for the first time in a long time, and they are super excited to getting their daughter baptized, and being sealed in the temple! The Seidel family was an answer to our prayers 🙏 
we celebrated by buying Döner to end off the day.

In other news, we participated in this mega service project that has been going on for 2 years now! There's a member who is completely renovating his entire house, and doing it practically alone with his family. We removed a ton of tile plates, and chucked them down this massive slide into a dumpster. It was a pretty good arm day! The member says that they should be completely done with the house within about 8 months or so. We will definitely be helping him more throughout my time here.

Sunday was the American Stake's stake conference, so we got there for our little branch's service,  and the building is just flooded with Americans, it was so weird. Borderline uncomfortable, listening to everyone speak my mother tongue. Anyways, my companion translated for the sacrament meeting from German to English through a headset, he did pretty well! I thought I'd take a shot in Sunday School, and was quickly humbled, but I tried to stick through it. I know how to say everything I need to, but I get halfway through the thought and just completely forget what we're talking about and what I'm translating. Respect for anybody who can live translate! We had a potluck after church, and I sat across from a guy who looks like David Bowie and another old guy. We started talking about my future and now I have like 6 people in Kaiserslautern who are vouching for me to become a pro tennis player. I tried to explain how impossible that would be, but they just said "remember me when i see you at Wimbledon",  so I guess my destiny is set. I can't even describe how big of a dream that would be though.

We met with the Seidel family on Monday again, and had a great conversation. When they left, they alerted us that some sketchy dudes were on church property, so like the massive buff suited bodyguards with sunglasses all missionaries naturally are, we used Plan A and asked them to leave politely. They must've been scared of Plan B because they left rather quickly. We rolled our sleeves back down and went to the door back inside and realized we forgot the keys and had locked ourselves outside, so we called a member and they got us in after a while. That's the whole story.

A scripture story that stood out to me as I was writing this email was from Alma the younger in The Book of Mormon. He was preaching in Ammonihah, a very difficult city that decided to cast him out. Even after all the effort he could give, he found only persecution. He was on his way out of the city, ready to give in, but an angel appeared to him, commanding him to go back and continue to minister in the city. He returned immediately, and met Amulek, who we learn became an amazing missionary companion to Alma, and they witnessed amazing things together. Alma was given exactly what he needed, at the time he needed it, through his faith and dilligence. It was incredible to similarly experience that with the Seidel family earlier this week. I can also testify that when we have faith and do the Lord's commands, he will give us exactly what we need, when we need it.

We had Zone Conference and interviews on Tuesday, which means we are already halfway through the transfer (crazy). The ZL's had called me thr night before and were like "uhhh we forgot to ask for a piano player... could you do that for us?" So without any warm up I had to play piano for the whole zone including President and Sister Cropper, which was a little nerve racking, but it was seriously a miracle that I could play well enough to make it through, and President even thanked me in front of everyone, and said he felt the spirit very strongly as I played "I Stand All Amazed" for the prelude. The Heidelberg Zone knows how to put on a Zone Conference. It was sooo much better than in my last Zone, and we all loved it! We would have some sad crackers and grapes as a snack in Düsseldorf. Here we had charcuterie boards, little Debbie snacks, and Capri-suns. It was not The American dream, rather it was The American's Dream.

We had interviews right after that, and it was wonderful! They changed it up qnd now we do interviews with Sister Cropper as well, and she's just super fun to talk to, so that's a treat! We rode home with the American elders and listen, nobody pressed any buttons, but a Van Halen song turned on in the car and nobody could muster the strength to turn it off... it was powerful.

Yesterday we did a special Tschüss D-Rat for Elder Christiansen in our district, because he is getting emergency transferred out of the trio to open up a new area today. It was very sad but very spiritually uplifting and super fun, because they brought swords- like real swords- for us all to play with! 

That was this week!

Ich vermisse euch, bis nächste Woche!

Elder Tage Rex


I think I did better with the pictures this week mom :)














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