December 26, 2024: My Snowman and Me

 Merry Christmas!!

Its been a weird week for sure. Work has been going slowly because of the new transfer and it's meetings, as well as Christmas celebrations. It's been great though, we've got to spend some time with some amazing people. 

We started the week with some Zone Leader training and the mission leadership conference. That was awesome. We got to present our zones numbers from the last transfer, and how we came from the most underperforming zone in the mission to one of the best. President was like "send this data to the twelve!" It was awesome. Some miracles were definitely worked last transfer. 

We had church on Sunday and we had our new baby missionary, Elder McCann give a 5 minute talk for his first Sunday. He did fantastic! We also got a surprise meal invitation to a family in our ward and ate Rouladen, a very traditional German meal. It's basically flattened and rolled roast beef filled with onions and cucumber and other veggies. 

Monday was a pretty normal proselyting day... until I accidentally broke my phone! Its been broken for a while but it was still somewhat usable. Unfortunately i dropped it one more time and that did the trick. We had to book it down to Frankfurt after that and pick up a new one. I was the last group of missionaries to arrive without a few phone though, so I actually got one for free which was a super nice surprise and an early Christmas gift. 

Christmas Eve! We got together at church and had a small devotional. After that we went to a little Phillipino member Michelle's house with the sisters and a couple other people and had a FEAST. She cooked an insane amount of food, including her famous freid chicken and tons of other things. After we feasted we sung karaoke for a while till we had to go home. That was super fun! 

On Christmas day we spent the whole day with a member family named the Titzes. They're a German-American family so we got to do some German things like eat raclette and some American things like drink egg nog and eat French toast. It was awesome to spend Christmas with a family, they basically adopted us for a day, they even had gifts and stockings prepared for the 5 of us that serve in Wetzlar. 

Today was the 3rd day of Christmas in Germany, as well as PDay so we spent a little time with an old lady in the ward who cooked some Knoodle and Gulash for us. We also watched a movie over Zoom as a mission, we watched Escape From Germany which was super cool! Its a church movie based on a true story how a missionary during World War 2 was in charge of finding 30 scattered missionaries serving in Germany with basically no directions at all between Frankfurt and the Netherlands in just a few days. 

Mosiah 5:7-8

"And now, because of the covenant which ye have made ye shall be called the children of Christ, his sons, and his daughters; for behold, this day he hath spiritually begotten you; for ye say that your hearts are changed through faith on his name; therefore, ye are born of him and have become his sons and his daughters. 

And under this head ye are made free, and there is no other head whereby ye can be made free. There is no other name given whereby salvation cometh; therefore, I would that ye should take upon you the name of Christ, all you that have entered into the covenant with God that ye should be obedient unto the end of your lives"

Something we learned from President Cropper the other day is that we are all unconditionally children of our Heavenly Father. He made us, so we are his children. Becoming a child of Christ however is our own choice, and we become spiritually begotten of him when we enter into a covenant with him. The first one is baptism, and that is our job as missionaries- to help people realize their relationship with Christ abd to become a Child of Christ through baptism and further covenants we make in the temple.

Much love!

Elder Tage Rex

I'm terrible at pictures. Here is one of one of my companions singing "Snowman" by Sia