Elder Tage Rex: Germany Frankfurt Mission

  This week has been crazy!  So we started working in our new area of Wiesbaden. The city is awesome, huge compared to almost anywhere else I've served, so we've been able to do a lot of exploring.  On Friday we reached out to all the leaders in our congregation and asked if we could meet them and share a spiritual thought, and some people responded and we got an appointment that same night with a family from Chile! They were awesome. We also were able to find a lot and explore a lot of the new city. We found a sick guy named Wassim! He's from Tunisia and is super interested. We were able to give him a church tour and he came to church on sunday. He came to a board game activity we held on tuesday as well. He said he's been in Germany for 9 months and never felt welcome anywhere until he came to church, and that there's something telling him he needs to learn more about what we know. He's also just a super fun guy! On Saturday we texted and called probably 200 p...

  We got transfer news on Saturday! Elder McCann (our trainee) and i got a call from president. Get this: we are staying together- but opening up a brand new area in Wiesbaden!! That was the last thing I expected. We are starting from ground 0- 0 people to teach, 0 connections with the Ward, 0 contacts in our phone. We are super hyped to just start building it up. Im also not a ZL anymore, so i can focus We are also in one apartment with 4 elders so it's going to be an adventure for sure. This is most likely my last area on the mission! Other than that there isn't much new.  We met a super cool guy in Gießen the other day who has spent his whole life researching and trying to find the truth of God in religion. He has learned Arabic and Hebrew just so he could read the Karan and the Torah. He moved to India just to look into Hinduism. Now he reffered himself to the missionaries in Gießen in order to find truth from it, because of all the Christian denominations the Church of Je...

  Here are the good things: - Elder McCann got his wisdom teeth out and is now recovered! We got some awesome videos of him. The German dentist is pretty brutal though. His face looked like a chipmunk for 4 days  - we found some cool people! I talked to a guy who said no at first, but as I was walking away he asked me where I was from. I told him America, and then he asked which state. I told him Oklahoma. He then starts speaking really good English to me and apparently went on a school exchange in Stillwater Oklahoma like 30 years ago?? What are the chances? That's was a really fun conversation. Figured he's probably an OSU fan though so I didn't get his phone number.  - we had an awesome day at church on Sunday, our newly baptized member Okwuudili showed up without getting a ride with someone (the person he usually goes with is gone) so he traveled upwards of two hours to church. He missed the sacrament portion, so we were able to do a mini sacrament with him afterwards...

 It's been a busy week! We started off with an exchange in Koblenz from Thursday to Saturday. They had been struggling, but we were able to help them out and help them start up their area again. Koblenz is a beautiful city though, there's tons of castles, fortresses, cathedrals and palaces and the Rhine river runs through the whole place.  We had a little time in our area on Saturday to work, and then we had church on Sunday. It was fast Sunday and it was pretty nice. We visited a older lady for dinner and had schnitzel! Monday-Tuesday was another exchange, this time in Friedberg with the media Elders. They run a ton of stuff like social media ads and crunch lots of numbers and spreadsheets. Unfortunately we don't know how to do any of that so we just took them outside to find some people. I was with Elder Chapman, who is a Turkish called missionary and we met a ton of Turkish speakers so that was super cool! Tuesday was the peak of fasching (a.k.a. Karnival) so we came hom...

  Eine gute Woche hatten wir.  Hier sind die highlights: From Friday to Saturday Elder McCann and I went on an exchange with Elder Parrish. We showed him around Gießen and had an insane day on the streets. The place we usually go finding at is pretty sketchy but on that day it was way crazier than normal. We were able to find some cool people though so that is a plus! We also visited a Chilean-German family which was fun.  Church on Sunday was awesome! We had 6 friends show up. One of them was Younes, a hilarious Persian guy that I might've mentioned last week. He moved to another city the day after though which was super sad. He gave us huge hugs and we took pictures together.  One crazy miracle on Sunday was that Sonia came to church! We weren't going to pressure her to come because she literally JUST had her baby. But somehow she coordinated it all on her own and got a ride from another family to church! We had no idea she was coming and then she walks in the door...

  Grüß euch! We've had a good week. We started out with an exchange with the Kassel Elders which was fun, I was with Elder Bedell. Unfortunately our lessons all fell through that day but we found some really awesome people to teach as well! It was also valentines day so we bought our companions roses (pic below). It was a good day.  Side note- I think I finally get what people mean by adults have no idea what they're doing, they just pretend they do. As a zone leader I still feel like I don't know what I'm doing- but the younger missionaries all expect me to know what I'm doing and stuff, and it's a really weird feeling. I guess knowing what you're doing is relative. Sunday was a little stressful organizing all of our friends and trying to get them to church. It's always a headache because it's like 1.5 hours away from our city and we have to convince people to make the trek every week. We had 15 people confirm over phone call the night before that t...

  We had a pretty good week, had a lot of meetings but we were able to get good work done as well. Highlights: - We had an apartment inspection and got an A+ - had MLC, the mission has increased in like 300% in every catagory since I got in the mission, it's actually pretty crazy to see. We used to find 100 people a week, have like 75 lessons with members present, and have around 100 people at church. Now we are finding upwards of 300 people, 250 member lessons, and 350 people at church every week. We also went from having 30 people on baptismal date to about 70 at a time. It's really cool to see the Lord hasten his work! - MLC is also fun because President basically just drops wisdom on us the whole time on how we can be effective leaders. He was the CEO of the 2nd largest hospital organization in the US and just has the most insane amount of knowledge from being a boss the last 40 years of his life. - Zone Conference happened, and it was super awesome. Always very spiritual....