Du Bist in Dunkelheit!

Guten Morgen!

That seems pretty accurate Lisa, especially when we've been born and raised in Provo, it's 

sometimes easy to take the gospel for granted. It's quite the change coming into an area 

where the number of members is only slightly more than 0%. It's a mixture of refreshing, 

exciting and overwhelming. But on the other hand, wherever you go people are people. I 

forgot to answer you mom, we use our iPads basically for gospel library, maps and notes. 

Maybe one day we'll have Facebook, who knows. You guys should stop dying...Joey's head 

trying to explode, Mom getting her tooth pulled, Lisa and the chillun getting sick, Andy 

getting wasted at basketball. Keep workin on that German Joey. Once I have German down 

President Fingerle said I can work on my Spanish again. Then we can both have a solid 3 

languages.

Another busy (in other words, great) week! The rundown is basically caroling, an interesting 

Muslim dude, a trip to the temple and a trainer/trainee conference. So: caroling. In an effort to

use tons of Christmas pass along cards, we got some of our zone together to sing some jolly ol 

songs. I hoped I'd be able to hide from it, but there was no escape...I was one of the 2 card passers. 

It was one of the few times in my life that I've wished to have better singing skills. In all honesty, 

it wasn't bad at all! Most people rejected my efforts to shove a card in their face, but in the end, 

along with giving away quite a few cards, I was also able to have some pretty nice conversations. 

I talked to a couple students, and it was basically the first time I've ever been entirely alone in a conversation with non-member Germans. Granted, I'll probably never see them again, but it was 

still pretty cool. After 2 days of caroling (45ish minutes each day) we got a solid 250 or so cards passed out. Awesome stuff!

So there we are going to visit a less active, when a very Muslim man came up to me and started rambling about our religion being false and was convinced that if we came to his house and watched this video that we'd want to change. Of course after politely listening to him for a solid few minutes, he refused to listen to anything we had to say, and just started calling out, "du bist in Dunkelheit!" (You are in darkness). Lots of interesting people.

Temple trip! Our ward mission leader drove us and one of our German investigators as well as 

two other elders and one of their investigators to the Freiberg temple, which is unfortunately under construction. But there are 2 sister missionaries that have a little presentation thingy where they 

talk about the temple and it actually went really well. The investigators were pretty emotional 

afterwards. President Fingerle has a big focus on the temple, so it'll be great when the temple is finally open again.

At Trainer/Trainee Conference

Training conference was great, got to see how my ol mtc buds are doing. Elder Green still gets his letters of eternal love from his girlfriend every week, Elder Racine already has a baptism under his

belt and Elder Bennett is still Elder Bennett. My main takeaway from it all is that mission work (and life in general) is really all about love. In terms of a language, someone from the 70 said that learning a language and having the gift of tongues isn't an event, but a journey of loving the people. Someone pointed out how the description of God and the description of charity have a lot of similarities. Loving others more than ourselves is maybe the best way for us to become more like God. His work and his glory is for other people to be happy!

So love people! God loves us perfectly, and naturally when we share that knowledge with others, God will bless us. Have a great week!

Elder Larsen

PS Also fun fact, if all the inactives started coming again, the size of the ward would be more than doubled. Imagine that happening in Provo...