"The Moth Shall Eat Them Up"

If you think that that's prideful or sinful mom, you should read Alma 26. That's pretty cray cray that Jonathan is about to head out on his mission, I'm starting to feel old (in terms of mission age, not necessarily literal age, tehee). Uh oh Andy, at this rate you're gonna start running out of excuses for not being constantly surrounded by babes. I look forward to the day that we can dominate frisbee together once again. Yeah Dad, I think that's the way the Old Testament has to be read, sadly. The temple bug seems like a good bug to have, hopefully it doesn't go away. That's funny, this week at zone training meeting President Fingerle said something pretty similar, he talked about the similarities between the characteristics of a successful missionary and a successful parent.

It Looks Like Matt Shrunk for This Picture

So this week was pretty solid. We met with Frau Heumann again, and are starting to teach her the 5th lesson. I think it's the 2nd time I've ever taught anything from the 5th, unfortunately we don't seem to always make it that far with our investigators, haha. It's interesting, the other lessons are more about preparing for baptism, whereas the 5th is more preparing for what will happen after baptism. We have another appointment with her tomorrow, which is when she gets her work schedule for July. As a nurse she typically has to work every other weekend (including Sundays), so we'll see if she'll be able to make it on July 2nd. We're hoping and praying, and after talking to President Fingerle about her, we feel even more confident that she is ready. All that's left to do is wait.

On Wednesday we rode the train up to Nienburg, a city on the north end of our area to help a less active member fix up his apartment. Gotta say...I'm not really the clean-freak kind of person, but if I were to live in such a dirty apartment I'd be pretty miserable. First he wanted us to replace a few smaller rugs in his living room with a bigger one in the dungeon, err...basement. So we carried it outside and laid it out in the church parking lot (he lives right next to the now-closed church building. Nienburg used to be it's own area). What had once supposedly been a very nice rug (the member insisted that it was) was now the all-you-can-eat buffet of a few dozen moths. Apparently it had been chilling in the basement of his apartment for 2 years or so. So remember kids, "lay up yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt." Or maybe this one is better: "For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool. But my righteousness shall be forever, and my salvation from generation to generation." Those scriptures make a lot more sense to me now. Anywho, though that didn't work out too well, we were at least able to clean things up a little bit in his apartment.

Aside from that, we also had zone training meeting this week, which consists of the zone meeting together to receive training (crazy, I know). The Zone Leaders talked about a new idea for working with members, "100 names in 30 minutes." They brought a member with them and pretty much did a live demonstration for us. Pretty much the goal is to have a short 30 minute power visit with a member, share a quick spiritual thought, and then try to help them write down a list of 100 names, asking questions like "who knows you're a member" or "what are the names of your neighbors," anything that can help them think of names. Afterwards at another appointment you meet with the same member again and discuss different things that can be done to help these 100 people: send a book of mormon, send the missionaries, invite to an activity, etc. The demonstration ended up being a little awkward, as the member kept getting distracted, but he still got a solid 41 names written down. So we decided we'd give it a shot this week and got an appointment for next Friday. Yikes, felt like I was kind of ranting there.

But yeah, don't get eaten by any moths this week. Have a good one!

Elder Larsen