Turkish is a Delight

Yeah Mom, I'm pretty much famous. If only the people in Hildesheim were aware of it. Where did Brian and Stasia live in Turkey? I'll bet there's some Turkish missionary around these parts that knows them. Yikes, it doesn't even seem like that long ago that Tessa left on her mission. Now I'm almost to my year mark. Scary stuff. Well theoretically Lisa, I'd like to develop the gift of tongues to the point that we can talk to each other in German and Turkish and understand each other...but at the moment for the most part we speak in English. Yeah I've discovered that in the mission, where there are those missionaries who take pride in being disobedient, especially when despite their lack of obedience they see lots of success. Your comment seems pretty spot on having to trust in the Savior. Sometimes we need patience and faith to see the blessings that come from being obedient, even when they don't always appear immediately or when we want them to. Don't get my hopes up too much, Andy, because now I'm definitely expecting a juicy email for next week. I think the last real juicy email I got from you was your encounter with a certain returned sister missionary. Boy Heidi before you mentioned my birthday it hadn't really occurred to me that it's coming up in 10 days. I don't really feel like I'm ready to accept the age of 19, so I'll probably just stay 18 this year. Gotta say Joey, I've complained a bit about the cold summer here in Germany, but in comparison to the hottest summer in 100 years in Spain I think I'll stick with the cold side. Keep up the temple work Dad, sounds like pretty awesome stuff.

Well this week was kind of all over the place. On Wednesday we spent most of the day in Hamburg at a Zone Conference, where we were taught by Elder Charles of the Seventy. Lots of cool stuff there. A big thing that stuck out to me was trying harder to reach heavenward in finding situations; sometimes I get in the zone of just walking along, using the same approach and same questions, watching the minutes go by, rather than really focusing on loving the people and trying to see them as God sees them. I also got to see my bros from the mtc, Elders Fritz and Green, not to mention the one and only Elder Peatross!  So that was pretty solid. Then on Saturday we went to Berlin where we had a language training meeting, since now I'm apparently learning Turkish...and I thought German was a difficult language. Anywho, there we learned some ways that we can work together as a companionship despite not being able to speak the same language during lessons.

We had had a couple appointments earlier in the week which ended up being me teaching the lesson and afterwards telling Elder Johnson what happened. Certainly wasn't the best strategy. Hopefully we'll be able to take what we've learned and change things up so we can actually help each other in lessons. We were able to find a Turkish lady who had been an investigator, who was born in Germany but learned Turkish from her parents. At this point that's kind of all we have right now in terms of Turkish investigators. We're just gonna have to be patient and try whatever we can to find those being prepared by the Lord. It's definitely a unique and stretching experience, neither of us know entirely what we're doing, haha. I have no experience talking to/finding Turks, and Elder Johnson has no experience with openly proselyting. Good thing the Lord is patient with us, with His help I think we'll eventually figure this stuff out :).

That's about all I've got for this week, keep on keeping on! Love you!

Elder Larsen