Attack the Day

Yeah Mom, you were accurate about me having a bit of indecision, but I think that's passed. My new return date is October 6th and I'll be starting studies in January. As for what happens in between, we'll see. Yes it most certainly is frustrating at times when people don't accept what we know 100% will help them. On Monday we knocked on doors and talked to people on the street for 5 or 6 hours...not one person was interested. It's hard and it hurts but I know that I tried and I know that God appreciates my efforts. Obviously there are things I can do better but Elder Sabin of the Seventy who visited the mission this week said that if we've tried, we've succeeded, and I think that's definitely true. Boy Lisa, I sure am jealous. Nothing more exciting than meeting the fairy king. I'm with you on looking forward to warm weather Andy, we're hoping to start up a sport evening thing sometime in the near future here. The youth in this city aren't typically immediately interested in being talked to about God, but pretty much everyone likes playing soccer. Wow Joey, sounds like you've got Marty going on the right path. At this rate he's going to beat me, Andy and Lisa. That's a good attitude, Joey. I should be grateful that we had enough appointments for three to be able to fall out in the first place. Good to hear you guys are still rocking the temple work Dad. I'll have to put the pedal to the metal if I'm going to keep up on my side of the work over here.

So we changed our pday to Wednesday this week in order to go to the Temple, since the Freiberg Temple is closed on Mondays. It was pretty dang awesome. When we came in the temple staff was low on manpower, so we acted as witnesses for baptisms. The temple worker there said we must have been help sent from heaven, because they had had no idea what to do with their shortage of workers. Then we were able to go through the whole set of ordinances for family names; if I'm not mistaken this was actually my first time having my own names for the temple. During our time there I happened to run into members from three of my previous areas, Stadthagen, Hildesheim and Werdau. The Freiberg Temple makes Germany seem a whole lot smaller. All in all it was pretty much the bomb.

Earlier this week, or I guess last week we went to Berlin for a conference with Elder Sabin of the seventy. He's a master when it comes to scriptures and one-liners, one being "attack the day!" It's pretty easy to just drift through each day and get caught in the rut of doing the same things every day. But it has been helpful in the last few days to really pray for the desire to do missionary work and to remind myself of why I'm here. Hopefully I can keep it up; after these kinds of meetings I always feel pumped for a few days but there's always the danger of going back to where I was before if I don't do something about it.

Speaking of ruts...we're still trying to get Schwarzenberg out of one. We found a guy last week who we were able to teach the restoration to and there was some definite interest, we're just working on getting around his busy schedule to set up another appointment. Though we aren't yet having a ton of obvious success, I'm happy. We're working hard, trying to be better and God is happy with our efforts. There are always little miracles that happen day by day.

I think that's all I've got for this week...have a good one!

Elder Larsen