Melchisedec, King of Salem

Merhaba. (Turkish for Hello there)

Almost from the beginning of my time in Tiergarten we've been looking
for an opportunity to meet someone who one of our investigators
believes to be the Old Testament prophet Melchisedec. After many
debates of if he actually existed, what his nationality would be and
what kind of things he would talk about, we finally met him. The
opportunity presented itself on Thursday. Silvio had requested a
French Book of Mormon to give to a friend and he told us we could
bring it to McDonalds during his meeting with Melchisedec. So we came
by and I was very disappointed to learn that this would-be King of
Salem was just a skinny, white, German dude. As we came in he told us
to sit on the armrests of the chair across from him, so that our
energies could be aligned and we could enter a state of being that
allows conversation between us and a Heavenly being like him. After
that he basically just rambled without pause for half an hour about
nonsense ranging from Norse Gods (Thor, Odin, Freya, etc.) being real
to McDonald joints being special connections between heaven and earth.
We haven't quite reached a conclusion as to whether he's just crazy, a
manipulator, a drugee or all of the above. At any rate I can now add
Melchisedec to the list of people from the Bible who I've met.

Despite the ridiculousness of our Old Testament friend, our investigator Silvio is still at a crossroads of deciding whether to continue meeting with us or if he wants to keep going to Melchisedec, which normally wouldn't seem to be a difficult decision but Silvio is rather attached to Melchisedec because in a time where Silvio was having a really rough time with his family and needed help he ran into Melchisedec, who offered to be his "spiritual leader." At any rate we'll just have to be patient and supportive of Silvio and do whatever we can to help him make the right decision.

Aside from that we met with someone else whose name we've been hearing
for a long time, a guy named David. Our first encounter with him was
as we got Facebook, he sent us a friend request and he constantly
posted LDS stuff on Facebook. We set up an appointment for Thursday
before Institute, and on Thursday morning he started posting things
about how mormons are racist and he blocked us on Facebook. We tried
going by his house once, tried messaging him a few times and after no
success we pretty much gave up. Well a few weeks later a member in the
ward called us and asked about him so we decided to try one more time.
He answered, agreed to meet that day and we actually had a pretty
solid lesson. He knows a ton about the church and he told us he's
gotten over his objections and wants to start preparing himself for
baptism. He then proceeded to go to a fireside on Saturday (he just
saw it on Facebook, we didn't even invite him ourselves), he came to
church on Sunday, he's coming to family home evening today and we have
an appointment tomorrow...so things are looking pretty good so far 🙂.

Last big news of the week is we got transfer calls yesterday, Elder
Mehr and I are staying in Tiergarten, which was a relief. I wasn't
feeling ready to leave Berlin quite yet, and as long as I don't get
emergency transferred (it's happened to me twice already, you never
know) I'll have spent more time in Tiergarten than any other area on
my mission.

My time's up, hope you all have a great week and avoid being
manipulated by Old Testament prophets 😊

Elder Larsen