Provo Boy Week 5

This week was kind of all over the place. Tuesday I was on exchange in Erfurt with Elder Palmer, he's a good chap. The only problem was that night in Erfurt I got eaten alive by mosquitoes. Every time I fell asleep I'd get woken up by this awful buzzing in my ear and with each rude awakening the itch grew greater. Around 3 at night I woke up and it occurred to me I had forgotten to say a prayer before getting in bed so I prayed, went back to sleep and had no more problems that night. So that was a sweet little reminder of the power of prayer.

On Thursday we had Zone Conference and I was able to see some of the homies for one last time. Elder Fritz will soon be the last survivor from our little group that entered the MTC that fateful day on September 16th, 2015. The Conference was really solid though, it was focused on the Book of Mormon and President Fingerle went over some of the evidences of the truthfulness of it. It was emphasized that the only real way to know if it's true is through the Holy Ghost, but there are also many historical and geological evidences of its truth. It was interesting that we talked about that because it was just a couple weeks ago that we had talked to a man who insisted that there were no such evidences in favor of the Book of Mormon.

Elder Openshaw a few years ago did a student exchange thing in Meißen so after our Zone Conference (which was in Dresden, close to Meißen) we got permission to meet with some of his friends from the exchange, who know quite a bit about the Gospel and have shown interest in learning more. So that was pretty cool and we were able to overnight in Dresden with the one and only Elder Ausobsky. He's quite the stud.

On Friday we went from Dresden straight to Nordhausen, an area close to ours and did street contacting there with the other missionaries in our district. Finally at like 9:30 at night we got back to Jena. A little too much time sitting in a train for my fancy, but we survived.

Saturday we topped things off with a ward party at a member's house in Gera. Gera is a part of my old area Werdau, but when I had gotten to Werdau about a year ago there was some drama in the ward and some of the members in Gera stopped going to Werdau and starting going to Jena instead. So my former ward missionary leader in Werdau is now the second councilor in the Branch Presidency here in Jena. Kind of strange. At any rate it was pretty interesting being in Gera again.

Sunday I got to enjoy my last sacrament meeting in Germany as a missionary. I got to bid farewell to the members, most of them stay home for General Conference so it's likely I won't see many of them again. I'm excited though to end on the spiritual high of General Conference and take some nuggets of wisdom with me on my way home.

Anywho, Life is great. Y'all are great. Have a good one!

Elder Larsen