Good Week

Yeah Mom, since we're the only missionaries in Tiergarten we just talk to everyone. Since there used to be a set of elders here that only focused on Spanish people there's a lot of potential in that department and it's obviously a bonus if we run into Spanish speaking people, but we talk to everyone. Right now of our 5 investigators right now, one is German, one is Latino, one is Chinese, one is Irish and one is Arabic. That would be pretty creepy Andy, dating a girl in my grade. But hey, I'm sure there are plenty of marriage hungry womanjis in that age group. I'm definitely looking forward to your dating stories, I'm pretty sure the last gem you've given me was that encounter with a certain returned missionary who knocked on your door. Fortunately Joey I've been lucky enough to not get pickpocketed. I've been somewhat wary in the last few days after last week's experience. I have however managed to lose a pair of gloves and a hat in public transportation back when I was in Berlin at the start of my mission. Nice to see that Marty's artistic skills are already better than mine.

I don't have a lot of time and am kind of lacking the desire to write much, but it was a good week :). Things are going well and we've got a pretty good amount of potential to work with. Good to hear from yall, keep being awesome.

Elder 'Teo Larsen

Berlin is a Blast

Fortunately Mom, we also teach in German. I was surprised to find that
we're the only missionaries in the area; back when I was here at the
start of my mission there were 6 in Tiergarten. Wenn du willst Lisa,
kann ich meine Briefe auch auf Deutsch schreiben. Yeah it's hard to
say what the reason is that peoples be after us. I guess in their
defense, their membership is going down and we aren't necessarily
supporting their cause. Machu Pichu, I'm looking forward to it bro.
Boy I won't be seeing Jacob in ages...cray cray. Heidi don't pretend
that Savannah is going to be old enough to be baptized when I get
home. Gracias Jose, espero que no muertes beim Skifahren. Thanks for
the prayers Dad, I know they aren't going unanswered.

Life back in Berlin is a blast. The whole atmosphere is just so much
different than in the smaller cities. I love it, but it does have some
disadvantages. For example on transfer day when I got into Berlin we
were with the zone leaders waiting for the last missionary to come in
to the train station, when a guy came up to us and was asking us for
directions. He was from some other country and we couldn't understand
him, but eventually we were able to help him get to where he wanted to
go. A minute or so later Elder Ausobsky, one of the zone leaders
noticed that his backback, that he had put by the rest of our luggage,
was missing. Right then a guy came up to us and said that the guy who
came to ask for directions was just a distraction so that a second guy
could come and snag the backpack. Luckily he had his wallet in his
jacket pocket...unluckily his iPad was in the bag. And even when we
saw the guy and tried to chase after him, the Berlin trainstation is
too massive, with too many trains going every direction to possibly
catch someone who has a minute lead on you. So yeah...you don't really
get that kind of excitement in quaint little villages.

But overall life in Berlin is pretty great. There's so much to do and
seemingly no time to do it, so we've stayed pretty busy the last few
days. And when we have a couple hours to do finding, all we have to do
is walk out of our apartment and Bam! People! Not something that I saw
often in my last few areas.

We had stake conference this week, so I got to see a lot of the
members from Neukölln, where I served at the start of my mission. It
was especially weird to see a couple of the kids who had grown like a
foot since the last time I saw them. The theme at the conference was
about family history, and the member of the Seventy who talked
compared doing work for our ancestors to the ghost army in Lord of the
Rings. Not bad.

Yeah, that's pretty much all I've got for this week. Hasta la vista baby.

Elder Larsen

Spanisch...jetzt geht's los (here we go)

Yeah Mom, it kind of just depends on where you are. In Schwarzenberg there's no university in our entire area, so most of the people we talk to aren't really in that age-group of wandering around engrossed in their phones. The thing here is that just randomly talking to people you don't know is kind of against the culture, which makes it pretty hard to open people up to the idea of letting us teach them in their homes. I've never really tried it, Lisa, but supposedly gargling water is supposed to help you roll your r's. Looks like Savvvyanuh is turning into a little Heidi Junior. The weather here is also getting pretty decent Andy. Just make sure you don't get all adventured out before I get home bro, save some place cool for me. Well Joey, I don't seem to be intelligent enough to decipher your analogy about faith being like a little nut, or what makes you want to have a hamburger at ripples. I do understand the feeling though, Germany hasn't quite figured out hamburgers yet. Yeah Dad, I can't say I'm in agreement with your weather preference, I've had enough of cold weather for a while.

Leipzig and Temple Zones

Saturday evening I got the bittersweet news that I'm being transferred. Bitter because 6 weeks in an area is pretty much nothing and I'll miss Elder Christoffersen (he be da bomb) but sweet because it's time for round 2 in Berlin, woohoooo! I'll be serving in Tiergarten, which is the middle part of the Berlin Stake. If I remember right there are several Spanish speaking members in the ward, also my new companion Elder Castillo is from Mexico, so now I have no excuse to not learn Spanish. It'll probably be a bit of an adjustment going back to trainee status in terms of the language, but I should be able to learn a ton. And it'll be nice to be back in a big city 😎.

Anywho, it was a pretty good week. The missionary work is funny sometimes in that one day this week we rang doors for hours and no one had interest and then the next day after 5 minutes we found two potential investigators. Aside from that we've been taking the youth of the ward out to visit the old single members in the ward, which has been pretty radical. Since missionaries aren't allowed to visit single women alone there are some members that haven't been visited for a few years, so they were happy to see us. There was one lady who had to ride a bike 8 or 9 miles through the freezing cold every week to get to church when she was younger...I just had to walk like 300 feet or ride in a car...

We've noticed sadly that the preachers of other churches in our area aren't particularly fond of Mormons. Every day we run into some new prejudice or half truth. "Your Book of Mormon can't save you!"  "Mormons don't let people of other faiths into their church buildings."  "We believe on Jesus Christ and only Jesus Christ. Not on Mormon."  It's sad and frustrating sometimes when people just aren't open to discovering the truth. But there's a nice scripture I read this week in the New Testament, Matthew 10, where Jesus calls the 12 Apostles. "And ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be saved." Since the beginning of the earth there have always been people who mock and ridicule the disciples of God and I'm flattered to be worthy of being mocked for being a member of the Lord's church.

Yeah, it'll definitely be an adventure going back to good ol' Berlin. Have a good week, homies.

Elder Larsen

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

Only Three Appointments Fell Out

Well Mom, though I sadly wasn't able to participate in the screech fest, we did have an eating appointment yesterday with a couple kids that reminded me quite a bit of Marty and Jake. The younger one was really small and I didn't really expect him to be able to really say much, but either he was a genius or older than he looked, because his English was probably about as good as mine. They're bilingual, the dad is German and the mom is American. Join the sick party, Lisa. It seems like everyone here is sick as well. We've had a few appointments fall through due to sickness and last Sunday church attendance was like half of what it's been the other weeks here. Hopefully that'll come to an end soon. Somehow through the mass sickness wave both here and in Werdau I've been able to stay healthy. Boy Andy, the clock is ticking...you're an old man now. So my return date if I extend would be October 6th, is that the week of the Dirty Devil? Yeah Heidi, President Fingerle said it wouldn't take more than the click of a mouse to let me extend. Hmm...if it's true that a boy invited Savannah to his birthday party that means Savannah's a bit further along than Andy is. That was a pretty good general conference talk, Dad. If there's any truth that needs to be spread among Germany it's that one about God being our perfectly loving father.

So I think we hit a new record this week in that only three of our appointments fell out. Most of them actually ended up working out, woohoo! All of our appointments this week were with people either older than 60 or younger than 15...which is something of a challenge. For the older generation the idea of there being one true church is really hard to grasp and for the younger generation worldly influences make it pretty difficult to live faithfully without support from the family.


A question I've asked probably thousands of times on my mission is "do you know anyone who would be interested in our message." This question has lead to a specific name I think twice on my mission...one of which was from this week. These two ladies gave us the name of a guy in an apartment building we were in front of, but after saying the name they couldn't hold back their laughter. So we were obviously pretty intrigued. Well it turns out this man, whose name they had given us had met with missionaries for some 15 years. The ward isn't too fond of him...to the point that they took his teaching record and shredded it so that missionaries would stop visiting him. But in all honesty so far he seems like a pretty nice guy. After talking to him a couple times he in turn gave us a referral of a lady in his apartment building who is interested in God, who we were able to talk to and invite to church. Anywho, that's the random story of the week...we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

The weeks get too mixed up for me to really remember what else happened these last few days and I'm also somewhat lazy when it comes to writing emails...so I think that's all I've got for this week. Have a good one!

Elder Larsen

Missionaries Be Scary

Well Mom I'm quite sorry to hear that you weren't able to dance it up on Saturday. I can only imagine how disappointing that must have been. I feel the same though about having to always be working on our faith and abilities...after 17 months of being on a mission there are still millions of things that have room for improvement. It's a good thing that God doesn't expect immediate perfection. It's rough Andy, I've only touched a frisbee like 5 times in the last year and a half. But it shouldn't take too long before the Larsen bros are out dominating again. The first time you were stuck with the same person for over 2 days? Didn't you go on a mission? I want to extend but I still need a thumbs up from President Fingerle. If I don't get it then maybe fall semester would be better...I had just remembered that a couple years ago fall semester started at the end of august and I figured I wouldn't have any breathing room. Hopefully by next week I'll have it figured out. Yeah Dad, if I'm able to extend it will be sometime in the first half of October that I get home. I also got an email today from the mission office that in the case that I do go for fall semester I'd be able to go home a week or two earlier, around August 20th. It kind of scares me that I'm to the point that I need to start figuring this stuff out.

This week was good, nothing too out of the ordinary happened. On Wednesday we had an exchange with the Elders in Freiberg. Freiberg is a pretty cool city, it's pretty much the Utah of Germany because of the Temple. You see random members all the time and everyone knows about the church...and more than just the "fact" that we have multiple wives. As of a couple weeks ago I've officially started learning Spanish (while on the mission), and in Freiberg I was able to have my first legitimate conversation in Spanish with a guy on the street. It was more like a weird combination of German and Spanish, but it was still pretty cool. Sadly our area in Schwarzenberg isn't really spanish-speaking central. There was also a guy in Freiberg that put a lot of effort into avoiding us; he crossed the street twice and started walking in the opposite direction to get away from us. Missionaries be scary.

We've got one pretty solid investigator at the moment, he's muslim but is very open and has lived in Germany for almost 20 years. It's been really interesting teaching him; I've discovered there's actually quite a few similarities between our religion and theirs--things that most Christian churches don't really have an understanding of, such as the pre-earth life and the spirit world. Obviously there are lots of differences as well, but it was still surprising to me. It's a little hard to stay on topic with him, but he's open and wants to be on the right path to return to God. We're hoping and praying for the best.

Not really anything else super exciting from this week, so...yeah, Tschüß out. Adios 🙂

Elder Larsen

Swell Week

It's hard to believe that there are 51 great grand kids in the Hall family, Mom. That's more people than there are members here in a 15 kilometer radius. Boy Lisa, if I had a baby sleeping on top of me like that through the night he'd probably end up falling on the floor after 5 minutes. Props to Joseph and JJ. Cray cray how many babies there are. Yeah Andy, I'm not 100% sure what the plan is with Abe, he's planning on starting with fall semester and I (just barely today) requested to be deferred until Winter semester. Still need to figure out what the plan is there. Joey, there are so many myths about the German language, I'm glad to put this one to rest. Typically Germans will only answer in detail to "how are you" if 2 requirements are met. 1) you're a good friend or associate and 2) they feel like talking. In other cases it's somewhat similar to english, just used less frequently and people aren't afraid to respond in the negative. Elder Christoffersen is from Worland, Dad. That's awesome that one of your converts from 38 years ago wrote a card for you.

This week was pretty swell. We're still having problems with fallen out appointments, but we've had some success with visiting former investigators. Ironically it hasn't been with the former investigators themselves, rather with people in the area who the Lord has been preparing. One former investigator said she was sick and that we could come by another time and as we rang the doorbells of the other people in the building, a man let us right in and we were able to teach the first lesson (which is pretty rare in Germany). We have another appointment with him this week and it turns out he's friends with the former investigator, so hopefully we'll be able to help both of them.

Another time, just yesterday we visited another contact in a tiny village who wasn't at home, but as we walked away we met an older lady and her daughter who had interest and we were able to make an appointment for today. It's cool how God blesses us in ways that we don't always expect.

Anywho I don't have much time left, but have a fantabulous week!

Elder Larsen