HAPPY FATHERS DAY DADDIO!
Hope everyone had a lovely week, we sure did, emotional too. It was crazy packing up Sister Scrugg's stuff and then picking up Sister Madsen too! I was full of anticipation and sadness and excitment and relief and joy. See!? A lot of emotions at one time, but luckily through it all we just had a blast! It was weird taking Scruggsie to office, but so exciting too, she was an amazing missionary and I am so honored I got to serve with her...twice!
Sister Madsen is super great! I love her already. We laugh a lot and she is a hard worker. She is from Mapleton, which we all know is down by Springville...not up by Farmington. (oops) Haha, she is one of 9 kids and they all sound awesome. She has served in Magdeburg, Greifswald, Celle and now here! She and I went into the MTC on the same day and she was fast tracked. Its so awesome to be in the middle of our missions commited to the work and motivated to see miracles and work hard for them. We are seeing so much success here (shh dont want to jinx us) but there are so many people, almost too many and they are split between 2 cities so our biggest challenge is just figuring out when to meet with them all! Out of all the challenges we could be having, Ill take it, just excited to see where the Lord leads us and hopefully learn how to master it.
Did I tell you about Alishar? He is a student who is studying in Frankfurt Oder who talked to US on the train a couple weeks ago. He is from Germany and his mother is from Kazakhstan. We taught him a first lesson and gave him the Book of Mormon 2 weeks ago and then last week he came to scripture class. It was actually a funny story, we called and he said 'didnt you say there was something in Frankfurt tonight?' and we said 'Yeah scripture class! We'll meet you by the stadion bus stop ten minutes before 19:00....' so then around 17:00 we got a call from him and he apparently got the times mixed up and came 2 hours early! haha, it was fine and he then came laster, but really eager right!? Hes a super smart guy and is in culture studies. He then came out to Eisenhüttenstadt to meet with us and Danita (the daughter of the branch president) was a great joint teach, we talked about the Restoration and he then comitted to pray about it and was excited to come to church next week! Wahooo I love this work.
Another small miracle was when we got rejected by this younger guy who we talked to about God...no thats not the miracle, so we thought it was a pointless lesson and then at the end we asked, well who do you know who would be interested in meeting with us and learning more about God, and without hesitation he said, yeah my step dad. So we got his information and called him up a couple days later and he made out an appointment! That appointment was yesterday and it was amazing! The son brought him the Book of Mormon we had given him and he had already started reading it. We had an awesome lesson and the spirit was so strong... he said he had stopped believing in God when his brother died when he was little but he had a desire to find out if he was there, he wanted to believe in him just didnt think his prayers were being heard. It was such an honor to get to be the missionary to tell him, Yes you do have a Heavenly Father who loves you, who loves all of us and wants the best for us. As we do what he suggests or actually commands us to do then we can clearly see his hand in our lives and can feel his love overwhelm us. It was a great lesson and he said the closing prayer. He was excited to read the Book and was eager to make out another appointment to let us know what would happen.
It was just a testimony builder to me of how nothing we do is wasted when we are following the spirit, one could have thought that appointment with Danielo was a waste, he was really closed and didnt want to believe, but then through him we found his dad and he is now feeling the love of his Heavenly Father having learned how to communicate to him. Bah what a wonderful work isnt it!?!
One of the biggest miracles I have seen on my mission was the 'keeper key' we got yesterday. Our goals in this mission are, To find and teach, to baptize and keep. KEEPING is the work we do with new converts, members and less actives. A keeper key is what we get when a less active comes back to church after having been gone for at least 90 days....or in this case 9 years. Marcel Peters is a member who was baptized 12 years ago and has really fallen away from his faith. He has been taught by missionaries a lot in the past few years and we have met with him almost every week for the past 6 months... and he was taught a lot before that. He has been coming to scripture class but not to church. We have invited him a lot before but there was always something standing in his way. . . Well you can tell he has been thinking a lot about the gospel in the past few weeks as he called the branch president and asked if he could order the liahona. He then commited to come to the ward party. He had a great time and you could tell he felt very loved. We again invited him to come to church the next day, and he said he would. My faith was tried as I convinced myself this time it was different than all the other times he said he would come. I almost teared up as we walked around the corner and saw Marcel standing there at 8:15 with Manfred waiting for us to take the train to church. It was such a miracle and he loved it. We ate at Rosel and Rowland Rudows garden after church and you could see that Marcel felt like he was home.
Theres a glimpse at some of the cool experiences we had this week, we didnt have time to go grocery shopping so weve been eating a lot of cherries (everyone has cherries) and some homemade bread the Scharfs gave us. haha, we are working hard and being obedient and laughing all day long. Thats how a mission should be done I think, I highly reccommend it. But I guess thats the same thing as real life isnt it. Just doing what you know you should, working your hardest at whatever your righteous goals are and laughing the whole time. Hope its working out for you. If not, just pray for it, Heavenly Father will send you SOFORT (immediately) the answer you need if you earnestly want one.
Have a happy, safe, joyful, successful, spiritual, exciting, fufilled, lovely week!
I love you!
Sister Rasmussen
No comments:
Post a Comment