I love the gospel. Dont you? Its so eternally glorious and brings so much happiness. Why? because when you believe in Christ and know that through him we can be clean and filled with joy, through his sacrifice we can be with our families forever...we can get through any trial or hard time because we know we have a loving Heavenly Father who wants the best for us....who is helping us grow. So...if youre going through a hard time, strengthen your testimony of your Saviour Jesus Christ and know that through him it will all be okay in the end....and if its not okay, its not the end. :) I am feeling so blessed to be serving a mission right now, the Berlin mission is a special mission, the biggest in Europe and getting bigger over 200 missionaries in our mission! and I get to be one of them...wow. So great.
Im especially pumped because we had Zonekonferenz on Friday and President taught us about vision and effort. He read to us the dedicitory prayer from 1975 and we talked about the promises promised to the land of Germany and the missionary work here. We are already seeing huge blessings, our mission is higher then average in almost every aspect, and we have so many people with baptisimal dates, now we are working towards getting them to that date. That is our plan right now with Michael and Bürcan, Miak and Ruth... Seglinde and Aloysious as well, and they are all making progress and if they arent we aren't wasting our time trying to pull teeth and push them to keep committments because after seeing and experiencing people like Hany and Schwester Zimmer and now Michael and Bürcan, there are people that are dying to learn how to live the gospel and to find the truth. So we are working hard to find those people. One of the differences president made is he got rid of 'ballards' not sure if there are any missionaries reading this but that is HUGE! Haha, yep instead of talking to a minimum of 20 people and then making out an appointment, we now just measure the new appointments and will report at least 7 new appointments a week. Anyway enough with the logistics, Im just stoked about the bar being raised and the new commitment we have to work hard.Bürcan is doing awesome, he's read through 2 Nephi and called the other day to ask us if there was anyway we could make his baptism earlier because he had told his boss that he had a BIG appointment on the 18 of September (which was his original date) and apparently his only other coworker is getting married that day, so he was very flustered and then asked us if we could move it...so now he is preparing to be baptized on September 4th!! Hes such a great guy and his committment to the Lord and finding the truth is so strong. We taught him the plan of salvation yesterday with Maik with us and it was awesome, by the end he said....you answered all my questions with this plan (he had been soooooo confused by talking to the jws and knew they were false) and he was just beaming by the end of the lesson and said he believed it was true but would still pray about it that night. Yeaaaah!
It was then pouring....POURING....at the end of our lesson, looked like, i dont even know, just so much water, haha, constant HUGE rain drops, and as we were walking through it avoiding puddles to head back to the bahns (steet cars) Bürcan quickly asked, so what time of day will the baptism be? What do I have to bring? haha, I just got so excited and overwhelmed with humility being able to be the missionary who gets to help him find out the truth, it was awesome to see this is all he is thinking about and what he is excited to do. We also called Michael to find out how he is doing (he is out of town for the next week) and he said hes doing perfect, he said he's completely changed his lifestyle and hasnt touched a cigarette since we taught him the Word of Wisdom 2 weeks ago, he said he's feeling heathier and happier. I then asked him how he is feeling about his baptism... he said, since ive been reading in the Book of Mormon and know that it is true, when I come back I want to be baptized....we had pushed his baptism back before because he was leaving for 3 weeks, and we wernt sure about him being able to quit smoking, but it looks like we'll have to move his baptism up as well!!!
There is so much joy in being able to help people change their lives...Maik the other day asked us (our investigator about 25, party kid who wants to change his life) he asked us, do you really come hear voluntarily? you payed to be here to do this all day?? and when we explained the joy of helping people make changes in their lives to be happier, he seemed to understand and said in his prayer (probably the 3rd prayer hes every said in his life) help me to change to be a better person. . yeah Maik, its so worth it to help someone realize they can pray for that, and then change. Hope that made sense, either way you should see I am overwhelmed with excitement about the work here and the people here!
This last pday we played soccer and football with all the missionaries in our zone, there were only 4 of us sisters and it was hilarious, we were the captians and we had huge elders protecting us as the quarterbacks etc, it was so funny. It was amazing to me to go from that environment to zonekonferenz to see all the same missionaries dressed up as servants of the Lord and us teaching each other about how to better make out appointments and be better teachers of the restored gospel of Christ. What an incredible work. I love it. It was also neat to see 3 of the other Sisters who were in my MTC group....we are the older sisters now, and people are training and its neat to share all the experiences we've had. With new Golden sisters there...I tausched for a day to Cottbus with a new golden named Sister Openshaw from California, it was neat working with a new golden and to show her another style of misisonary work, and we got a long really really well, she reminded me of Ros Collett, and we laughed a lot.. We taught a cool kid named Björn and he believed that Joseph Smith saw Christ and Heavenly Father..and was excited to have found the truth and was excited for his baptism on Okt 1st. Woot.
Those are my random thoughts and feelings at the time, sorry a little scatterbrained, just so excited and blessed to have a knowlegde of how to get happiness and get to share this knowledge with the people here looking for it!
Hope you have a stellar stellar week and Congratulations to my bestie Syd who got engaged!! and Natalie who got MARRIED!!! Together Forever.....thats what Im here for teaching people about how they can too have that eternal love and joy foreverrrrrrrrrrrrrr, through the gospel and living it 100%. Yay, what an incredible eternal plan our heavenly father has for us. Lets not forget to thank him for it and show him our love by living the gospel...not just knowing it, or knowing about it, but LIVING it and showing our committment and gratitude for it. I will if you will. :) Happy Monday, talk to you soon!
Liebe grüße, Sister Rasmussen
No comments:
Post a Comment