June 25, 2013

Hallo Familie!

  This last week in Forst was pretty good. We still are trying to figure out how to use our time most effectively here in Forst. It is going to be a pretty difficult time. We have 1 investigator here right now, she's a single mom with 3 kids. 2 of them still live with her. She is really open, and still has a long way to go, but she will do great. The ward is really involved in bringing her in and integrating her into the ward.

  Ah! so did you all see the announcement for missionary work?? It explains about how missionaries will be using internet and media to do missionary work, and how the missionaries should do more of the teaching instead of finding. It will be a lot more effective to have the members do the finding. It's pretty difficult here because the members often feel like they have talked to all of their friends and feel discouraged. It's going to be an interesting change to missionary work.

  The first thing that we did after we arrived here was (as usual) clean! woohoo! The floors are now so much cleaner than before! woohoo! We live on the 3rd floor... it's sometimes pretty rough climbing all of the stairs every day... but it's not bad. We also have bikes, so we ride them everywhere... Oh! speaking of bikes... we rode them to the Bahnhof (train station) and parked them as we went to Görlitz for our p-day. When we returned, we found that the back tire of Elder Miles had been slashed! ahhh! lame. It was sad... and after that, we were told by our ward mission leader that we shouldn't park our bikes there...whoops! It's a learning experience.

  The ward here has a ton of activities. English class and volleyball on tuesdays, choir practice on wednesday nights, and fußball (soccer) on saturdays. Aside from the ward activities, we have also service in the Forster Tafel, a soup kitchen, like I had done in Kassel.

  I think the hardest part here will be finding new people to teach, it seems like everyone knows who we are and what we're talking about. It's going to be pretty interesting. I'm not sure exactly when we will be able to implement the internet in our finding and contacting efforts, but I think it will help us to find more solid investigators.

  My time here with Elder Miles has been awesome. He is a very level-headed thinker. He wants to study to be a therapist. He's going to help me so much with my personal progression. It will be awesome.

  I received your package! you all are awesome :) I love you all so much! I loved the swedish fish :D I will be working on sending off a couple of awesome german things back to you in the near future... so I'm going to need your new address

  Anyway... I'm doing great. Things are going really well. Thank you for all of the support!

Love,
Elder Braden Thorkelson