November 4, 2013

So this week was pretty good. We went up to Hamburg for a mission tour. There we learned a lot from Elder Patrick Kearon (I'm not exactly sure what his calling is. He's in the presdidency of the second quorum of the 70 I think). It was really good. It was the entire western half of the mission together. It was crazy seeing so many misisonaries all at once. We now have 280 missionaries in our mission, and we had half of them in Hamburg on Wednesday. None of the concepts were really 'new'... but things were reemphasized and I felt spiritually uplifted through that experience. There are so many new things that have been given to missionaries and members to work together. It's really unbelieveable that there is still such a difficult tim ehere in Germany to get that done. This week was the first time that we had 'ward council' here in Minden. We were finally able to address a couple of the points that we have wanted to talk about for the last month or so... blah. Haha. I'm just glad that it happened.

It is so strange being able to talk about going home and to have the thought 'hmm... I can wait that long'. Whenever someone asks how long I've been on the mission I say 'about a year and a half'... but that point is actually long gone! ahh! weird. Elder Jason Godfrey just got home like last week (I went to school with him at Madison). I'm pretty sure that Conner Hoffmann will be going home soon, and I'm fairly certain that Tyson Marsden is back as well. Time has flown by and continues to go at an excellerating pace. I have a bunch of things that I have written down on a bucket list. It should be a lot of fun seeing how things play out.

Finally, yes. I can grow hair on my face! woohoo! It's pretty awesome. except I don't know how much I can actually grow... because I'm a missionary and I can't exactly just go without shaving for a week.

Elder Christensen is really a great change for me. There have been so many improvements. We have begun organizing all of the people's contact information that we have and tried to start visiting them... but it looks like 90% of the people have moved... and the 10% of people that are probably still there are never home. We have now begun to move our focus on contacting/finding the people who hav ealready been found by others and put more emphasis on finding new people ourselves. It hasn't brought too much success yet... but I feel like things can only go upward.

Today we went to a funeral from a member in our ward who died at 90. There was a small luncheon at the church afterwards and that was a good opportunity to talk to some of the people who don't often come to church (or who don't ever come to church). Since half of the ward is related anyway, practically everyone in the ward was there. In the church in Germany there needs to be a lot more growth from outside the church, more convert baptisms. Sure, it's good to grow from the inside... but that's not fast enough... and it's kinda weird to see the same name 8 times on a ward list :P haha. We're doing our best as missionaries to find people that we can teach, but if we're doing it alone it is a slow and monotonous work. If we work at it together, it will be not only more effective, but more fun for both sides.

I'm glad that you're so awesome and that I can always count on you! :D I've been doing a lot better lately. Hopefully it only continues to increase in intensity and joy.

Thank you for everything!

Love,
Elder Braden Thorkelson