December 8, 2013

Hello!

  I'm glad that it's not so cold here yet :) haha. We are getting down to 3° every now and then. We did have snow for a couple of days. That was pretty interesting. There was a hurricane warning that told everyone to stay inside for a couple of days. So we ended up cleaning the apartment and organizing things for next week. There are some good news, We went out and did some finding and made out an appointment! woohoo! It feels good. In Germany it's sometimes difficult to want to go outside just because the chances of meeting someone who wants to learn or even just to talk about any aspect of religion are pretty slim. But in spite of that, we went out and found someone. It feels good and it rebuilds my faith in ourselves and in the Germans and in the Lord.

  It seems like Nikolaus is a bit different here in Minden. There were kids going door to door singing Christmas songs who had bags of candy! haha. So it seems like the German equivilant of Halloween... but more awesome.

  We had a lesson with a girl who was an exchange student in Utah for 10 months, and her mother and grandmother. It went pretty well. The daughter has a testimony of the gospel and comes to church nearly every week. The mother was asking some questions about Gleichberechtigkeit... equal rights for women in the church. Asking questions like 'why can't women be bishops or why can't a woman be prophet?' Which were really good questions that were pretty difficult to answer in a limited amount of time. I feel like we did leave behind a good impression from the church.

  At a member's house I was able to read some snippits of a book called Der Kleine Prinz (the little prince). It was a beautiful book that would be great for bed-time stories. I would highly reccomend it (provided that it's in English... which i am fairly certain it is, because it's originally a french book and if there's a German translation, there's probably an English translation.) Have bed-time stories with the (big) little boys :) It would be awesome.

  This next week we have our christmas zone conference in Hamburg. It will be good to see a bunch of missionaries. When we went to go buy our ticket, we got the cheapest one... which happened to actually be the First Class ticket! woohoo. So we will be going in style and luxury :P haha.

  We'll be skyping pretty soon!! haha. weird. It will be the last time before I come back home. Strange? yes.

I love you!

Elder Braden Thorkelson