The mission has a new blog address: frankfurtmission.blogspot.com and they have a picture of Sierra's group when they first arrived at the airport in Germany.
We have had some miracles this week and it's been awesome. First off, we had an investigator come to church! It was super cool! Georgiana finally came to church after we've been trying to get her there for two months. It was awesome. She liked it, but it's hard because German is not her first language. But we have iPads! With the ability to have different languages! Sis. Knutson basically just took my iPad and started looking for everything (sacrament prayers, hymns, lessons) in Romanian. We found most everything and it was really great. Now we just have to get her there every week. We'll work on that. The other miracle was that we had the opportunity to be the answer to someone's prayer. There's a less-active sister in the ward with a lot of health problems but she's been doing better as of late. So, at our last appointment we invited her to come back to church. She got really teary-eyed and told us that she misses church, but she can't come by herself and her husband works seven days of the week and rarely has a day off. She was kind of crying about it and hen Sis. Knutson spoke up and said, " What if we came to pick you up Sunday?" Oh my goodness. You should have seen this sister's face. "Really? You can do that?" Yes. Yes we can. And we did. At 8:30 we showed up at her door and picked her up and we all went to church together. And she was so happy. When we meet with her this week we're going to set up a permanent schedule of people to come pick her up every Sunday that she feels well enough to come. But yeah. When we walked her home after church I felt like we were walking on clouds. She had such a good time and loved the lessons and the people and it was amazing. Zeynep has started planning her baptism. She is planning her baptism as hard core as most girls plan their weddings. It's almost scary, but she's just so excited. She's determined to not let this date fall out. It's going to be great, but it's three transfers away. I've started some very sincere prayers asking that I stay in Nürnberg for a long time.
I have learned this week why it is that missions are hard. The answer is that no matter how well you start, how strong you go, eventually all of your weaknesses are brought front and center and you have to face them. That was this week. It was a great week. We've done a lot of good, and a lot of good work. But I've also gotten to know every single one of my weaknesses very well. And it sucks. Really truly. But I read an Ensign article this morning called "Getting Over Feeling Underappreciated." Now, this isn't the problem. Missionary work is a hard, and very often thankless job. But the solution to feel under appreciated (or down or sad or anything) is service. We have the power to choose our attitudes and be positive and then serve people when they are possibly the last people we want to be serving. Turning outward, and not inward. That's the secret and that's what I'm going to try and make a very concentrated effort to do this week. Serve everyone and put them above myself. It's going to be hard, but I've had some amazing examples of service from friends at home, and missionaries here. So yeah. That's what I'm going to do this week. Other than those two things, it's been a pretty okay week. Sis. Knutson started packing this week. It's weird, but it's good. It's giving us a reason to really deep clean the apartment before my new companion comes. Whoever she is. We'll find out Saturday.
I love you all, and I hope you have a great day, and a fantastic week!
Love Always,
Sis. John
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