Woche 65

Schönen guten Tag, liebe Familie und Freunde!!

It's been another crazy week here in Dortmund. I've just been loving my time here. The city is great. The ward is great. The District is great. The Zone is great. Life is awesome!!

This week:

I got to go a bit down memory lane as we visited Essen District's district meeting! It was a lot of fun. The missionaries there are some pretty dang good ones, and we loved getting to take part in their Meeting. The spirit was strong :)

Sadly our split with the Essen Elders got postponed due to some food poisoning, but we'll split with them tomorrow. Not we get to hang out with them even more! Haha

We had an Investigator show up to church and it was going way well up until we met with him on Monday night and it turns out he doesn't want to learn, he just wanted to bash and prove that his religion was right. So that was annoying. I really hate bashing haha

Russ! I don't know if I've mentioned Russ before, but he is so amazing! He was an Investigator of the old Dortmund Elders before they closed as I got here to Dortmund. He's about 60 and moved here from Ghana 6 years ago. He is a spiritual GIANT of a man. He has truly seen some absolutely mind-boggling miracles in his life and he is just loving the Gospel. I feel like he teaches us at least as much as we teach him. He loves the Book of Mormon, and says he feels the spirit every time he reads in it. He has a crazy work schedule, but every single Sunday he has off, he in the church. He has been praying for an answer about whether or not he should be baptized for the last few weeks. We are meeting with him tonight and are hoping to pick out a date with him. He's already told us that he plans on being baptized, he just wants to be really sure and 100% in if he makes this decision, which is awesome. 

We also had Mission Leadership Council (MLC) yesterday in Frankfurt and it was way powerful. It was probably the best, most effective, and most uplifting one I've been able to attend so far. We were able to have a really good council on the state of the mission and we all feel that it is in a really good place. The missionaries are working with faith and diligence and we are way proud of them. We also discussed what we can do and change to improve it further, what our next step is. It was just a way wonderful experience and I left with a ton of new ideas and a clearer idea of where to go next. Way good!

I learned something cool this week! Something I'm very grateful for!

These last few weeks I've had a few ups and downs with dealing with stress and it's been pretty annoying to be honest. Every time I felt like I had figured it out and was ready to move forward, the stress came back.

But what I did yesterday in the long train ride back to Dortmund is I just started writing. I decided to write and write and write until I figured out what to do and how to overcome it and move forward. And I learned something very interesting.

So back at the beginning of my mission, contacting was way hard for me. It was really scary to talk to people, and I struggled a lot with fear. When I get stressed, contacting gets difficult. Definitely still possible, but it becomes a burden instead of a joy. 

What I learned though is how important it is to actually figure out what the problem is! I had thought that contacting was stressing me out, but it wasn't. It was something else, and the stress just made it difficult to contact. I spent so much time trying to cure the symptoms of stress and didn't even realize that it wasn't actually the source. I felt that because I was stressed, it meant I was doing something wrong, and that I needed to change something or let go of something (confusing weakness for sin). It was annoying me because I just couldn't overcome it, no matter how hard I tried to rely on the lord and remember all the things I'd learned. It was really frustrating!

But what was bugging me wasn't even big, and as soon as I recognized it, I quickly made some plans on how to start working on it, and now it's all good! I still have to overcome this stressor, but I had spend about 3 weeks trying to solve a problem I hadn't identified yet. I had just assumed that it was one of my age-old enemies, when it was really something else entirely. 

I'm very grateful that the Lord is patient with us and I know he was there smiling by my side the whole time. I felt him and still feel him and I'm grateful that he let me figure it out for myself. He obviously helped me a ton. But he didn't just give me the answer straightaway. He let me work for it and grow from it. 

I know that the Lord supports us in our trials and that he wants us to succeed and be happy. He is so good :)

I love you all! Please remember how much God loves you! He WANTS to help and support you! He WANTS to give you answers to your questions, and he WANTS to help you become more like his Son :)

Ich hoffe es geht euch gut und dass ihr wisst, dass du ein Kind Gottes bist!! Habt eine richtig schöne Woche, alle!

Liebe Grüße,

Elder Harps 

Pics:

Elder Heller and I laughing at his punny Sister's card

Pday last week with our gigantic District. Bowling in Bochum!

Pday last week with our gigantic District. Bowling in Bochum!

Another Pic of the Elder Rasband Konferenz

German Sky

German Town (taken from a moving train)