30.06.2014

Dear friends, 

I hope your week has just been fantastic! :) Maybe because it didn`t fall apart as much as ours...pretty much what happened. We were secretly shooting for up to 13 lessons this week, and ended up with one, which actually was outside our area. I guess one might call this a horrific week, but it wasn`t really, perhaps because we still got some things done. I`m a little shorter on time than usual for some reason but I will do my best to explain. 

First of all, sickness has hit a lot of people in our immediate and extended teaching pool. Two to three lessons gone. Then, exams are also an issue to some of our investigators. Two lessons gone. Work, of course, and just not being home, or watching football, ...almost all the other lessons gone as well. This being said, other people`s agency influences what we do but it doesn`t influence that we do something. Because we WORK in this Mission. I`m really grateful that our branch mission leader did not only support us by giving us for free a solar-powered flashlight and a Switzerland football sombrero, but that he also introduced us to the art of dooring. It`s a bit of a touchy subject in this Mission because President Miles doesn`t really like it that much. Which ended in generations of Missionaries never knowing how to do legit door approaches and the practice being abandoned altogether. When we went to teach a less-active member with him in Seebach (which is tons of far away from Dielsdorf) this week and the lesson fell out (who knew?), he just started ringing the other doorbells of the building. No one answered, just a lady came to the window to tell us that no one in her place speaks German. In German. So we went on, and came to another house where a potential investigator lives. She opened and we talked for a while, and the salesman Brother N____ (our branch mission leader) is, he convinced her to take a Book of Mormon and give us kind of a referral, even though she was not interested altogether. Here`s where it gets really cool. She speaks English, and we offered to bring her an English Book of Mormon the following day. But since she was looking like she came from South Asia somewhere, and is Hindu, I thought I should ask if there`s another language that might be better. She answered Telugu. Well. None of us had ever heard of that and we were quite positive that probably the Book of Mormon wasn`t translated into it, so we prepared her for English which we knew would be fine. We got home and the next morning we were just looking through the cupboard where we have all our foreign Books of Mormon, in alphabetical order. Looked under "T". Didn`t find Telugu. Then saw a random book laying flat in a different row of the shelf, with foreign symbols. So I opened it and it just happened to be in Telugu! :) 1 Nephi 1:20...We shall see what happens next. I have a feeling that might have opened her heart a little more and she might actually read it :) We also went on to another HUGE apartment building and had some good conversations. We also gave out a second Book of Mormon so we`ll see what happens to it :)

Random AGSM Moment: We went to this place called Buchs this week to go see a potential. The potential wasn`t home (who knew?) but we saw a very pretty fountain...an upside down rusty car on a probably 40 ft tall pole in the middle of an intersection. It was so pretty we decided to take a picture :) Behold it in attachment, my dear e-mail subscribers. Everyone on the blog should just go on a trip to Buchs to see it themselves :)

Keep up the good work, y`all! :) Love,

Elder Friedmann