Fixer Uppers

So family...transfer calls....they happened. 

Let me tell you a little something about transfer calls in the Germany Berlin mission.  If you are staying together they always start out with both names. "Sister Brown AND Sister Nilson." When you are being transferred they split up the names.
We got our call Friday.
The names were split up.
 "Sister Brown, you will be staying in Leipzig...  Sister Nilson, you will be transferred to Cottbus..."

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 We were both crying before the call was even over.  We are such a great team!  They are splitting up our magical companionship.  I was crushed!
I love Sister Nilson so much!!  I have never had such an easy companionship.  I learned so much from her and we got so much done here in Leipzig.  

They always say that when you are fighting with your companion and not getting along that everyone else can tell.  The Spirit isn't there and people can tell.  Well, the opposite is also true.  When you do love each other and get along well everyone can tell.  The members on Sunday all told us how sad they were to see us split up.  They had all noticed how well we worked together.

So Tuesday I will say tschüß and she will get on her train.

 The good news is that we both fly home together.  So we can have a happy 14 hour flight to catch back up :)

We were able to skype with G this weekend too.  He is doing really well.  He has been meeting with the elders and preparing for the priesthood.  The elders have also been teaching his family. He told us how grateful he is to have the gospel in his life.  He bore his testimony to us and said that he would never fall away.  He just kept thanking us for knocking on his door and bringing him this message.

There is no feeling in the world like hearing the testimony of someone you have taught and grown to love.  Nothing else like it in the world.  It makes this all worth it.  All the rejection and disappointment and being far away and constantly tired.  It is all worth it  because my sweet G (and B) now have the gospel.  They have the truth.   That is why I am here.

So I learned something this week from the Frozen soundtrack.  There is a line in one of the songs that says "you can fix this fixer upper up with a little bit of love."  I think that is what I needed in response to my crazies rant two weeks ago.  Maybe these crazies just need to be loved.  That is something I have learned (am learning) on my mission.  I am learning to love people who are hard to love and to love without getting loved back.  Sometimes that is hard.

So now I have a game plan to combat the craziness of just about everyone here in the DDR.

I will fix these fixer uppers up, with a little bit of love!

Love,
Sister Brown

I don't really feel like writing...

But a picture is worth a thousand words, right?!?

Have a good week!

Liebe Grüße

Sister Brown

Crazies

family,

this keyboard is being ridiculous.  so i cant capitalize anything.  sorry. lame Internet laden....

so we have been encouraged to watch the district.  it is a mini series that the church made where they filmed a district of missionaries in california.  we watch them as training in meetings and study time.  anyway, presient kosak has been pushing for us to watch them.  sister nilson and i did this and then had an idea.

there is one companionship who struggles to find people to teach.  another companionship in the district has a baptism and the struggling elders invite everyone they  can to the service.  they invite 20 people. 5 say they will come.  1 comes and, long story short, he is baptized.  some elders in our district had a baptism scheduled so we figured we could give this a try.  we printed off some invitations and made a list of everyone we could invite.  we texted, called, and took invites around for a few days.  we invited over 50 people.  So using the district logic, we should see 2.5 baptisms from our efforts.  right? wrong!  in our case, the girl ended up in the hospital for emergency surgery and the baptism was canceled.  it worked so beautifully on the district.  why cant that be REAL life??

we were able to make contact with some people who we hadn't seen in awhile.  so i guess the efforts weren't totally wasted...

i have also prepared a mini rant ot share with you.  

it begins with a question: why cant we ever find normal people to teach?? 

we have found so many crazies in the past little while.  seriously.  if you want to find the most interesting people you have ever met in your life, just put on a skirt and a name tag and walk around.  they will find you.  it is crazy to watch.  the police cant find them.  the FBI cant find them.  the CIA cant find them.  but we can find them.  every.single.one.  

But then again, these are children of God who need the gospel and i am the one in a skirt with the crazy German with an American accent who solves rubiks cubes during bus rides.  

so maybe, just maybe, these crazies we are finding are no more crazier than us.  

it takes one to know one...

the end

but we also had some good news this week.  L

came to church.  it was his first time and we were all so excited.  he said he enjoyed the meeting, but that he only understood about half of it.  not bad for his first time in a christian church.  it was really cool to get to explain the sacrament ot him and watch him take it for the first time.  we have been teaching him about Jesus Christ and it was just neat ot watch him take the sacrament and think about everything we have been teaching him.

now i have a little brag sesh.

so at the start of my interview he prayed for us and then asked me to teach him the second lesson (plan of salvation) in german in 5 minutes.  so i did just that.  then after he sat back and looked at me and said "sister brown, what happened?"  I was confused at first, and asked what i had done wrong.  then he explained that he was looking at a totally  different sister brown than he had seen eariler.  he said that i was confient and happy and knew what i was doing.  he just said a bunch of nice things about how much i help the people i am with and stuff.  it was just nice to have an interview where he said such nice things about me and didnt get after me for anything.  

then, here comes the best part, he told me what he had written down.  he always takes notes as we speak.  he had written something and then went back and underlined it and then gave it an exclamation point.  

he wrote sehr gutes deutsch.  

presdent kosak thinks i have good german.  he said he was so impressed with how good it has gotten.  that made my whole day.  my whole week.  the whole transfer.  i have been working so hard to get this language down.  i write flashcards and vocab lists.  we talk 9-9 every day.  i have just been waiting for it to all catch up.  it was just so good to hear him say that.  he doesnt fluff anything.  he is german.  

so i must really be able to speak german!

that is the brag fest.  

So life goes on here in Leipzig!

have a good week

love,

sister brown

this was a schnitzel restaurant that had american week so we checked it out last pday.  there wasnt really anything american besides the flag.  but the schnitzel was delicous

herzlich willkommen to the DDR...

Meine Familie,

This week Sister Nilson and I went on tausch.  It was my first time being responsible for Leipzig.  The sister we tausched with served here too, so it was no problem.  We had served together in the MTC, so it was a lot of fun to reminisce and see how far we have come in the past year!

One of our English class students/investigators asked us to  look over his paper and correct the English mistakes.  We agreed.  So this week I spent my lunch breaks brushing up on my Tibetan treaties from the mid 1850s history. 

 This week we also worked on raising our goals.  President Kosak has raised (quite dramatically) our standards of excellence.  So the whole mission has been having a push for bigger numbers.  We have been finding it hard to set goals for such big numbers that we feel are impossible to reach.  This week we just tried it out.  It was a good chance for us to exercise our faith.  

We ask all of our investigators to do it, to read or to pray.  But, it is really hard to do ourselves.  This week we just did it.  We set higher numbers and prayed  that we could make them.  We made some, but not all.  However, almost all our numbers were higher than they have been so far this transfer.  It really did work!  

It is just a new way to look at goal setting.  Before, I would look at what I felt was realistic.  I would look at what we have gotten in the past or what we had planned for this week.  The problem was my definition of realistic.  We are working with the Lord.  We are doing His work.  We are seeing miracles every day.  He can do anything.  So we dont just put goals down in our planners because we know we have the appointments to back them up.  We dont make the goals just to reach them. We make the goals to show our faith.  We make hte goals to stretch us.  We make the goals so the Lord has a chance to help us reach them.  

That is something I learned this week.  

We had an amazing  week of getting in contact with people we hadn't heard from in forever.  A contact named A called us one morning during study.  We ran into an old investigator, A, on the bahn.  We went by on Dr G for the 100th time, and he was actually home.

We also got a call from K.  He is a man that we met awhile ago on the bahn.  He is 25 and studying finance.  He called us and we were able to make out an appointment and meet him at the church.  We weren't sure if he understood why we were meeting or our purpose so we started with How to Begin Teaching.  He has a christian background and does have faith.  He asked us what the difference was between our churches and all the other churches.  We taught him the first lesson.  He had some questions about the priesthood, but I think it went pretty well.

Then the elders met a lady on the street who they invited to church. She came and they gave her to us to teach because she lives alone.  She is a doctor of some kind and had an operation last night so she didnt get a lot of sleep.  She was SO tired.  The whole relief society time she was nodding off.  I had no idea what to do.  No one ever trains you on what to do when your investigator falls asleep...  I gave her tic tacs, let her read my scriptures, gave her my planner to write down her contact info, showed her pictures, but nothing worked.  Every few minutes I found myself putting my arm around her to gently nudge her back to consciousness.  SIster Nilson and I were dying laughing.  

She was really sweet though and said she would come back next week a little more rested.  She called us last night to  make an appointment too.  

Thanks for all of the prayers and love and mail :)
Have a great week!

Love,
Sister Brown

So the big news of this week was the change in church times.  The two Leipzig wards have been meeting at the same time until this month.  It was just too crazy and there wasn't enough room.  

So this weekend we switched to 1 pm.  

It was a hard switch.  

The  fact that the switch was made on a fast Sunday didn't help.   It seriuosly almost wiped out our entire ward :)

But we survived!

So what else is up in Leipzig?!?

This week we made homemade biscuits and lemonade.  

A member gave us a blender. 

We made Smores with our cute little English class.  

I solved world peace in the Leipzig missionary world.  

And we had a sleepover with the Hamburg sisters.

We also met again with L. He is our little Indian man who said he wanted to learn more about Jesus Christ. He has no Christian background so we wanted to start super simple.  We used the picture book and went through and taught him about the Savior and his life and everything he did for us. We just explained each picture and told him the stories of Jesus.  At the end, we asked him what he thought and felt about Jesus Christ. He told us that Jesus loves everyone and was very nice.  Then he said, "I think Jesus has a very big heart."  That is right L.  The biggest heart!  He then  prayed in Christ's name at the end of our lesson. 

It really strengthened my testimony to watch how even the simplest stories about the Savior could touch him.  It was a wonderful experiance.

I wish you all a great happy sunny week!

Love,

Sister Brown