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...