The Missionary

Sorry about all the posts, but I seem to only do this once a week, so maybe it's not so bad. I decided to put Jaren's letter last so it will show up first to the readers. If you don't want to read about all the other stuff, you don't have to.

I did Jaren's letter a little different this week. One of the Elder's serving here told me that his dad numbers his questions, then the Elder copies and pastes the questions to his email and responds. I was complaining that Jaren wasn't answering my questions, but I didn't realize he couldn't print them off and respond to them like I do his letters. This seemed to work. So the letter might look a little different and that's why.

Here's the letter:

Well Mom, Dad and Family,
The work is going pretty well here. Our last few weeks have been a little slower but it is picking up again. We just started a new cycle and I am still in Hanau with Elder Norton. That means I´ll be here for sure until the first week of Dezember. I´m so excited! I really hope that I can stay here through Christmas (Weinachten in German) because I hear it is really cool. It is really cool anywhere in Germany I guess, but more fun to do it with people you´ve been around for a while. The Organ class is going well. We had two people there last week, and for sure will have three this week and possibly five the following week. One of the ward members coming this week has an inactive husband so maybe we can meet with them through this class! So now with the questions,

1. How do you say Herr Czop's last name? Well, lets see how well I can do with that! It is like chop in english except it is a harder sound. If you replace the ch with a ts it should sound like tsop. Hopefully that helps!?

2. Does he understand the Atonement yet? Well, we tried to explain it to him, but he couldn´t get over what he has been told for his whole life in the Catholic Church. We did break it down and talk about the suffering in Gethsemani and his death on the Cross and the Resurrection. They mainly focus on the death and don´t view the other two as part of the Atonement.

3. Does the Bishop's daughter play the organ? Not really. She has had a few things taught to her, but she plays it like the piano and doesn´t use her feet. Sister Seeber, Bishops wife was also there with her daughter last week to learn more. She wanted me to teach her and her daughter how to use the pedals and how to set up the organ for different hymns. It was actually a lot of fun! I just tried to teach it the way I was taught by Paul Christansen, he was great and made it seem easy. I hope I did okay when I taught it though!

4. Have you had a transfer yet and did you stay together? My guess is you will be together at least one more transfer, maybe longer. I don't know how they work things there. So you probably guessed that we´ve had a transfer already with what I said earlier. I´m still here in Hanau with Elder Norton. Our distrikt has also changed. We had six in our distrikt before, two Elder´s in Offenbach and 4 here in Hanau. We now have eight in our distrikt. 4 in Hanau and 4 in Offenbach. We also have a new distrikt leiter, Elder Kramer and he is with us in Hanau. And guess what? He is from North Carolina! He comes from Chapel Hill if you have any idea where that is at. From what I hear, most new Elder´s stay in the same area for at least the first two transfers and the younger one will usually stay longer after that. So this could be Elder Norton´s last cycle with me, but I could be here in Hanau for a cycle or two after that.

5. What does the Bishop do for work? I think he is a Doctor, I´m not sure what kind of doctor either, but I´m pretty sure that´s what he is.

6. Are you sad you will miss your first national election? The campaign is driving me crazy! I can´t even imagine what it is like down in the states right now! It is actually driving me crazy because the people here, once people on the street know we are American, they immediately start to blab their opinion on our election year and the candidates. The Germans love Obama because he had a huge rally here with about 400,000 people. We were told that the other day by a German! I´m glad I´m not their right now though because it sounds crazy and would probably be driven crazy by listening to it!! So good luck next month!

7. Might you be able to do what the elders here do with their cameras? Take them to the library to download pics or take your card in. That would be cool if you could figure that out!
I´ll try! I don´t even know where the library is here or if they even have one in Hanau. We actually do emails in an Internet Cafe and most of the time they don´t let us download things. I´ll try to send you the pictures I have before Christmas so you can have them.

8. Have you heard from other family or friends? Not really. I´ve had an email from Adriana and one from Deb Peterson but not really from anyone else. Then again, I have a lot of friends out on missions and don´t know their addresses to get anything from them. I need to write Kendrick one of these days and I have had some contact with Spencer Black every now and then. It sounds like your blog gets a lot of attention though! Wish I could see it! If you sent the link in an email I might be able to view it. That way I don´t have to go through the web to find it, I could just click on the address in the email. If you do though, make sure it is direct to the page you´ve done so I don´t have to search through it to find mine. (I doubt I will do this because I don't want him to become distracted by the blog and trying to catch up!)

10. Has your time changed yet? Ours will on the weekend. Yes, our time changed on the weekend, so one week before you. We actually just had stake conference and we weren´t in the meeting where they announced the time would be changing, so when we went to the Sunday morning session, we were an hour early!!! Embarassing! But we´re missionaries and we don´t have a calendar for this year so we weren´t in the know with that one!
Hope that works for you and I´m glad I´ve answered your questions now! The week has been great and work is progressing. We have also meet a new investigator who lost contact with the missionaries almost a year ago! She has missed them a lot and when we just happened to knock on her door, she was so excited to see us! We also have a Turkish guy as well, don´t know how much interest he really has, but I´m learning a lot about the Islamic religion through him. My respect for them and their religion has also gone up a lot! They are some of the most peaceful, family oreiented classes of people I´ve meet! We are also working with about 3 inactive families now from that list Bishop gave us and they are really excited to meet with us.
I also have one request, do you think you could send my organ shoes!? I have my proselyting shoes but they are terrible! I think Erik might have them so I hope it isn´t to hard to convince him! They are my black penny loafers. If Erik doesn´t have them, they are probably in the cedar chest. I don´t want to buy new ones because they are really expensive and I need them! I thought that I would be okay without them but I was wrong!!!! So if you find them send them to the Röhnstraße address before the first part of Dezember so I don´t have to worry about transfers and not getting them.
Good luck this week and Gott Segne Euch! (Euch is you all in German)