2nd Week at the MTC!

Hello Family and Friends,

Well the second week was a little bit tougher than the first.  It was also a sad week because one of the elders in my district went home so now I am in a tri companionship.  One of my companions is going to the Frankfurt mission and the other will go with me to Berlin.   Two of the Elders in the Germany zone went home so now there are 24 missionaries going to Germany which is relatively small compared to the last group that had about 50.  Half are Elders and half are Sisters.


Anyways this weeks we started studying language a lot more.  For those of you that don't know German, it's very confusing compared to English.  How you say sentences is different depending on how many verbs are in the sentence.  So if I were to say "I know the church is true" in German that would be "Ich Wisse die Kirche Wahr ist" which translates in English to  "I know the church true is" so it's very confusing and hard.  With that said I know for a fact the gift of tongues is true.  I bore my testimony on Fast Sunday in German, without any notes or anything! SO the language is going very well.


We are teaching full lessons in German.  We have 2 investigators who really aren't investigators they are just our teachers disguised as someone else.  But they are pretty hard to teach one of them was supposed to be drunk when we were teaching him so it was very hard, he wouldn't let us in for like 10 minutes. It was good practice because that's likely gonna happen in Germany.  However, we have a real investigator which isn't common.  The last missionaries gave us their investigator who is not LDS.  The only problem is we only know how to say gospel words so our investigator asked us "what do you like to do in your spare time?"  Me and my companions were like..."uh "preach my gospel" in german cause we didn't know what else to say that would make sense, so he was like,"Oh well I guess that's cool"...  So we have got some things to work on!!!

AN interesting fact is that in almost every devotional Germany is mentioned!  We had another devotional Tuesday night and the speaker told a cool story about the holocast and mentioned a man who ended up saving more jews than anyone in the concentration camp by bribing the guards.  The man grew up and always wanted to become a business man, he took a chance at a company not doing so well.  He ended up succeeding greatly from that company and when he left it he had to have 2 dump trucks to carry all the money out because he had so much.  Then the war happened and he saved tons of jews from the creamatoriums.  After the war he said this,"Oh how many more I could have saved.  This car right here could be 2 more people, my coat 1 more, my house many more".  I really liked that story, it taught me to give everything you have and to have no regrets after your mission.


I saw Keaton Ashby a lot.  He will be a great missionary.  His companion seemed really cool as well.  He left this week for Halifax.


My companion and I got to go off campus and take a shuttle and help a missionary get a perscription.  We loved that and joked that the "real world still does exist".


We went last Wednesday to the temple and did a session, it was really cool.  The temple actually has a separate section just for missionaries like missionary clothing and missionary locker rooms.  Laundry went great...all you do is put your laundry in the washer and press whites, colors, or dark colors!!!


My companion was a skateboarder.  He is legit!  He got sponsored to travel to championships across the U.S..  He also owns a helmet making company and sold helmets for like $300.  He's way cool.


I love the alarm clock; I wake up on time every morning!  I am trying to learn 30 german words a day and it has really helped.  My teacher says I am working very hard and he can see me progressing because of it.
Love,
Elder Spangenberg