Elder Spangenberg Berlin Mission Oct 2014 to Oct 2016 : It's Begining to look a lot like Christmas!

Today is my 2 month mark from the start of my mission! Wow time has flown by, I still remember when I got dropped off at the MTC.

Everybody here is preparing for Christmas. They love it so much they have 3 days for it and the city shuts down. Everything is closed and nobody is on the street. We are going to a member's house for all 3 days of Christmas, so that's good. We did get to check out the market in Spandau. It is the biggest Christmas Market in Germany. It was huge and we kept asking ourselves,"When is this going to end?" It was street after street full of Christmas Markets!

We had a lesson with Br. G and he made a ton of progress. He said he will make a baptism date when his daughter enjoys coming to church and knows why he is baptized. So that was great to hear and she usually comes to church and in the past has enjoyed it.

We had a few appointments fall through but a couple of them were because they forgot and we set up another one this week so that is good. We didn't find any new investigators but we did meet this really cool African on the street. He said he was moving back to Africa but he would come back later next year and would call us when he got back to Germany. He was really nice and spoke English, thank goodness!

We did receive 2 referrals this week which is awesome. My companion and I believe part of it was us trying so hard to find people and it not working out. One man just called the church headquarters and said he wanted to meet with the missionaries ASAP. We called him and he is from Saudi Arabia and he speaks English. He said he wants to meet with us soon and wants his brother there too. We are excited to meet with them and it sounds like they are very interested in the Gospel.

Our second referral is a man from Serbia. He lives right by us but he traveled almost an hour to go to the church in another area. He just walked in the church and said he wanted to meet with the missionaries! We called him but couldn't understand him and thought he said to call next week. Last night we received a call and it was his friend saying he wants to meet tomorrow and asked where we could meet. We told him there was a church by his house and he was surprised and excited. So today we have 3 meetings, it's crazy! My companion and I have never had a day like this. My companion has also never received a referral either, so we are both very excited. They both sound interested in the Gospel so that is different from our other investigators who have been investigators for 7 or 8 years!

For Pday, we missed our train to go to Potsdam because of having to find a McDonalds. The Germans don't believe in public restrooms, its the worst! The only ones are at McDonalds! After missing our train, we decided to go to Potsdamer Platz instead. Its a huge city with stores everywhere. We went to a Nike store, Sony Center, and a Lego store. It was huge with 2 stories full of legos and they had bins full of specific replacement parts.

After that we went to this old church that got bombed during WWII. It is in the center of the city and it very cool looking. It is called the Gedachnis Kirche and it looks awesome. They left it how it stood after the war. It is an amazing site to see. Then we went to the Mall of Berlin. It is the Biggest Mall in Europe, it's 3 stories tall and has 2 buildings that attach. There were so many stores we spent forever just walking through it, we got lost in it. That's how big it is! After that the weather got bad so we had to go to our apartment.

The weather here is terrible, it rains every day. That's the worst for this reason....Nobody will talk to you if it is raining and it gives them an excuse to ignore you.

Me and my companion did make cookies from scratch! We also made chocolate covered pretzels. We are giving them to our investigators and members in the ward. We are pretty proud of them. They tasted amazing. I'm gonna gain so much weight..I've already gained 5 kilos (about 10 pounds) but I can't help myself the food is sooo good!

Elder Spangenberg