Finally 20!

Berlin Zone

This is a memorial for all the Soviets that died.

Hey everyone!  First to start off, thank you for all the birthday wishes.  I'm finally 20 woohoo!  This week was pretty eventful.  We were in Berlin a ton this week.  Zone training meeting was on Tuesday and we had the whole meeting in English.  It was really weird but I guess they were trying it out because normally all the meetings are in German.  I think it had to do with the fact that there are so many new missionaries in this zone that don't speak German yet.  But the meeting was really good and we learned about how we can use the Book of Mormon more to help our investigators and ourselves.

We are finally starting to get a teaching pool here.  We met with the one lady who is super cool.  She used to be a hard core atheist, but she had an amazing experience, she didn't really specify what happened, pretty much she said God saved her in the hospital from a near death experience and since then she totally believes in God.  Anyways she knows the Book of Mormon is true and believes this church is true.  She is waiting for baptism because she is still a little sick and she wants to be healed before she gets baptized.  She feels that she got an answer that she can be totally healed.  I was able to give her a priesthood blessing so that was really cool.

So I don't know if everyone has been hearing what is going on, but there have been a couple of terrorist attacks in Germany this week.  The first one happened just right outside our mission in Wurzburg.  Apparently a guy had an axe and just started hacking people on a train.  It's pretty gruesome to think about but nobody died from that as far as I'm aware, and the second one happened a couple of days ago in Munich.  Some 17 year old kid just opened fire at a McDonald's and killed 10 people including himself it's pretty sad.

So we had originally planned to do a street display in Berlin, but we had to call that off because there was actually the gay parade going through the streets of Berlin and there were supposed to be 750,000 people in that, yeah crazy right!  That day we saw rainbow flags all over the place.  And we decided it would be better to reschedule than to chance it, because the Munich attack happened the night before.  But nothing happened in Berlin, so all is well.

Other than that, it was pretty much my companion doing his Arabic class.  We were out of our area for a big chunk of the week.  But my birthday was pretty good we didn't really do anything cause I had to speak the day after in church.  But the Egyptian family found it was my birthday and they immediately invited us over and we had a really good Swedish cake.  We had a couple of appointments fall out, gosh dang it, but you know that happens.  One of them was our fault because we thought she lived in a different city, but now we know!

I gave a talk on my favorite scripture this week in Moroni 10:32 "Yea, Come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God."

I  love this scripture because it really explains what we need to do, which is deny ourselves and serve God and that still isn't enough.  We truly have to accept that without Christ's grace we couldn't do it.  It would be totally impossible.  I know that Christ heals us and that he walked the path before us and showed us the way.  If we follow his example and come unto him, then he can help us reach our full potential.
Have a great week!
Elder Spangenberg

Berlin Dome