My New Mailing Address

LudolFingerstraße 9 

31137 Hildesheim

HILDESHEIM!!!

This Place is The Best!

Seriously though, the city is beautiful!

The members are great! 

I have a great companion!

We are going to rock Hildesheim this transfer!

But sadly, I wasnt able to go and take any pictures or to really talk to very many people because Elder Fitch contaracted bronchitis and so I have been stuck in the apartment for pretty much the entire week.

Next week I promise to write you a better more spiritual filling email with pictures, but this week it was just not in the cards. I am pretty sure I am headed to take Elder Fitch to the hospital...

Thank you for the emails and the prayers! You are all super awesome!

 

Love Elder Schmalz

Tchüss to the city of Glück and hello to the home of Hilde!

So my time in Itzehoe and Glückstadt is coming to a close.....tomorrow actually, and I'm off to a city called Hildesheim.

 

Leaving a place like Glückstadt is really hard! I have made some really good friends here and I have learned so much here, not only about missionary work but also about myself. At least my last week in Glückstadt was a good one. We had the awesome opportunity to do service at the World War Two memorial in Itzehoe. The bad part was that Elder O'Keefe got a gnarly tic in his arm and he is now on Lyme disease watch.

I also got to say goodbye to all of my friend that I have made here and we were able to finish the preparations for a music event that we are putting on in the church. All in all a really good week... other then the tic fiasco.

I'm so excited to move on to a new area and to see what I can learn and who I can help in Hildesheim!

Thank you for all of your support and for your emails!

Have a great week,
Elder Schmalz

 

My ward mission leader Bruder Ritter, and pretty much my best friend in the Gluckstadt ward



Schwester Schroder, a sweet 92 year old convert to the church

Zone Conference, Goodbyes, and Being Attacked by a Drunk Guy

This week was pretty awesome! It was a week of seeing old friends and companions and saying goodbye to the best mission president a missionary could ever ask for! It was also a week of dreams coming true... (which will be explained)

This week we traveled to Hamburg where half of the mission met to have our last zone conference with President and Sister Kosak. We had the opportunity to hear from them both and hear a couple of awesome musical numbers... A week earlier President Kosak had asked me to do a musical number, and then when I arrived at the conference he asked me to change what song I was singing..... so I sang  "We Thank Thee Oh God For A Prophet" after finishing President Kosak asked me to do it again... but then he sang with me and that was really cool!

 

Where's Elder Schmalz?

As a goodbye present, President Kosak did a sketch of Joseph Smith for us! How cool is that?

and now on to the part about dreams coming true... So when I was in the MTC I had a dream that I got attacked by a drunk guy......

 

This week we talked to a couple on the street and it was going awesome! We asked them if they wanted to see a video and they were more than willing to watch "Because of Him". Everything was going great and we were halfway through the video when out of nowhere this drunk guy walked up to us and tried to steal my IPad!

Elder O`Keefe distracted the drunk guy while I finished up talking to this couple about the video, and when I finished I turned around to see elder O'Keefe being held by the front of his shirt and the drunk guy winding up to punch him in the face!

That is not what I expected so I ran over and helped my companion out of the situation, but not without the drunk guy trying to attack again! Needless to say, we handled it and we are okay!

SO COOL!

This week was honestly just a great week and I learned so much! 

Something that has been on my mind this week is that Heavenly Father loves us!

He doesn't just love some of us. He loves ALL of us! 

He wants us to be the very best WE can be. He doesn't want everyone to be a President Kosak or for everyone to be a Elder O'Keefe. He wants me to be the very best Elder Schmalz I can be and He wants you to be the best YOU! We are all different and those differences are blessings. So yeah, just go be the best you that you can be and don't try to be someone else!

"If all the tools in your toolbox are hammers it is going to be hard to build a house!"

Thank you for all the love and support! Go have some awesome summer adventures!

 

Love Elder Schmalz

Transfer week, two new companions? and Alli Baghi!

So the first week of the transfer is usually pretty hard considering you have to adjust to a new companion and how he lives and does missionary work, but this one hasn't been super hard. Not the easiest but most definitely not the hardest.

Elder O'Keefe is from Pleasant Grove, Utah and he actually trained one of my best friends in the mission, Elder Winkel! He is super musical and is an amazing piano player so the branch absolutely loves him, which should make things easy.

So this last Friday we had an emergency zone trading meeting which included us picking up another new companion?...... A brand spankin new IPad!

The zone training meeting was fantastic! We went back to the basics and had three classes about the Book of Mormon, church attendance, and the importance of personal prayer.  One of the highlights  was when one of the zone leaders, Elder Blake talked about one of my favorite scriptures, and that is the last half of 1st Nephi 1:20 and it says

 

"But behold, I, Nephi, will show unto you that the tender mercies of

the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their

faith, to make them mighty even unto the power of deliverance."

I actually didn't notice or really see the importance of this scripture until I came on my mission. I may have actually already talked about it one of my emails, but this scripture has followed me around my whole mission and not in the creepy stalker kind of way but more of like a super awesome guardian angel scripture kind of way! When ever it seems that I'm starting to get discouraged or frustrated, every time in some way or another this scripture is always one of the scriptures that always comes up! I want to testify that I know this scripture is true. The tender mercies of the lord are over all that he has chosen! But then the question may come up of "who is it that he has chosen?" or the thoughts that say "I'm not of the chosen", but we learn in the scriptures that he has chosen all of us! He saved all of us, not just some of us! When we understand that, We can see how cool this scripture truly is! If you don't believe me or you are maybe thinking that our Savior has forgotten you, I promise that he hasn't, and if you just take a moment and think about all of the things you have going for you. Heck, even if you honestly and truly count your blessings, you will see that those tender mercies of the lord

have been in your life and will always continue to be in your life. And you will see how much our Savior loves you, because he really does!

So yeah, that's a spiritual nugget that has been on my mind lately.

 

Stolen picture from Sister Brim's blog (sorry) but I couldn't resist that cute boy's face!

 

So onward with the happenings of this last week...

This week Elder O'Keefe and I talked to a man named Alli Baghi. He can't speak German very well and he doesn't understand that much either, but we gave him our card and we went on with the day. Usually when we give someone our card we never hear from them and never see them again but not Alli Baghi!

We walked out of missionary correlation meeting and found Alli sitting in the chapel waiting for church to begin, and he had found himself a Book of Mormon! When he saw us he had the biggest smile on his face, he had a great time at church and with the IPad I was able to communicate

with him in his native language of Persian. He loved our lesson and we immediately made out a time for us to come back today. At church one of the speakers did not come so I had a surprise talk sprung upon me 5 minutes before sacrament meeting, but I gave a talk about my favorite

subject...... missionary work, and Alli loved it! Everything went perfect yesterday!

But.....(don't you just love how there is always a but at the end of all my awesome missionary stories? It's a reoccurring theme of my mission)

We had a great first lesson with Alli today right before we came and started emails. In our lesson we found out more about Alli's background...... Alli is from Iran and does not have a long term Visa. His wife is in prison in Iran for being a Christian and if he returns he will be put to death. He wakes up every day not knowing if he will be deported or if he will be able to save his wife. So yeah, tough situation. In order to try and protect him and his life we may not be able to continue teaching him. We will find out later this week from our mission president. But I'm confident that everything will be straightened out, because he is soooooo ready for the gospel and he is one of the friendliest people I
have ever met!

All in all it was a fantastic week, and we found an awesome new friend! We are utilizing technology, and I know that I have learned a lot this week!

Thank you for your prayers and for your support!
Love Elder Gavin Schmalz

Sent from my iPad.      <~~~~~~~~~~how cool is that!

So this week was pretty uneventful, but I did find out that I will be getting a new companion in this coming week.

Due to the uneventfullness (is that a word?) of this last week, this email is going to be pretty short, with a profound quote from one of my good friends here in Germany

"A calm sea never made for a good captain"

I love this quote! It is sooo true! If everything was easy we would never learn and grow and I know that is true. So if you are going through a hard time or a trial there are three things you can always do...

#1 you can choose to face the trail cheerfully and pray and ask for help & comfort.

#2 you can learn and grow from your own experiences and then help others through theirs.

#3 you can email me! Even though I am on the other side of the world I am still just an email and a week away!

Well I hope you all have had agreat week and thank you so much for the emails and the prayers!

 

Love, Elder Gavin Schmalz

Cool Quote of the Week

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
Dr.Viktor E Frankl Holocaust Survivor

This week was a week of deciding, and that decision goes hand in hand with this awesome quote. 

About two weeks ago things got really hard! We were finding little (visual) success and up until a couple days ago I was really sick of people being rude and acting the way they were acting. We had troubles meeting with all of our investigators, and honestly it was just really hard! The old moody pre-mission elder Schmalz started surfacing (oh no!). Needless to say, I was just getting a little grumpy! I definitely was not smiling, (it was more of a very faked not genuine smile) but then in personal study I found these three scriptures!

  2nd Corinthians 6-8

But this I say, He which soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully.

Every man according as he puposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: For God loveth a cheerful giver.

And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye always have sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work.

I decided that if this scripture says that God loves a cheerful giver, I am always going to be a cheerful giver, even when people are rude and it seems like we are making no progress at all, and right after I made this decision, we were directed to a man named Singh. We were about to call it a night when an idea popped into my head to go try to see a woman named Veronica, so elder Garner and I walked across Itsehoe to talk to her. We got to where she lives and she wasn't home, so we started to head back home. On the way from her house we passed a pizza place called "Itzehoer Pizza King" and we both remembered that we had a contact that worked there so we went inside to ask if he was there, AND he was!

As previously stated his name is Singh. He has a lot of questions that are very hard to answer, but the way that he asks them I can't help but smile! We had an awesome talk and we had found out that he had just gotten home from a 4 week trip to India just two hours prior to us meeting with him, and as we were leaving he said 'I like talking to you guys because you are happy and you understand me!

Boom! Holy cow! How cool is that? In personal study the scriptures pretty much told me to be happy and then because of smiling and being happy (and mostly the Holy Ghost) we found someone who actually wants to meet with us and he has awesome questions!

Yeah, so that was awesome! And to top it all off, I got to Skype with my family on Sunday which was awesome! Nothing better to do on Mother’s Day than to see my beautiful mom on a 32 inch computer screen :) I love you mom!

Okay, but seriously, if you are having a hard time or even if you are having an okay time, you can choose to be happy and you will see the difference! Notice that the scripture also says we still have to go SOW and REAP? We can't just sit around smiling and expect our troubles and our labors to magically disappear, but I know that when we CHEERFULLY do what we need to do we will be blessed and it is just so much more fun to smile and have a god time! :)

Thank you so much for your love and support and I hope you had a great week!

Love, Elder Gavin Schmalz