New Mission Structure - 9 Zones

Elder Schmalz is now serving up in the Neumunster Zone!

Baptism! Goodbyes! and The City Of Luck!

So after 16 weeks of teaching through language barriers and stressing, it has happened. 

Raju Patel was baptized! It came together perfectly, even though we had no baptismal clothes or water in the font until a couple hours before the service. Now the Meissen Branch has a brand new member and I'm so grateful that I got to meet and teach this man and his family! I then had to say goodbye to him right after because tomorrow I'm on a train to my new area...Glückstadt. It's all the way in the most northern part of Germany, to serve with Elder Garner!

Glück means luck or fortune, so I'm on my way to the City of Luck! So that's some exciting news!

This week has just been so awesome, and I'm super excited for this next week!

 

From the words of my good Friend Raju Patel "I Know this church is true" (but he says it in half Hindi half German!:) I also know this Church is true and I'm so grateful I have this opportunity to share it, and to see this gospel in action! :)

 

 

New Carpets, Zone Training Meeting , and an Upcoming Baptism!

So this week has been a week of moving furniture and living out of one room! The mission office decided that our apartment was due for new carpets, so this last week we moved all of our furniture into our bigger study room and have been living there. That was stressful! Then we received the news last night that we have to move all of our stuff into our tiny bedroom and live there for a week! YAAAAAA!   <----------- super sarcastic.

 

 

Okay, I'm done whining!

 

Now I'm going to tell you about the good stuff that happened this last week.

We had an awesome zone training meeting and we had interviews with president, so that was super exciting and really fun! Right now our zone is working non stop and they are really seeing success.

 

Dresden Zone

The biggest good news of all!!!!!  

 

Raju Patel not only made us delicious vegetarian Indian food but he also accepted the invitation to be baptized this coming Sunday! please keep him in your prayers, he really needs it.

This week has been fantastic and this coming week will be even better.

 

 

Disease, deportation , and a dang cool experience on exchange

First off... I got a Haircut!

 

This week our investigator on baptismal date got super sick and we had to move the date of his baptism to the first week in March. So sad. We are going to give him a blessing this week in hopes that he will feel better soon. It sure seems that all of our investigators are getting sick and keep canceling appointments due to sickness. What is going around? We have been trying our hardest to meet with people this week but things just kept going bad.

 

We were able to teach the Salioski Family the 1st lesson two weeks ago and they loved it! They are super prepared and we were planning on inviting them to baptism this week and we were sure that they would say yes........ but... we called them on Tuesday to meet again and we received some really sad news. It turns out that our Macedonian family are not just super prepared to receive the restored gospel but also....illegal immigrants and are getting deported this week... So that is not exactly great news.

 

On a brighter side, I got to go on exchange this week with Elder Nielson, a missionary from Delta Utah who is going home in two weeks. We had an awesome experience as we were opening our mouths "talking to everyone we pass" and had been out in the snow for 3 hours talking to people and just kept getting rejected and yelled at by people when we saw a old man walking down the road and we decided to go and talk to him. We went up and just said hello and he was so happy to see us he said  "what you are doing is so good!" and " I knew you were servants of God before you even talked to me", so we talked to him for a while and we asked him how he had such a strong testimony. He told us about his experience as a younger man where he found out for himself that he was a child of God and that we are all children of God. This man had such a strong testimony and he was not ashamed to share it. In fact, as we sat and talked he said he wanted to sing us a song from his church and he sang to us softly and started crying in the middle of a busy road. He then read our name tags and saw  Kirche Jesu Christi Der Heiligen Der Letzen Tage

He said he had never heard of our church before and he would definitely be interested in learning more about it in his home town in Austria. He then grabbed us and bore his testimony about our work that we are doing and he hugged us and gave us his blessing and then he tottered on down the street. 

Elder Nielson and I just sat there in shock for probably 5 minutes. I know that that sounds like such a weird and random experience but the spirit was so strong and that man strengthened my testimony! 

This week has been a great week! It has been a really hard and sad week, but I have learned so much in the last 7 days and I can't wait for this next week!:)

I really just love being a missionary!

 

Macedonians, accordions, and a whoooole lot of walking!

So in December Elder Bretzing and I went tracting and we spent an entire day in a town called Coswig. Not a single person in this town wanted anything to do with us. One lady finally let us in to her apartment, but she couldn't speak German.  She managed to tell us that her husband CAN speak German, so we gave her our card and we went home. I wrote the address and the name down in my planner and we forgot about it... (I know that's terrible!)

 

Last week after our appointment with Raju in that same little town, I remembered (actually the Spirit reminded me) that same apartment building that Elder Bretzing and I had once visited. We went back and spoke with the husband of the woman we had talked to but he was running out of the door to take his sick daughter to the doctor. We gave him the extra Book of Mormon we had and told him we would come back. When we went back, we were able to talk to him and we found out that he is from Macedonia, and that he had been waiting to find out the truth! He had already started reading in the Book of Mormon that we had given him and before we could talk about who we even were and that we wanted to teach him he was asking us if we could come back and talk about the book! We have two lessons scheduled with the Salioski family this week, and I'm super excited! They are such a cool family! They have a 19 year old daughter named Nadia, a 5 year old named Alissya, a one year old named Muhammad and he is super cute and funny.

We also had two more people come to our English class, and they were not Cops! (what a relief!) They can both play the accordion and they said that they will teach me how, so now I'm super excited for our next English class!

By the way, this week I think we walked a marathon!

 

Thank you for your awesome scriptures that you shared with me, and thank you for the prayers!

Love,  Elder Schmalz

 

 

New Companion, Threats, and of course Missionary Work!

This week has been the longest and weirdest week ever! It started off with having to drop Elder Bretzing off at the train station in Dresden, and that was hard. 12 weeks is a long time to spend with a person, but luckily Elder Bretzing was awesome and we became really close so it's good I guess that it was hard to say goodbye. I then spent all of Tuesday with my two German zone leaders and I was able to clearly communicate the entire time with them so that was cool. I also picked up Elder Weber!

Elder Weber is from Highland, Utah and he went to Lone Peak Highschool, so we will be able to talk a lot about Utah for a while haha! He also loves to go running....... Yeah (sarcasm) but in all seriousness, he seems awesome and I can't wait to get to work :)

One of the things we do here in Meissen to help find new investigators is teach a free English class at the church. We recently took a break for the holidays and we were going to be started up again this week, so Elder Bretzing and I went around Meissen and the surrounding towns and we were putting up flyers. Without even realizing, we put up one of our flyers right across the street from a company that teaches English for €190 ($220) a class.... whoops

My first day with Elder Weber we recieved a phone call in perfect English (super weird, we never hear English) asking about our English course, and if I was the teacher, what time and where, and how to spell my name?..... Then they went into a whole thing about how we are breaking the law by offering a free class and that if we continue they will take action......

Luckily their claims are false and we as missionaries are recognized by the goverment of Germany as teachers and eccliastical leaders and we have the licences to prove it.

So don't be surprised if in my next email you are hearing about the police showing up at the church and asking us a bunch of questions. hahaha!

We met with Raju this week and gave him a baptismal calendar and scheduled out all of the lessons with him before his baptism. We talked to him about the Book of Mormon and I'm super excited for him and his family!

That's pretty much all that has happened this past week.

I'm super excited for this next week and for what it will bring.

 

You should all go and read the Book of Mormon and find your favorite verse and then send it to me next week!:)

 

Love Elder Gavin Schmalz

 

Transfers! Temple! and some Awesome Lessons!

This last week has been crazy! We received our transfer calls and I'm staying in Meissen! Elder Bretzing is heading to Berlin to be a district leader! (stud status!) It will be sad to say goodbye to my new friend. My new comps name is Elder Weber and from what I hear, he is really cool, so I am really excited! I will pick him up in a couple days when I drop Elder Bretzing off at the train station.

We also had the awesome opportunity to go to the Freiberg temple this week before it closes for a year and a half, and can I just say it was just like going home for a few hours. Even though everything was in German, it felt just like going home. It was super cool and I am super grateful that I could have that awesome and spiritual experience. Going to the temple also gave me some time to think about my grandparents who passed away this week in 2013. I have been so focused on being a missionary to really let the sad thoughts creep into me, but I am glad that I had that time to think about them and to really see how they changed my life and I know that they are here still. I will see them again, I know this. Now I can focus back on the work I get to do here in Meissen.

We taught a lesson to one our investigators about keeping the Sabbath Day holy. He is notorious for changing the subject or just talking about anything and everything with the two Americans. It's really hard because he likes to talk about science or news and I don't know anything sciencey or newsy in German... so this time we really prepared and I said a prayer that we would be able to teach him a complete lesson. We went in and he started right away talking about this Asian thing that he had read about that helps you live longer and feel better... (so random?) but we then were able to talk to him about the word of wisdom and told him that we would teach about it next lesson, but this lesson we wanted to teach him about something that would strengthen his spirit and help him feel better, and that is coming to church! He shut up (in the nicest way possible) and he didn't change the subject or chat about random things, he just started to participate in the lesson and really started asking cool and good questions and you could see that he was really learning and understanding. H said that he will come to church next Sunday!!!

So pretty much this week I learned to not let my emotions or frustrations get in the way and to just let the Spirit take the lead, and when you do that, you really see change. You have to change your attitude to see anything else change.

Another great week, and I can't wait for the next one!!

 

This week the snow melted because we were hit with a tropical heat wave in the middle of January, and the Elbe River is threatening to flood Meissen.

On the bright side, we were able to hike to the spot in Germany where President Monson dedicated all of Germany for the preaching of the gospel. It was so beautiful! It is in a town called Radebuel, and it's in my area.