Hello all! I hope you are all doing well. I'm going to be more brief this week.
This week was absolutely crazy good. To start off the week, I went on an exchange with the Zone Leaders in Leipzig, so on p-day we toured around and saw lots of cool churches and sites (I talked about some if last week), and then I stayed there for Tuesday and part of Wednesday. I got to meet lots of really cool people that the Leipzig missionaries are teaching, and that was really cool. Then we came back to Jena and had a really exciting street display. It worked super well, and we had lots of people come and look at it and ask questions! Also it just looks super cool -- we had the Bible on one side and the Book of Mormon on the other. We will use it more in the future too because are going to be doing more displays.
On Thursday, we served Bernd again, and there were a crazy amount of leaves, and so we raked up a bunch into a giant pile and were jumping in them and it was really fun!
Then on Friday, we had a super awesome lesson with our new friend Mohammed! We talked about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, and we invited him to read it and ask God if it was true. He responded that he knew it was true and that it came from God! We are super excited to continue teaching him. We also got our transfer calls Friday night, so I am no longer going to be in a trio :(. Elder Mitchell is going to Bremen, and me and Elder Kuttler will be staying in Jena.
Then came Saturday -- the long awaited day: Sochimas Baptism! He was super excited and we rode the train with him to Erfurt. Then we got some nice pictures and had a small little service. We sang lots of songs (cause Sochima loves singing) and then a few talks -- I gave one on baptism and then our branch president gave one on the Holy Ghost. Then we had his baptism! Elder Mitchell was the one baptizing, and Elder Kuttler and I were the witnesses (aka standing in the splash zone haha). It was great and Sochima came out of the water and thanked God for it. After he changed he bore his testimony about baptism and about being cleansed from his sins. He expressed how baptism was important, but how he was even more excited to receive the holy ghost the next day.
On Sunday, we were able to do his confirmation (we also told him to be at church at 8:30 even though church doesn't start till 9:30; cause he is usually late haha). He showed up at 8:15 lol, and so we just talked about the priesthood and the temple some more and preparing for that after his confirmation.
After his confirmation, we had an investigator/friend class with Liu and Sochima. Sochima and Liu are pretty good friends which is super good, we were talking about the commandments and we talked some about baptism. We asked Sochima to share his experience with Baptism and confirmation and he bore really powerful testimony about it, and Liu could feel the spirit. He asked Liu if he would want to have a similar experience as Sochima, and be baptized on December 8th and he accepted!
We also met with a new friend named Ilias, he is super smart and speaks perfect English and German. He brought a list of 9 questions to our first meeting and was taking notes! It was kinda funny at first, but he really is interested in finding truth, and knows a lot about many religions, so it is going to be awesome to continue to meet with him!
One more thing. This week one our friends, Tiburce, has been sick for a while and so we thought we would stop by and give him a blessing. He hadn't been answering our texts or calls, but as we were going over we gave one more call and he answered. We said we were going to come give him a blessing for the sick and he said that he would love that. We went over and gave him a blessing and talked about the priesthood authority that we have, and how through that authority we have the correct authority to baptize. He has concerns because he was already baptized in his church, and his parents don't want him to get baptized again. I think it helped him a lot, but he says he still needs time to think about it.
Overall, this week was just crazy awesome and I hope I get more weeks exactly like it in the future.
I'll try and include some more fun stuff next week! (The last picture is from a tall building in Jena and it was super pretty.) But I gotta run, so I hope you all have a great week and I would love to hear from you!
- Yaşlı Johnson
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