Faith is Like a Little Seed

Guten Tag!! Time for the weekly recap! 

So this week we found two new investigators!  That makes for a grand total of 12, which is so awesome!!  Our week was full of a bazillion appointments, but I will just highlight some of my favorites.  On Wednesday we went to the Trieb's house, they're an older couple in the ward, and it was the most fun I've had at a member appointment in a long time! We were just talking and laughing the whole time and it was awesome!  Bruder Trieb showed us super old pictures of people in the ward, and pictures of their children and all the fun trips they've taken to America.  It was just really fun to be with them and get to know them :)  Then that night we had an appointment with Victor!  He was one of the elder's investigators, but I taught him a couple times while they were still here.  He's from Spain and he is just the nicest guy!  Like the big brother I never had :)  He asked some pretty tough questions, and I think he is struggling getting started with a testimony about the church, but it was a great lesson in the end.  And he taught us a little Spanish so that was fun :) I tried reading a couple verses in the Spanish Book of Mormon, and I was just pronouncing everything like a German!  It was so embarrassing!  I've lost all of my Spanish!

This week we also got to meet two brand new babies!!  Ketty, our less active from Peru, had her cute little girl, and the Hirschmann's had their little boy! I love babies!! Unfortunately as missionaries we can't hold babies, so I had to be content with just patting their tiny little tummies and watching them sleep. 

On Saturday we had Zone Conference in Salzburg!  President Kohler and his family came, and it was literally the BEST Zone Conference ever!!  I loved it so much!! We learned about the 12 tribes of Israel, and the duties of the descendants from those tribes, and also about being the first-born in a covenant and having a double portion of the birthright.  It was just so enlightening, and he connected it all back to why we are here as missionaries, and why this is our job to share the gospel, and why we even care about helping people.  We talked a lot about being a successful missionary, a motivated missionary, and an obedient missionary, and those were all things I needed to hear!!  

We also have some exciting news in our mission: we are getting the mobile area book! That will make things sooo much easier for all of us and I'm so excited!  Because of the European privacy laws, we haven't been able to have it on our iPads till now, so it will be so great to finally have it!

Yesterday we had a goal of having 9 investigators at church.  We invited 12 so we were thinking that it would be no problem to have 9!  In Preach My Gospel we are taught to make goals with faith, and expect the Lord to fulfill His promises to us, so I literally had SO MUCH FAITH that 9 people would come to Sacrament.  Well, church starts at 9:00, and when I looked around at 8:56 we only had three investigators!  Which is still amazing and so wonderful, but I thought I had enough faith that we would have 9!  As Sacrament Meeting started, I realized that we would not reach our goal, in fact we would miss it by a long shot.  I was a little disappointed and wondered what more I could have done, how much more faith I needed to have to move these mountains in my life, and why these people had chosen not to come.  It's hard for me to have faith that things will happen because I've kind of programmed myself in life to not be disappointed if things don't work out, and even expect them to sometimes not work out!  And now that I finally put that aside and had a ton of faith, I thought things would work out.  But they didn't. 

BUT...I learned a really important lesson :) Wie immer. Faith is not only to hope for things to work out exactly the way you want them to.  Faith is to trust in God's plan, to trust that He knows better than we do, that He can see further ahead than we can, and that He is in complete control!  Faith means that you know who you are, a child of God, and that you love and trust Him above anything else!  To quote the primary song: "Faith is trust in God above. In Christ, who showed the way." Faith isn't just hoping things will happen, and having your wish come to pass.  It's being okay when things don't go according to your own plan, but instead according to the way of the Father's plan.  It was a great lesson to learn, and one that I will probably continue learning over and over throughout my mission and throughout life. 

Okay I can't English anymore, but I love you all and I hope you have a wonderful week!

Liebe Grüße,Sister Thunell