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Monday, April 29, 2013

Woche Zwölf- Versetzung Zwei!

Lieber Familie!
Today is the first day of Transfer 2! I cant believe that all has passed so quickly... it seems like I just blinked and suddenly its here! So much has happened... but luckily, I still have 15 transfers left! Plenty of time to accomplish all the lord has for me to do!
This past week has just flown by- faster than usual it felt like! Our most standard Investigators, Amanda, Wayne, were both unable to meet this week, so it actually opened up a lot of time to go and find new people to teach, who are ready to find the gospel!
Last monday I actually got my first haircut, in German. What an adventure that turned out to be! My trainer just sat and laughed as I struggled to figure out what the Lady was asking me in her fast Austrian German. Once I realized she was asking how many millimeters I wanted, I realized I had NO IDEA how millimeters compared to anything... so I went with 9. It sounded like a solid number. Turns our it looks pretty good!
Tuesday was an Austausch, and once again I got to work in Wien, this time with Elder Niedens. We taught advanced English class, which is seriously difficult when the people we are teaching's native languages include german, chinese, arabic, turkish. But we made it fun!
I love my time in Wien... my favorite part of missionary work is probably street contacting now. And in Wien there are 4 million people roaming the streets at all times! Its great! I had some SWEET discussions with people, and even got a few numbers for them elders and gave out some Books of Mormon!
 I promised myself and the Lord I would start pulling my weight around here. And we saw some serious miracles!
Of the course of this week, we found 13 potential investigators, and had 4 new investigators!!!! That just BLOWS the mission standards out of the water! Because we had a little extra time to meet with new people, and go check up on old potentials (because we couldnt meet with Amanda or Wayne all week) people were just FALLING into our paths. Wednesday and Thursday it just felt like everyone we talked with we had an amazing discussion. I have such a testimony of just going outside and doing the work- finding someone to go by on, someone to talk to, TRYING to find people to teach. The Lord really led so many people into our path this past week, it was incredible. Sure, not everyone became a new investigator, but we still taught some great lessons, gave some Books of Mormon, and layed some great ground work for these people.
One Miracle story during the week though. One guy we found is name Janiker. He is from Syria, and he is studying in St. Polten. His english is better than his german, so we teach in English, but he reads in arabic. He basically knows NOTHING about Christ other than he had heard the name before and wanted to learn more. We gave him an INCREDIBLY simple first lesson overview and read from the Book of Mormon with him. He is really sincere and wants to learn. We gave him 3 Nephi 11 to read to learn about Christ. the next day, we saw him walking on the street talking with his friends. We went to talk to him, and he told us he had already FINISHED 3rd nephi, and had questions about who the people of "Ether" were. AMAZING. We are still trying to get a second lesson with him because he is pretty busy, but he just loves the Book of Mormon and he already showed his friends and wants to get copies for them.
(embarrassing side note. While this conversation with Janiker was going down, we walked past Haupt Bahnhof, where all the kids walk through coming home from school. We were standing next to a couple of teenagers who just started kissing like they wanted to eat each others faces off. after they were finished the girl turned around... and it was Annika Brunnsteiner! She is the only young woman in our Branch! It was kind of hilarious to see her turn bright red as she realized the missionaries were standing right behind her teaching someone. How sad for her haha)
Friday and Saturday were pretty intense. We got a call from our GML who said that mission headquarters informed them that St Polten is getting a SECOND COMPANIONSHIP next transfer, so we need to set up the apartment for 2 more elders! So they came over Friday to measure everything, scheme it all out, make some plans, then they took us to Melk, their dorf, for the day to get the stuff ready to bring back on Saturday. Their house is HUGE, and we actually ended moving stuff IN for them before we brought our stuff our. Long story short, we were moving furniture up and down stairs from about 17 hour till 2 in the morning! and then we got up at 6 to bring it to St. Polten. Fun day. Best part is when we were moving stuff in, one of our neighbors came out, kranky as Ill get out, yelling that we were disrupting the peace of everyone and he was about to call the police. and I was only one around to really calm him down in my broken German! I think I confused him more than anything!
Sunday we had lunch with our GML and discussed the Ward Mission plan... we have some big goals for the future! Im PUMPED! Plus, they had a ping pong table in their house... and his wife who is from China, challenged me, so I got to play for a few minutes. That felt really good.
All in all this week was great!
Transfer calls also came saturday... Elder Janis and I both decided that we have a work here to accomplish and we will just need to work hard to do it!
Thanks for everything, I love you all!! Thanks for the prayers, I hope you know Im praying for you.
Adventure is out there!
Elder Bartholomew

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