GUTEN MORGEN!
Hello everyone! It's been another pretty wonderful week. Things have
really been shaping up here! I'll try and keep this one positive again.
I've gotten to be pretty good friends with a few of the Elders here. One
of them, Elder Adams, is from Utah and he ran cross country through high
school. I've been running with him a lot since he's one of the only Elders here
who actually likes running. So that's pretty great. There's also Elder
Winder, who also is a runner who ran a marathon prior to his mission. We get
along pretty well.
Things continue to go well with my companion, Elder Fromm, even though
there were a few times this week where I think we got frustrated with each
other. But he sprained his ankle during basketball on Thursday, and luckily
it's not severe, but it has given us opportunities to be patient with each
other. I'm given opportunities to help him out and be patient, and so I've been
trying to use those, and I think our hearts have been softened a bit. Since
then we've been getting along pretty darn swell.
I've talked with the other two Elders in my district as well, the ones that
I felt I was having the biggest issues with, and we've been able to resolve a
lot of our disagreements even though we still will conflict a little at times.
I think we're actually able to tolerate eachother pretty well now, haha! But
yeah, things are a lot better and there's a much stronger respect between all in
the district.
I would say that the thing I've learned about resolving conflicts in the
last few weeks is this: It's pretty darn hard to hold your tongue, but you won't
regret it. I saw this a lot on social media mainly before I left, where if
somebody would insult another person, that other person would focus on coming up
with a good "comeback" because it would usually get a rise out of anyone who saw
it. But that never ends a conflict. There were many times early on where the
Elders would make jabs at me, and I would think to reply with a reciprocated jab
(Sometimes, I let myself.) I found that in the times I didn't reply, the
situation would often be left to diffuse somewhat independently. Inversely,
when I would try and "counter" the jabs, the spirit would very quickly leave and
the tension would rise. If I was focused on making damaging comebacks instead
of just trying to ignore the comments, I'm afraid that by now, I would not be
getting along with the other Elders at all. So a word of advice from my short
experience is to be wary of the temptation to reciprocate hostile attitudes,
because that rarely helps anything. It's something I need to keep working on,
too.
I've been setting goals to memorize more German scriptures, and I got 2
Nephi 25:26 down just the other night. Some nights I'm beat, though, and focus
more on reading than I do memorizing. So this is a work in progress. We've
finished covering German grammar principles and now I'm just working on
memorizing the articles for the words we're learning to apply a lot of them,
since you can't do much I learned if you can't remember the "genders" or
articles of your nouns.
My work has slowed a bit in the last few days though because I got sick
with a sore throat and congestion, so these have been a rough few days in terms
of concentration. But I'm pushing on and taking tons of medicine to try and get
over this.
OH, and by the way, we got our flight plans! We're leaving Tuesday morning
on the 16th at 6:20 AM for the Salt Lake Airport, and fly out at 11:00 AM to
Atlanta Georgia, then to Frankfurt! We'll be arriving in Frankfurt at 8:45 AM
the next day. This is going to be an interesting plane ride. But I am
super stoked to be able to really start the mission. I'm just trying to
focus on work here still right now, though, because a lot of Elders are getting
MTC-itis, and can't focus at all. Nevertheless, it's still fun to think
about.
Let's see...that's about it. The language continues to go great. I'm
getting a good foundation here! And the more I study German, the worse my
spelling and sentence structure in English gets, so that's wonderful. AP
English? Just a distant memory.
One last thing, every Friday we've had "world cup Friday" with Argentinian
Elders out on the soccer field. It's pretty funny because both missions of
Germany and Argentina just throw out as many people as they can. There were
like 70 people out yesterday (I couldn't play because my companion needed ankle
"rehab" ((the trainers didn't really know what they were doing. I'm not just
assuming that. One of the trainers whispered to the other and said "I don't
know what I'm doing" as he attempted to fasten a brace on my comp's
ankle))). And then we also annexed a bunch of other missions onto our team,
like Armenians and Georgians (The country Georgia), and Argentina does the same
with any Spanish speaking mission...so we get outnumbered sometimes. The chaos
is pretty fun but some people take it too seriously and we've almost had a few
fights. Geez, Elders. Germany is winning 2-1 in World Cup Fridays right now
though, apparently, so that's...good...
Okay, sweet, now I'm done. Thanks for your prayers, interests and
concerns!
Love you all!
Love,
Elder Wallentine
Here are some pictures! The one taken at night is with a few old friends at
Mountain View, and one is me holding our flight plan, and then one of my name
tag, and one with a bunch of elders in our district. My companion isn't in the
photo though, sorry. But yeah, the name of the church is:
(Die) Kirche Jesu Christi der Heiligen der Letzen Tage
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