Elder Glenn Johnson: Livin' the Dream in Berlin, Germany: Out for a year? Nah

On Wednesday, October 25 of the year 2017, my fearless Zone Leader, Elder Jarom Hickenlooper, and I were on splits for the day. Going throughout our planned activities for the day, it comes time for us to make our way over to a sister in their ward, who needed help moving things around in her house.

As we are both fairly new to Hamburg, we were a bit lost on the U Bahns, so we decided to get out at a station called Wartenau. Now we are looking for a way to get there, soon to find out, we can take either a U Bahn (the one we were just in) or a bus. We decided to take a bus instead of more U Bahns, because we’re both used to busses and U Bahns are a little foreign to us.

As we are walking up towards the bus stop, I see a woman walk towards me in the corner of my eye, and speak to me starting off in English, and when I turned around it switched to German. „Elder Johnson?“ she asks, looking at my nametag, „Yes, that’s me,“ I reply. She then asks a question I had never thought I would hear for a long time. „Is your dad‘s name, Chuck?“. To this question I reply (in English, even though we were speaking German) „Yes..?“

She then proceeds to recall her memories of my father serving in her ward, as he served in Hamburg more than 30 years ago. She could still remember him coming over to their house for Christmas all those years ago. She saw us two Elders, and knew she recognized my face from the very first sight. She is one of the only people who my dad is still in contact with from his mission in the Hamburg mission, and the chances of us running into each other like that are very very small. But as we learn from the prophets, es gibt keine Zufälle (there are no coincidences).

My Dad's friend, Petra

I hit my year mark on the mission this week, pretty sick.

That was the big highlight of my week. Other highlights: we had a lit supertausch in Harburg where we played an intense game of BS, had some more lessons with some legends, gave some Books of Mormon out, and feasted upon one of the most heavenly pizzas on the planet.

a stake dance we helped set up a bit

This pizza had Ground beef, pepperonis, bacon, chicken breast, AND bbq sauce. We’re talking one of the most American things you can buy here; ‚twas a blessing to eat.