Elder Glenn Johnson: Livin' the Dream in Berlin, Germany: Enough

Salami ladies and gentlemen.

Nice to see you this fine warmer pday. Our week was interesting. We had a few highs and lows and an explosion at the main train station but whatever, normal stuff here in Germany.

Some highs: We taught a really cool 18 year old from Syria. This legend can speak quite good English and even better German. We taught him about the restored gospel and our beliefs and he was quite open and would love to learn more! The dope thing is how we came to teaching him. He was invited by some elders to play soccer every Saturday with us and just noticed that we were really nice people and wanted to know why we were so nice and seemed so happy. Boom. Roasted. Another high: We taught the first lesson to a Persian man and it was cool to be able to understand and communicate better in Farsi. Also it was a good lesson and our friend was pretty interested it seemed. Georg came to church and is still one of the most rock solid investigators that has set foot on this earth, we had also a friendly Italian friend of ours also make it (it’s a me, Mario!).

A low part of our week: We had a very packed Saturday full of 5 appointments and a street display, and every single one of our appointments fell out. That happens every now and then haha. But the street display was fun talked to a few legends. We spent a lot of time on Friday going to potential friends of the church of the Turkish origin but no one had interest really. We talked to many Turks, I understood like nothing, and all but one woman had no interest. But we’ll see if something comes from our Turkish lady that wants to meet again and talk about the Mormon Kitabi. Also our good friend Faiz wasn’t able to make it to church again, so that means we’ll be having to work with him some more a little bit longer to help him prepare to be baptized. He is really an awesome guy.

Freezing Cold Street Display

Explosion? At one of the largest train stations in Germany? Yes, that was seen by me live. On Sunday, we headed over to Hauptbahnhof to meet with our zone leaders to make a quick exchange for our Turkish speaking comps to visit a man of the Turkish origin (who ended up not being home). I was with Elder Parry again and we started off doing some finding over there and got roasted by a lot of people. We talked to a man who’s actually an investigator of the Elders in Altona, which was cool. He told us he had lost contact for the past few weeks with them and really wanted to meet again because he’s interested to learn more, so we could give that further on the Altona elders, which was cool! He told us it was no accident that we met that night. Then as we headed back into the train station to meet up with a friend from Eritrea, we heard quite the ruckus going on over by one of the trains. There was a large group of people all kinda yelling and screaming and chanting and everything you can think of. As we watched (from a safe distance) next thing I see is a big white flash accompanied by a fairly large

BANG

. Interested, came many people over near us as we had a great view of it. No longer than 45 seconds later, a large squadron of German riot police came guarded with helmets and shields to go calm the crowd down. About 2 minutes later came another large group of police. No tear gas was thrown or shots were shot but it was insane. I couldn’t tell you what the bang was. It was loud enough to have been a half stick of dynamite, a blank from a gun, whatever your imagination allows it to be. For those 10-15 minutes no trains came in or out of the giant train station and it was crazy. Sick that I got to experience that in real life, but glad none of us got hurt. Could’ve been potentially pretty bad.

Well, those were pretty much the big parts of our week. Hope you have found entertainment through the digital reading of this large collections of letters forming words which formed sentences which formed paragraphs which finally formed a new weekly from yours truly.

Much fun this week