Schlappentag

So ihr lieben, belwome cack.

Let me tell you something about our legend Samer. We had a great lesson with him this week on prayer and it’s wonders it can work, but that wasn’t the legendary part. He told us of a friend he has who is having trouble believing in the religion he’s a part of, and that he’s just struggling to know what’s right. Well sometime this week we are going to be going over to him and telling him that we got the perfect solution for his troubles, without him knowing his friend sent us, I’m quite excited.

Zoko - Me, Elders Wright, and Taylor, 3 amigos

Zoko Reunion - Elder Brown, Rasmussen, me, and Wright (we were all comps with elder Rasmussen and each other basically)

Last Zone Conference with President Fingerle

So besides today being Memorial Day for us fellow Americans, here in Hof we also have a holiday that’s just for this city, called Schlappentag (Schlappen-slippers & Tag-day). I’m sure you’re wondering, what kind of city celebrates a holiday called slippers day? Well that would be Hof. Allow me to explain the story of this day to the best of my knowledge why this day is here and what it means. So back in the year 1415 or so, there was a Czech Reformer named John Hus, who was a fighter against abuses in the church, and was condemned to death and was burned. His followers then tried to carry out a reformation of the church, violently, and in the year 1430 they conquered the city of Hof and completely destroyed it. In this time the population turned to the margrave (a military leader in medical Germany times) of Brandenburg and they told the citizens of Hof that they would be exempt from taxes for 10 years to help rebuild their city; the only condition was that the citizens equip themselves with weapons and learn how to shoot to be able to protect themselves in later attacks. This turned into craftsmen having to go once a year to shooting practices and competitions, to which they always went lazily in their work clothes and their „Schlappen“ to go shoot. They made a special beer for this one occasion, Schlappenbier, that can only be consumed on this one special day. Now to this day, the Monday after Pentecost we Hofers celebrate the men who went and practiced shooting and drank some special beer by having parades, wearing lederhosen, and...you guessed it....drinking Schlappenbier (not us of course 😉).

video and pics from the Schlappentag Parade 

I hope you feel enlightened and just a little bit more German than you were coming into this email. Some other highlights: we had kindergarten day at volleyball and had a bunch of children who played with us but that was fun anyways, haha. Titian in particular had 0 chill. We had a girl come to church for a little while which was cool! Unfortunately she was kinda like a mouse because she came last week and asked for money and a visiting member gave her 10 euros so she just came back for more money but we offered her something better than money, eternal life, but she wasn’t too interested in that and left. She took a Book of Mormon though, mal sehen what she does with it but let’s pray she reads it hahaha. I got to see Dusty.

me serenading Dusty

Well that’s about it my legends, enjoy your Memorial Day bbqs 🇺🇸

an idea of what a Tafel in Germany looks like / Action pic 

Elder Johnson
Ludwigstrasse 52

95028 Hof

Germany

Von meinem iPad gesendet

Happy Ramadan

Selaamee boys and girls,

Wonderful to be back here with you all digitally yet again. I am writing this on a train on the way to Plauen for a district pday because heaven knows there will be a large lack of bock to write this email during / after our district activities. So we had a lit week. It was full of lots of boring uneventful missionary things, and some pretty cool stuff. On Wednesday we met with our legend Samer. We practiced German with him, talked about life and we’re teaching a lesson and reading in the Book of Mormon with him when his doorbell rang, and my legend was like „ohhhhh fetcchhhhhhhh I forgot my dude was coming over“ (that was an exact quote 😉) and he then explained to us quick and quiet that we needed to put all the church things away because this guy is very Muslim and Ramadan was starting the next day, so it would be dangerous to talk about our church with him there. So that was basically our invitation to get out of there before it got weird haha. Just an idea how it is teaching Muslims here in Germany. Not easy haha.

Thursday was the beginning of Ramadan, basically a month long fast participated by the Muslims. I’m not a master on it but from what I know they believe in these 30 days the gates to hell are closed and the gates to heaven are open, so they have the best chance to get close to Allah (God) in this time so they fast from sunrise to sunset. It’s pretty interesting. We met with our Arabic Persian couple on Thursday and the Arabic girl is participating because she’s Muslim and wants to, and the Persian boyfriend is just doing it to lose weight. So I guess to each his own, haha. I guess it wouldn’t have been a bad idea to try it with them cuz you know #Oct12.  Nah but they made us food and that was cool of them and a little weird, because they didn’t eat, but it was tasty. Unfortunately they didn’t make any of Elder Rasmussen’s favorite falafels or maté or anything. We got to have a good lesson with them on fasting, though, because this is also a time for them to only read from the Quran and learn things from it. It’s not easy for us to teach a lesson like we usually would so we had to adapt and that we did.

Other than that, we played volleyball and had both of the legends Lukas there, whic was great. I destroyed, like usual #sorryrosa. We also basically ran church on Sunday. I played the hymns, Elder Rasmussen and I blessed the sacrament, we both gave talks, we brought sacrament stuff and prepared it, set up and unlocked the church, we were the Sunday school teachers (even though we didn’t even end up giving our lesson because people just wanted to go home earlier I guess, haha). But it was good, we had more people in attendance than ever before—it was nice—haha. Mostly because some members from all over Germany were at a family reunion in the area so they decided to triple our numbers of attendance and visit our little branch. We had about 28 or so people so it was nice. Something else cool happened afterwards. A lady from Munich or somewhere in Germany came up to me and thanked me for my talk, which was nice, and then she began to explain that one thing I said was truly inspired. So this being like my 3rd talk in the branch, I was running out of stories to tell. Since I had already told the story of Georg, my legend from Hamburg, to the branch, I wasn’t going to bore them with that one again. But I needed to tell one story and I just couldn’t think of one until I got up to talk. I just had the feeling to tell the story of the great Georg again, because most of the people there hadn’t heard of him anyways. Well this lady afterwards told me of her son that came to church that day that hadn’t been to church in years because he is dating a non member of the church and they live together which creates problems between him and the church. She told me that that was the exact thing he needed to hear and hopes that will plant something in his heart. Just thought that was pretty cool, it made my day for sure.

I also made a pretty funny mistake when explaining the story I thought I should share. When explaining the part of the story where Georg got his wife to want to marry him, because being baptized was a thing he really wanted, I mixed up the German word for convinced (überzeugt). I told them that he forced (gezwungen) his wife to get married to him. Not pretty close words at all idk why that came out, but it was pretty funny and everyone was like hahaha what the fetch but then I had realized what I said. Funny stories.

Anyways my legends, I’m out see you next time

 im sorry

morgen Sport cuz we’re Gehorsam

cool Tower in Hof we visited, kinda looks like some Disneyland stuff

district pday without 2 elders who thought a Pentecost party was more lit than us

Elder Johnson
Ludwigstrasse 52

95028 Hof

Germany

Y’all mind if I....

Salami

First off, I’d like to give all a fat Happy belated Mother’s Day to all mothers, future mothers, fathers, uncles, the cousin that nobody likes but is in the family so is loved, dog mothers, the rest of the dogs, and myself.

Also it was a big week in our family as well. My father had a birthday, sister had a birthday, brother in law and sister had their anniversary, other sister survived yet another week without me, and they all had the blessing to get to speak to me over Skype. The Skype was pretty fun, crazy that it’s the last time I’ll see them until I’m back in America.

my legends

It was also a nice week here on the other side of the flat earth, in Hof Germany. I taught/translated a few Persian lessons which took up our entire Tuesday basically, we had a street display where we received phone numbers of some legends here who are interested in learning about the restored gospel. We also had a long trip up to Leipzig and had interviews with President Fingerle which was also pretty good. I think we hit a record high of the amount of delay—almost 4 hours behind we were—I believe. Poor man has to deal with that like 10 times every 6 weeks.

MTC / T-Pose Tuesday

interviews / y’all mind if we t-pose?

Thursday was an interesting holiday here in Germany, known as Christi Himmelfahrt (ascension I believe?) or also known as Father’s Day, where almost all of the men in the country go around the city pulling weird carts full of beer and music and just be weird. We celebrated the best way two Americans could celebrate, by meeting with an American man named James. He’s an opera singer and goes all over Europe singing in shows and performing and teaching other singers how to sing. He was a cool man. He also had a very friendly Labrador. He has been taught before by the missionaries and really respects our church (has a daughter in America who’s a member) but isn’t really too interested to change churches but loves to learn more about Christ from us and talking about religion. And obviously, who wouldn’t want to chill with some Americans in a different country? So that was fun. We also played a German knock off version of dodgeball called Völkerball with some members and non members, and obviously I destroyed them all because as we all know, if you can dodge a wrench you can dodge a ball.

But yeah, we’re still working with a few of our investigators to help them progress, and our friend from Syria who’s golden is still doing great. He is starting an internship in a few weeks that will help him a lot to get his family over here so he can get baptized and join our church.

We’ve seen some cool stuff the last couple pdays. This place is beautiful and just packed fetching full of cool things to see. 

a cool castle in Hof with Lederhosen

an oldie: i call this one, "when you didn't prepare for snow on your ride to Hamburg and it starts snowing"

Anyways, I might bounce out of here I mean why not shoot guys we’ll hit youngish a fat Tschüss then.

Elder Johnson

Ludwigstrasse 52

95028 Hof

Germany

Mother's Day Skype - LAST PHONE CALL!!!

We had a great day today as a family. We go to have our last phone call with Elder Glenn Johnson before he makes his bittersweet way home...

Young Mocc

Iyi akshamlar my friends.

Sorry to inform you, but by the reasoning of a packed pday this weekly will be a shorter one.

Man what a week of normalities again. We had 2 exchanges, one with Elder Wride of California who has quite a beautiful taste in music about which we were able to converse for quite a while. Except I had a flashback like the one you see in movies/TV shows where it’s all instant and fast when he pronounced, „Bon Iver“ like „Bone Eevehr,“ because I remember many many moons ago as I was still such a small unknowing missionary and Elder Samuel Douglas Mehr had told me about the way this one elder pronounces Bon Iver, so that was neat. Other than lots of music talk, we did missionary work such as a Sport evening where we got to play volleyball and basketball with some legends, great time.

I also ate a lot of Pizza with Elder Wright.

Elder Wright and I had the blessed opportunity to take part in an exchange with one another and let me tell you a bit about this glorious exchanging of companionships. We met some legends. First, we met an American on a train who was from San Diego which was neat. We had no idea until he pulled out an American passport and couldn’t speak any German to the ticket checker. We also met a German youth guy who was obsessed with American basketball and James Harden and his jump back look shoot cereal move, he was hilarious. We met a couple super nice feminists who we talked to for a little bit, which was also pretty sweet. Hmmm who else, a legendary African who studied at New York University, an Arabic guy who spoke really good English and was suuuuper confused asking why we would leave America and come to that city we were in, which was lit, haha. Let’s just say most people we met were pretty pumped that we were American. Elder Wright became a mother and choked. We found 20€ on the ground. I can’t begin to explain to you how great this Tausch was. Hopefully we’ll be able to pull off another this transfer before he most likely leaves me.

street display after the legendary tausch

I bought lederhosen today and if you don’t know what those are, just google it. I’ll send pics next week, had no time to take pics today because we were busy doing the Lord’s will and translating a solid Persian lesson in Plauen. Good stuff.

the plauen sisters, us, and a legend from zwickau

Anyways tell your moms something nice this week I sure do like my mom a whole lot 👍

well bye  

Elder Johnson

Ludwigstrasse 52

95028 Hof

Germany