Elder Glenn Johnson: Livin' the Dream in Berlin, Germany: Sie ist schwanger? Was hat sie gemacht?

Hëÿ,

To start you off on this pleasant P-day, I’d like to relieve you of your worries from the subject line of this email. If you’ve already translated it for some reason or your German is just taking over and you’re forgetting your English, you’ll recognize that the sentence means „She‘s pregnant? What did she do?“ That was a quote straight out of our ward Christmas party, ladies and gentlemen. A few of our legends were acting out the nativity with hand puppets with the kids of the ward participating. Well, Mary’s part comes on and the actor of Joseph (the true legend himself) says to the kids those questions, followed with an „uhh.....I mean....“ and before he could get another word out he had all the adults in the room weak at the knees; great experience.

Christmas is getting closer and closer and that’s great. We had a Christmas party with our fellow workers from the Tafel. We were a little freaked out, because we had no idea what to expect; eating at some random German restaurant (that looked more like a bar from the outside) in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of Germans. But, oh man, was this a treat. I was blessed with some really awesome tasting duck, along with Knödel and Rotkohl of course, and Elder Hillyard unfortunately got Grünkohl (cue Sister Stewart‘s classic „GRÜNKOHL??“), but he enjoyed it. One of the saddest parts was when we realized that it was all free, drinks and everything, and we hadn’t used our free refills to our advantage until about 20 minutes before we were done. Never making that mistake again. But once half of them were drunk and singing it got to be quite the show. Germans and their alcohol, man!

We were also „surprised“ at our Christmas party with the assignment to sing a song. I put quotes around surprised, because we had talked about it before that they might do that. Apparently it’s a German tradition to have the missionaries sing a song at the party. But luckily we were prepared and had gone over the words to „Jingle Bells“ beforehand. We were also pleased with the opportunity of meeting one of the greats this week; Stephen Sinclair. The man who created the legendary pie loving Elder Ryan Sinclair. It was quite a funny experience though, I don’t think I could’ve been able to count how many times this legend said goodbye before he actually left, quite fantastic.

Anyways, other than that the work is going great. We are just waiting on Georg’s papers to be finished then the legend can be baptized, Jason is still getting baptized on January 6th, and Richmond will come around sometime and quit letting our appointments fall through haha. We’ve also been doing lots of finding and spreading the joy of the Christmas season through the light the world initiative. Macht mit.

Peace out