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