Liebe Familie,

Thanksgiving this week was pretty fun. We had our dinner with the other Missionaries in Schwarzenberg on Monday. Elder Van Miltenburg and I did all of the cooking at our place. We made a chicken, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, cooked carrots, and garlic bread. It was all way good, but none of it taste like it does in America. I had to use a ton of different ingredients. You would be surprised how different a German grocery store is from an American one.

This Christmas Season, our Mission President has come up with a cool event for us to work on. It is called Der Advent der Wunder or The Advent of Miracles. We have this poster in our room that is an Advent Calendar. We have a bunch of ideas that we can do for each week as Advent Gifts. Every morning before we leave our apartment, we say a pray on our knees asking for our Heavenly Father to help us see Miracles.

The Christmas Mart is beautiful. Gorgeous. This Saturday Elder Van Miltenburg and I sang with the choir at the Mart. Good news, it was really good. Bad news, during the duet of The First Noel that Elder Van Miltenburg and I sang, I totally came in wrong. It was sort of embarrassing, but regardless it was way cool to sing. I stood there on the platform (a little German looking house/shed thing) and could see most of the Market and the rest of down town going up the hill. It was too cool. We then went to an old folks home and sang the whole program again. This time our duet was much better, I came in at the right time! Yea! We also sang a second duet at the old folks home, Jingle Bells. Most of the rest of the songs were in German, but our director, Sis. Richter decided that since she had two American Missionaries who could both sing, she gave us the English songs as duets. Good Day.

This week I finished the Book of Mormon. The first time on my mission. Every time you read it different things seem to be emphasized based on your circumstances. I started to read it auf Deutsch. I have gotten through the first 25 pages. I understand a lot of it, but not all. I guess I would say 75%?  Reading is a lot easier for me than listening is. It is interesting to read it in a different language. Again, you get different insights. Some words and verses in German stick out to me more in than they would in English. I would also like to read the Old Testament in German, but that is going to have to wait for a little while. The Bible in German is a much older, harder German to understand, so maybe I will conquer that reading in a couple of months.

So yesterday, was sort of hard. My companion and I walked around Innenstadt (the down town) and did contacting. I tracted into this one guy would just wanted to argue. I understood everything he was saying and his argument, but I got flustered and stumbled over my German. I ended up just giving him a card and told him that the website could explain it better than I could. I was feeling sort of down, so I just sat down on a windowsill in the crowded Innenstadt in the dark (it was night time) and prayed. I asked for strength. Sometimes it is hard to keep going when person and person tells you that you are wrong or they just aren’t interested. I felt the comfort of my Savior and I kept going. We were able to make an appointment that night. I know that we all have challenges, we all have flaws, we all have things we need to work on. It is through the Lord that we can accomplish such things.

You guys are awesome. I hope your Thanksgivings were awesome!

peace

tschüß,

love,

Elder Austin Arthur Fullmer

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