Hallo!

First, Mom, I love the cookbook\notebook that you sent me with all of your recipes. I don’t know why I haven’t kept you up to date with my cooking adventures, but I thought I would take a moment and share. To date I have made: Pasta, Sausage and Veggies; Chicken Noodle Casserole; Broccoli Cheese Soup; Chili; German Potato Salad and Wursts; Tuna Salad; Baked Potatoes; Egg Salad; Pancakes; Biscuits; Fullmer Family Bran Muffins; Gravy; and Camping Cookies. Wow. I was so tired of eating Spaghetti. Seriously, that is all that missionaries eat, and it was basically the only thing that Elder Lingard and I ate until I got the recipes. Way better. A few quick stories in relation to this food. I actually made the camping cookies this past week. We have been meeting with two younger kids Elias and Janos Jeromin (12 and 10). Their Mom is a member of the church, but really inactive. We found out that her two children wanted to be baptized. The problem was that they were never coming to Church and their Mom didn’t want us to meet in their house because it was always messy. So for a month we were meeting in a park nearby their house. Finally, it just seemed silly to keep meeting with them when their Mom wasn’t trying to help the situation. The mother is a single mom and super stressed out, so we took a couple of steps back. This past week, I baked those cookies, and Elder Guthrie and I wrote our testimonies out and with an invitation to Stake Conference: we dropped by their house and rang the door bell. She came to the door and was really happy to receive our gift. The woman literally looks like she is always about to cry. So I think we cheered up her day. I hope so, anyways. Hopefully they come to Stake Conference. We have it this weekend. It should be pretty cool.

This past week we had Zone Conference. We have a Zone Conference once a transfer during the fifth week of the transfer. This time the Zone Leaders called my companion and I and asked us to give a talk\workshop on Motivation. The ironic thing was that night I really need to think about motivation. That night we were halfway through the week of our door to door challenge. That night three old ladies told me that could not understand my accent, one man told us we would not have any success at this apartment building, and then another literally walked us out of his apartment building and told us to move on. I got the message. I needed to be thinking about motivation. The next week, I thought about this idea of motivation a lot. I sort of felt like I was back in LT.Halvorson’s Leadership and Organization Behavior class – mostly because we talked a lot about motivation. Elder Guthrie and I came up that a couple things that missionaries can use for personal motivation. First the ”whats”: music, the Scriptures, goals, and our testimonies. Second the ”whos”: our families, ourselves, our investigators, and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Maybe some of these ideas can help you motivate yourselves this week. We used a scripture for the topic of ourselves and says, ”verily I say, men should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness; for the power is in them, wherein they are agents unto themselves.” Also, and the risk of sounding a little sacrilegious, I just thought of a cool quote. It come from a song that The Fray sings: ”Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.” Good Job, The Fray. Right on the Money.

The rest of Zone Conference was way fun. I have made some good friends with Elders in the Hamburg Zone. The Neumünster Zone was also there, so I got to see Elder Turney. That was way fun. He was in my Golden group. We traveled to Germany together.

Well I love you all. Good luck with everything this week. Also, Aunt Jana, and Dad, be safe in the Middle East this week. You are actually closer to me there then the people in America. So you should count yourselves lucky, just saying.

The pictures are from some families in the congregation here.

peace,

tschüß,

love,

Elder Austin Arthur Fullmer