& the Adventure Continues

Hello everyone!

We had more lessons this week with people who are interested in the Gospel than we have had this whole transfer COMBINED. Woohoo! It was really satisfying to teach so much this week. We hope that it keeps growing through continued effort. :)

Also, on that note, transfer calls came! And the lovely Sister Bishop and I are doing ANOTHER transfer! Squeal! It'll be our 4th transfer - and therefore, we will have spent 6 months (a whole third!) of our missions together. No complaints here. Hopefully I don't drive her crazy by the end of this transfer, but we're excited to have another transfer because it feels like things are really starting to pick up even more!

Eating dinner on their Passau apartment
terrace because of the lovely weather

The view from their Passau apartment terrace

Finding was actually really fun this week. There was randomly this big Töpfer (pottery) fair that came into town, so we went and talked to a lot of people.  The idea of going to such a place to find felt like cheating in the past since it wasn't p-day, but I've since learned that casually walking around such a place leads to a lot of organic opportunities for talking to people. It's fun. We struck up a lot of conversations with craftsmen selling their work, and they almost all asked about our tags, and we had some cool discussions. One guy told us that we both were dressed really nicely - we were both wearing shirts that Sister Wilkes had left behind in the München 3 apartment, haha.

We also got to go to a street Ausstellung! I hadn't been to one in a LONG time. But it was so fun! It was in Neuötting's area, so our whole district went down there with their ward mission leader, and we had this big stand set up with info about the church and pamphlets and Books of Mormon and mini "For the Strength of Youth"s and stuff, and the best part - the GML (ward mission leader) brought this electric keyboard and a bunch of hymnals and he played hymn after hymn and we all just SANG our hearts out, and it was so fun! The weather was absolutely perfect and a lot of people would just stop and listen. There was one guy who was like, "Could I request a song?" Apparently his daughter married a Mormon guy in the states, so he's semi-familiar with the church. He requested "Näher, mein Gott, zu dir" ("Nearer My God, to Thee") so we sang it with him and it was really nice. We got a lot of telephone numbers for the Neuötting elders to teach! We are going to go to Rathaus (city hall) this week to try and figure out how to do the paperwork so we can do one here in Passau while the weather is still so nice. It was so fun!

The Elders at the Ausstellung in Neuotting

Hm, what else. Elder Faux is temporarily in the office, so we were the only missionaries at church yesterday... And there wasn't a piano player. Gulp. I repeat myself - if you want to go on a mission, LEARN. THE PIANO. I BEG OF YOU. Sister Bishop and I were both kicking ourselves yesterday because we aren't Elder Faux and therefore aren't proficient in piano... Sister Bishop plunked the main line while I conducted, and we just did our best. We just thought it was funny, but we made it through the meeting without any major mishaps.

I wanted to share something I've been thinking about a lot in my personal scripture study in this past week. We read in the Bible that we should "love our neighbors as ourselves", and something dawned on me this week. We always focus on the "love our neighbor" part, which is obviously incredibly important, but the other half of that talks about how it's a commandment that we love ourselves. Sometimes we overlook that. I know that I do sometimes. I've been trying to make a more concentrated effort to be kind to myself and not to just beat myself for being an averagely imperfect human. But the secret is that no matter how we try, we're always going to be imperfect. But the enabling power of the Atonement is a real thing - and Jesus Christ invites us all to come unto Him to feel His perfect love.

So if He loves us, we should too. :)

Sister Bushman

More photos . . .

With current and former companions at the Munich Zone meeting:
Sister Berry, Sister Bishop, Sister Bushman, Sister Cherrington

Sister Bushman had blood drawn this week;
but reports are that she will survive.