I am getting sick of trying to title these e-mails....

Parental Editorial Comment: Ryan typical has something in the reference line of his emails.  We use that whenever possible.  If he doesn't do anything, we will create a title for the blog post.  We have not asked him to title the emails, he has just done that.  Obviously, this week he had writers block when it came to the title. Still laughing...

Well transfer calls were, well uneventful. The entire district is staying! Which I am most certainly happy about, we have a good district ( Did I mention what everyone was studying in the district? Elder Esplin was studying Chemistry, (But now wants to be an engineer) Elder Hustead is studying Physics, and Elder Hanson is studying Chemistry. I feel very at home here ;-) ). 


I think I may have mentioned Zone Conference in my last e-mail, we had this past Tuesday, and it was incredible! It was in Winterthur, which meant that Elder Esplin and I needed to get up at 5 am to be out the door by 6:15 to catch a train from Bahnhof at 6.37 to make it to Winterthur (transferring trains 4 times) by 8.30, because that was the only option that would get us there before 10. Wunderbar. :-) That ate our entire day we got back from Zone Conference at roughly 7:30 that evening. It turns out that we only ordered 40 Book of Mormons but, Elder Sampson ( Ehepaar) said he is going to bring us some more tomorrow to hopefully get us to survive this month :-). 


But with all the other supplies we ordered my suitcase weighed probably around 100lbs. Elder Esplins was much smaller and probably weighed around 30lbs. Let me just say, there is nothing more fun than trying to carry a 100-pound suit case from Winterthur to Dornbirn, taking 4 different trains and 2 buses ;-).

We had a cool lesson with Thomas this week. The first thing he said when he showed up was that he doesn't want to meet with us anymore, he felt like he was being rushed. (Coming from our first lesson with him, Elder Esplin pushed for a 3x4 ( meet 3 times a week for 4 weeks) which comes from Preach my Gospel. I have never used it, and don't like it, because here in Europe, it doesn't work (its rather Ironic, it was brought up in Zone Conference that the culture here is different and that the 3x4 can cause people to stop investigating). 

Well sure enough, he told us that he couldn't meet with us, because the program was too extreme. In his mind he had gotten himself into a 4 week vortex of no escape which would force to be baptized in 4 weeks. ( Which is why I don't like the 3x4, people here only see it as us pushing to meet a quota, and when it comes to religion, if they are open to it, they don't like to feel pushed.) Luckily for us, he had some time right then to meet and we talked. The Spirit was there, and before he left he said, that he wanted to meet with us again next week :-) YES!! Wow, that was one whirlwind of a visit, we went from being dropped, to having a really good discussion, to him realizing that he like meeting with us ( BUT ONLY ONCE A WEEK) and that he wanted to continue. Thanks goes to the Holy Ghost for that one. We about lost one of our investigators... 

Other than that the week has been a fairly "Normal" week. I say normal, meaning similar to the past couple of weeks, but in reality, I guess the term "normal" doesn't quite suffice. :-) On Friday we had another lesson with Ralph, which went really well. There was no organized structure, he had read the entire restoration pamphlet we gave him and said that it wasn't hard for him to imagine it actually happening. Then he said all that was left was for him to read the book and pray about it to find out if its true! Awesome! The only thing is, is that he wants to have time to read the book before we meet again ( this is something which comes up surprisingly a lot, people think that they have to read the entire book before they can meet with us, and even after we explain that they don't need to, they still want to anyway.) So he said to give him a call in 2 or 3 weeks. Which isn't what we would like to do, but we are just going with it at this point. 

Saturday was cool, we had about 4 hours free. So we did a lot of dooring, We started on Fishbachgasse, and in about 2 hours where able to completely door 8 buildings. Covering about 100 doors. Only 1 of which was interested and invited us back this week. with 2 hours left we decided to try going by on a few people, none of which were home. But then we started going door to door in Kehlerpark. 5 doors back to back to back, all invited us back this week! ( We should have started there earlier!) It helped that by that time is was a bit later in the day, when we went to Fischbachgasse, it was around 3 or so, and more than half of the residents weren't home. But they weren't really on the streets either... That's always something that boggles us as missionaries. On holidays, there is no one on the streets, no one driving around ( i.e. no one going anywhere)  no one in the stores, because everything is closed, and yet no one is home! Where do they all go? 

Its been cool to see a change in the ward recently regarding missionary work. There is a much more noticeble excitement about missionary work. Some of the Melchizedek Priesthood brethren have been asking to go door to door with us. Yeah you heard right, we are getting request from people to come with us tracting for a few hours ( doing splits that is in order to double the effectiveness). Either people are starting to become more insane, or this church really is true, maybe a little of both...  ;-) The idea to come on splits with us while we tract actually came from a member of the bishopric. We had gone by on him earlier in the day and asked him if he knew anyone interested. He couldn't give us any right then. But then that night at Ward Council he brought up the fact that here in Austria its a different mind set. People just don't talk about religion, he said he would rather go door to door for a few hours then try to think of people who may be interested. So he did. We did it last week, and we have plans to do splits again this week. :-)

It still amazes me how sometimes things just fall into place. Coming back from Church yesterday we talked to a couple on the street, it turns out they are new to the area, and were very open to hear about our message! We made an appointment on the spot with them and will go visit them this week! We weren't even out looking for people and we find them! The Lord has been putting people in our path right and left. Its been very cool!

Thats about all that I can think of right at this moment,

Thanks for the love, support and prayers, I really appreciate them!

Love,

Elder Ryan K. Christensen