August 6, 2012

Woohoo, another great week!  I´m not sure if I have told you about all of the goals of the mission, but, the goals are that we baptized 150 YSA´s this year, teach 20 lessons a week, find 10 new investigators a week and then focus on working with young single adults.  Well, this zone was basically like... dead 5 months ago, but, we have been focusing on the things President Schwartz has asked us too, and know our zone is leading the mission!  By a long shot.  We are tripling how many lessons we were teaching, quadrupling the people found, and this last week, 5 baptismal dates were set!  We had interviews with President this week, and he said he wanted me to report to all of the District Leaders and Zone Leaders in this meeting we have on Thursday where we were, where we are, and what we did to go there.  About 2 months ago, we made like TONS of plans for what we could do to help this zone out, and, it worked!  So, the zone is tearing it up!
    This week we had some amazing miracles, we met with an inactive lady, who happened to be a referral from a random person on the street, we got to know her real quick and then left.  At the end of the week, she had been trying to call us, but, she couldn´t for some reason, so, she somehow got the number for another companionship, and called them, and told them to tell us that she wanted to meet with us.  We went and met with her again, and she had her sister with her.  She said that her sister has been going through a way hard time, a divorce, her kid is in jail, someone broke into her house and beat her up, she lost her job.... and more, she said that in this time she didn´t know where to go, she had no friends, and none of her family was helping her.  Then, this inactive member just happened to call her up and tell her about the missionaries and how much the missionaries helped her.  The Sister came to visit the member and asked if she could meet with us.  When we were talking to her, she talked about how she just had all of these troubles and how she wanted them to go away and she wanted to be reborn.  We read in Alma 7 with her where it talks about the atonement and baptism, and uses the nifty phrase of being reborn.  She read that and started crying and said it was an answer from God that we are the true church and how she can be happy again.  We set a baptismal date with her in the first lesson, but, she lives in Köln, so, the Elders there will help her the rest of the way.  By the way, that family is from Macedonia too, I don´t know why, but almost all of the people I have been finding and teaching come from the ex-Yugoslavia territories or Africa..... whatever.
    We also were teaching a black guy called Stanly.  We taught him, and he said that he really wanted to learn more, but, he had to go to Stuttgart.  He said he would be there for almost the whole week, but, after, he would love to learn more.  A couple of days later, we got a call from Stanley.  He asked if we still remembered him.  He then asked where the Church was, and when we could meet.  We told him, and then he said, "Good, I´m glad the church is there, I would really like to join your church."  We were way excited and set up a time to meet with, and then we found out he doesn´t live in Düsseldorf either which is why it was always hard to meet with him.  So, we gave him to the Elders in Duisburg, and he is praying about a baptismal date right now.
    There was a baptism in the Ward last week from an excommunicated member.  We were able to get 3 investigators there.  It was so funny, I asked 2 of the investigators if they wanted to get closer to see the baptism, and they didn´t understand, he asked, "You want me to go and get baptized now? Okay."  He started to get up to go and get into the font haha!  His brother was just laughing at him.  They all really ended up enjoying the baptism, and one of our investigators, the one that was going to go in and get baptized right then, told us he wanted to get baptized in 5 weeks.  So, basically, we were hearing about baptism the entire week haha.
    We also managed to meet the goal of 20 lessons again.  We were supposed to be home Sunday at 8 for call-ins.  We had an appointment at 7.30 and that was going to be the 20th.  We went to the lesson, and he wasn´t there!  We ran to a corner, said a quick prayer, doored a house, and found a new family =)  The Lord blessed us to meet that goal and find an amazing family from Iran.
     Thanks for all of your love and support!  Things are going great, and getting better and better!
Elder Collings