A Wart Named Michelle

It's been quite the week. Sister Megli has had this wart on her toe for the last couple of months that has been super painful, so we went to the praxis to get it taken care of.

 

It was an adventure.

 

First of all, they couldn't decide what Sister Megli's first name was, and then they didn't quite know what to do with her middle name. We hadn't even gotten to the wart yet!

( So, Sister Megli's name is Erin Michelle Megli.)

Then, we get into the office, and the doctor looks down at her papers, and then looks up at Sister Megli and asks

"Who is Michelle?"

We both looked at her kind of blankly, then we all sort of figured it out.

Well enough.

We decided later that Michelle was the wart, and what Sister Megli should have said when the doctor asked

"Who is Michelle?"

was

"Why that's the wart, ma'am...Would you care to meet her?"

 

We got to participate in a super cool service activity this week. There is this awesome member going to Vietnam, and she always takes these little "candy bomber" packages of candy to the orphanage that she visits. So, we got to help her package a ton of German candy into cute little packages to give to the kids. So much fun!

 

 

My brother wrote something in his email last week that I found interesting.

He said:

" The great thing is that the Lord works with you in whatever shape you're in. "

It reminded me of what Elder Holland said in General Conference in his "Lord, I Believe" talk.

" Except in the case of His only perfect Begotten Son, imperfect people are all God has ever had to work with. That must be terribly frustrating to Him, but He deals with it. "

There were multiple experiences this week that reminded me of this principle, but I'm only going to share one of them.

It was after church yesterday, and we were casually invited to a after church luncheon with some of the members of the ward, but we could tell it was more of a ward thing than a missionary thing, so we decided to go when we could have stayed. So that one choice put us on the Bahn at exactly the right time. We ended up behind this guy who was sitting by himself. Then an older lady got on, and tried to stamp her Bahn card with the "open door" button instead of the time stamper. The guy noticed what happened, and helped her out. He stamped her card, and then gave her his seat. And then....get this! He turns to her and asks her

"Do you know of any good churches in the area? I'm looking for a church."

Sister Megli and I almost fell out of our Bahn seats. We looked at each other and then planned out what we were going to do next.

We followed him off of the Bahn, and stopped him. Turns out he lives near the church, and is totally interested in coming and meeting with us. MIRACLE!

 

The things that led up to us being on the Bahn included some personal weakness, but our weakness put us in the right place at the right time.

 

"Our own intellectual shortfalls and perplexities do not alter the fact of God’s astonishing foreknowledge, which takes into account our choices for which we are responsible." Elder Maxwell

 

That's something that I have always believed. I've always been of the opinion that God's perfect plan had to include the undeniable fact that folks were going to mess up, misunderstand, misinterpret, and miss seeing eye-to-eye. If He didn't plan for that, there's no way that His plan could be even close to perfect. Some people make try to think of this as God taking control, or being a puppet on a string, or not really having agency, or something of the like. But I want to testify, with all the force of this 5'6, missionary-badged person of mine that His perfection covers our imperfection, and that without Him, no matter how cool or good or well-educated we become, we would still be living a lie, because without God, we can never truly know ourselves.

 

This quote again, because it blows my mind every time.

 

by Joseph Smith:

 

“What kind of a being is God?” he asked. Human beings needed to know, he argued, because “if men do not comprehend the character of God they do not comprehend themselves."

You may wonder why you have certain weaknesses, or certain shortcomings, or tendencies, or trauma, or opinions, or whatever it is, but I'm here to tell you that there is a reason. There are no "bystanders" in the marathon of life, unless we consciously choose to be. There is always another round, where we can "get back into the game".

That's the final glory of the Atonement.

Even our greatest failures can be the fiery catalyst that catapults us out of self-centered, narrow-minded mortality, into glorious freedom.

We need each other's strengths,

but shockingly enough,

we also need each other's weaknesses.

We're all trying to get home, and live life fully on the way there.

 

Your weaknesses are a part of that process.

 

May our gracious, tender, all-knowing, all-loving, perfect Heavenly Father be thanked for loving us enough to know that we need to know what it is like to be weak.

 

The beautiful thing is that your worth exists outside of your weakness.

 

 

And sometimes even through it.

 

 

All my love, always.

 

 

 

Sister Roderer

 

Caught in Flight

It's been a fun week here in Mannheim. Lots and lots of rain, fall is HERE, it's finally time to wear boots again, and I've learned some skills that I never knew I would on a mission. 

Yesterday was a Kinder Spektakulär in the big main park in Mannheim. There were a ton of booths with different activities for kids, and the church was in charge of one of these booths. We were not sure what we were going to be asked to do, but face painting, balloon animal making, and rubber band bracelet making was not all on the expected list.

 

I face painted for 4.5 hours.

Folks, I've never face painted in my life.

Whose idea was that? This is coming from the girl who cannot draw a straight line.

With a ruler.

Now you want me to paint something on a child's face that's supposed to be recognizable afterwards?

Good Night!

Mercifully, the Lord's plan is perfect, miracles do happen, and most of the kids wanted to be cats or pirates.

I always talk about being able to reach dreams, like they are just something you can pull off of the shelf and pop open and "just add milk".

I'm always going off about wings, and flying, deserving, and attaining dreams. Today, though, I've been thinking about what you do when your wings are in the shop, or broken, or scratched, or just really ugly.

How do you fly if you can't get off the ground? Or don't want to be seen once you do?

Something that hit my soul in the head like a ton full of bricks is that I realized that I have spent most of my life thinking about what I could do, rather than what I can do.

For example: "If I had just felt a little more comfortable about myself, I would have been myself and he would have asked me out on a date."

Or, something more personally relevant: "If I wasn't bogged down with gluten, I would be clear headed enough to say something thoughtful, like I usually try to do."

Or yesterday, I played a movement from the Undine Sonata in Sacrament meeting with this really cool person from the ward. "If my lips weren't so dry, and if I had had my Chapstick dabei, I would have played with my usual sound."

I found that I am continually excusing myself from less than profi performance by assuring myself that I could have done all of those things splendidly, had I had the right circumstances.

With this train of thought, I have in effect, been raining on my own parade, or switching the railroad switch, so that my train of experience runs off course, then blaming the weather for the mess I am in.

I think it is so important to accept what we can do in the exact moment we are doing it. Once we are willing to do that, no matter what or how much that is, we will take our foot off the break, and we will be able to do more than we expected.

Wanting and trying to give more than we can give in that moment, to satisfy some understanding of our own worth, is in a sense, selfish. To give all that we have, to give it all to the Lord, and give it freely, that is what expands our ability to be able not only give, but to receive.

"  Surging selfishness, for example, has shrunken some people into ciphers; they seek to erase their emptiness by sensations. But in the arithmetic of appetite, anything multiplied by zero still totals zero! Each spasm of selfishness narrows one’s universe that much more by reducing his awareness of or concern with others. In spite of its outward, worldly swagger, such indulgent individualism is actually provincial, like goldfish in a bowl congratulating themselves on their self-sufficiency, never mind the food pellets or changes of water. 

Because selfishness is really self-destruction in slow motion.  " Elder Maxwell

That's how you fly, when flying doesn't seem possible. Like a penguin or an emu. If you can't fly in the sky, fly in the water or across the sand. But, you can always fly.

Sister Roderer

Welcoming our new Zone Leader at the Mannheim Bahnhof

A Good Week

Worms Soccer team photo bomb. The one guy with his arm around my
shoulder, after the picture was like "we....are so drunk. We have had
so much beer." So I forgave him for making me Schwarz.

This week had a lot of great, random little surprises in it.

From...

*our split with the Sister Training Leaders, and having some really cool conversations with beautiful people and giving out 4.5 copies of the Book of Mormon in under two hours of basic street contacting,

*to the Bahns starting to run more normally again,

* to me giving my first talk in church in German,

*to transfer calls and our entire Zone pretty much stayed exactly the same (except for a Zone leader getting released to help open a Spanish Branch in Heidelberg, and the new Zone leader coming in being a German with half of his family living in this area),

*to the entire Worms soccer team photo bombing our picture at a Street Display in Worms

*to someone showing up at church that we've invited for several weeks now,

*to playing classical music on my flute for the first time since leaving Utah (Undine Sonata)

All in all, it's been a good week.

A couple thoughts from my talk...this is short, sorry! Email time is like the blink of a very small eye.

It was based on John 17:3

Quote by Joseph Smith:

“What kind of a being is God?” he asked. Human beings needed to know, he argued, because “if men do not comprehend the character of God they do not comprehend themselves.” In that phrase, the Prophet collapsed the gulf that centuries of confusion had created between God and humanity. Human nature was at its core divine. God “was once as one of us” and “all the spirits that God ever sent into the world” were likewise “susceptible of enlargement.” Joseph Smith preached that long before the world was formed, God found “himself in the midst” of these beings and “saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest could have a privilege to advance like himself”³⁷ and be “exalted” with Him.

Joseph told the assembled Saints, “You have got to learn how to be a god yourself.”³⁹ In order to do that, the Saints needed to learn godliness, or to be more like God. The process would be ongoing and would require patience, faith, continuing repentance, obedience to the commandments of the gospel, and reliance on Christ. Like ascending a ladder, individuals needed to learn the “first principles of the Gospel” and continue beyond the limits of mortal knowledge until they could “learn the last principles of the Gospel” when the time came. “It is not all to be comprehended in this world,” Joseph said.⁴¹ “It will take a long time after the grave to understand the whole.”⁴²

To understand ourselves, we need to understand who God is.

The characteristic I pointed out was that of love. That is the first thin we teach, is that God loves us, and that's why we are here, that's why we have prophets, that's why we have commandments and ordinances, that's why we have trials, and that's why I'm on a mission.

Doctrine and Covenants 121: 36, 41-43,45

God's love is also His power. His power is His love.

How do we gain this love?

Matthew 22:36-39

1) keep the commandments

1 John 5:3-4

2) Love others

The best way we can love our neighbors is by basing our worth in Christ, and not in the opinions of other people.

3) see experiences from a state of love.

Choose to see everything that happens as the road to receiving your hearts desires.

President Brigham Young

      “All intelligent beings who are crowned with crowns of glory, immortality, and eternal lives must pass through every ordeal appointed for intelligent beings to pass through, to gain their glory and exaltation. Every calamity that can come upon mortal beings will be suffered to come upon the few, to prepare them to enjoy the presence of the Lord. … Every trial and experience you have passed through is necessary for your salvation.”

God loves and loves us. He has all power to make us better, and heal us.

Mannheim missionaries with our chalked Plan of Salvation

Love you all,

Sister Roderer

Riding old-style Bahn back from church

Teaching a lesson by lamplight on the balcony

Awkward print dresses inherited in Mannheim

A Day in the Life

 

 

Sometimes, no matter how much one tries, one cannot avoid gluten. That's what I've learned this week. We had two eating appointments one day that were basically only gluten. It was rather delicious, but not that healthy for this pile of bones.

The next morning,

I awoke and felt like I'd been flattened by a steamroller....the Mannheim Steamroller to be exact.

Hehe

Anyways,

I stumbled through morgen sport, like a puppet on a string, except the puppet master was a puppet novice and got all of the puppet strings tangled up.

So I moved on, and tried out getting ready for the day.

I was blow drying my hair, dog paddling through my thoughts like a chewawa in a hurricane, and without thinking, I yanked the blow dryer cord out of the outlet.

 

I pulled too hard.

 

The outlet was hanging by its wire threads, pulled completely out of the wall.

I grunt...partially in panic

Then grumpily stick it back in the wall, trying to get it to fit.

I tried too hard.

It got stuck, half way in, half way out.

I attempted to yank it out again, since it worked so well last time, but it stayed stuck.

I had to pray it back out...

 

I wasn't feeling too hungry, so I grabbed one of my special yogurts to eat for breakfast.

(I only had four for the week)

 

 

It was frozen.

 

 

But that's ok, because it was actually tasty frozen.

Speaking of frozen nourishment...

I missed out on spiritual nourishment because I kept falling asleep through all three hours of study, and was basically a zombie by lunchtime.

After a short nap, I jerked awake, but I felt as though I awoke to a dream rather than from a dream, like I was stuck in some missionary level of Inception, and the top kept spinning and spinning...or maybe that was my head...

At this point in the day, I'm about ready to call it quits, so I pitifully cry to Heavenly Father in prayer, and He reminds me that sometimes days are meant to be endured for a stretch, just until we get to the happy bit. I told Him I'd keep going, but I didn't think I was going to be able to do a very good job.

 

Little did I know what was in store...

 

We get to city central, so we could do our chalking finding activity.

Sister Megli and Elder Beverlin start drawing the plan of salvation, and I look at Elder Ostler, who immediately starts contacting people with his signature "HOW!" hand sign and authoritative "Hey, Entschuldigung, Herr.", then I look at all the people walking by me and I'm like

Uh...I've been turned into a cow...can I go home? (name the movie)

But I knew the only way out was up, so I start talking to people.

 

Out of the corner of my eye, I see these two...well...German dudes, and I was like

Uh oh

And all of a sudden we were talking.

And all of a sudden, he was proposing.

 

Flattering, with a refillable side of awkward.

 

He tried all of his angles. I tried to let him down easy at first, by saying that I couldn't because I'm a missionary, and he immediately asked me when I would be finished with my mission.

 

Uh...

 

Then he's like complimenting me on my looks with a "Mama Mia!" finger kiss

 

And I'm like

 

Ehhh?? Chubby white girl with a side of sourpuss? Whatever floats your boat! (actually it was more like. Eep! May your ship set sail, and may it sink in a sudden summer storm, because that ain't happenin, Sonny)

 

I wish him all the best, and I'll be forever grateful to him for shocking me out of my gluten stupor.

 

The best part of the day, however, was by far the opportunity to have an appointment with two people who were deeply interested in the church. Their questions were beautiful, and the Spirit was there. It was the Balm of Gilead, and a clear witness to me that things were going to be ok.

 

We also met with this amazing person who asked us a lot about faith and how we can have faith deep enough to facilitate miracles when the human mind is so susceptible to doubt. A scripture from Mormon came to mind.

Mormon 9:25

To me, faith without doubt means acting on hope without having all of the answers.

Sister Megli and I talked to a lot of people about hope these last couple of weeks, and specifically what brings them hope. So I ask you the same question.

 

What brings you hope?

 

Perfect hair, unfrozen yogurt, a specific text, an award, recognition?

 

What fills your soul with self-peace?

Here is some wisdom from Elder Maxwell:

 

"Thus we see, brothers and sisters, how we are justified in being of good cheer for ultimate reasons--reasons to be distinguished, however, from proximate circumstances. If, for instance, our attitude towards life depends upon the praise of men, the level of interest rates, the outcome of a particular election or athletic contest--we are too much at the mercy of men and circumstance. Nor should our gratitude for the gift of mortal life depend upon the manner in which we die, for surely none of us will rush eagerly forward to tell Jesus how we died!

 

  Instead, Jesus calls upon us to have a deliberate trust in God’s unfolding purposes, not only for all humankind but for us individually. And we are to be of good cheer in the unfolding process."

 

Even if the unfolding process sometimes makes you feel a little "bent out of shape" know that this Sister missionary in Germany knows it's worth it, and knows you're worth it. It brings me a startling sense of hope to realize that I am worth the pain I experience. And so are you. The goal is always to lay it all at the feet of Christ. Have the boldness, the courage, the consistency, and the heart to give your insecurities to Christ and have Him transform them and you into something breathtaking.

 

 

So, here is my proposal:

*Take one things that hurts you, that scares you, or that tears you down, and write it down on a piece of paper.

*Then find three ways in which this thing has brought you hope, or brought you to the Savior.

*Then think of one example in Christ's life where He felt something similar.

 

These kind of activities are the ones I sincerely dislike, so I'll give you an example so you know that if I've done it, these no excuse for you not to. ;)

 

*shutting down when I feel like people think I'm dumb

* 1) compassion for others 2) practice not being an object, but an agent 3) more prayers to see the situation more clearly--stronger relationship with Christ

*Mark 6:1-4

He did it, so that we can too. The plan's perfect. That I can guarantee. Go figure out why. He says we can prove Him, and He'll bring us hope every time.

Entitled to Know/ #awkward missionary

Aloha!

 

I broke the only spatula in the apartment last week which made it very difficult for Sister Megli to bake the three batches of cookies required for a variety of things this week. There was this moment

"Where's the...?....oh....yeah..."

Whoops.

#awkwardmissionary

 

Also, we were sitting behind a lady in the Bahn, and I noticed a teeny tiny spider in her hair.

"Excuse me"

I say

She promptly turns...

"There's a spider in your hair..."

and sends the spider flying down her back.

Sister Megli and I, our eyes bulge

She turns and I vainly attempt to get the spider without sticking my head down this lady's shirt.

Too late

Much too late

"Is it gone?"

"Eheh....yeah."

"Oh thank you, thank you!"

Now I just feel terrible and I look over at Sister Megli who is trying not to laugh.

Then I crack a smile, and we giggle silently until the lady stands up at the next stop, turns to us, thanks us again, and leaves. I'm praying that the spider dies before causing any damage. Just kidding. #awkwardmissionary

 

So last week we were talking to this sweet Chinese girl, who spoke no German and like five English words. She was so sweet, and said she didn't know much about God, so I pull out my finest sign language skills and point at the sky and say "God", then point at myself "brings me", then I touch my heart and spread my hands outward "hope". Then I turn to Sister Megli. She followed suit, except she said "love" with hands on her heart instead of hope. The girl I guess got the message and said she would like a Book of Mormon in Chinese. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen events, we didn't get to give her a Book, which will probably bother me forever, because I think she would have loved it, and would have loved to know what in the world we were taking about.

So this week, we see this Turkish lady at a European drinking fountain (aka stone head with drinkable water coming out in the middle of the plaza), and she was in the same boat, and so I tried my sign language again. I pointed up at the sky, or meant to, but didn't realize that I was actually pointing at the underside of the stone stairs right above us. So I point up and say"Gott" and she smiles and nods and says "pass auf!" Which means, be careful!

We left.

#awkwardmissionary

 

This week has been so much different than last week, and it was because of one simple idea. The people in Germany are entitled to know about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That's what I'm here for. Everything else is irrelevant. The rest is in the hands of the Lord, and in the choices of the people. I learned something else this week. If you don't love what you are doing, then you aren't doing it correctly. Meaning. Life doesn't have to be as hard as we make it out to be. That doesn't mean it will be any easier, but it will make more sense, and that means we'll have more hope.

 

We are entitled to know more deeply the love that God has for each of His children, and as we recognize that, we will come to better understand why life is sometimes unfair.

 

There are many times when we must withhold judgment and trust God, even in the midst of “all these things.” Elder Maxwell

That's all I've got time for.

Love you!!

Sister Roderer