Dental Care

Highlights
From this week:

Traveling on ICE

*MLC was this week, which is always a party. 1.5 hour ICE ride in each direction! 
*Eight of our twelve investigator appointments fell out, and nobody answered their phone, which left us with opportunity of being creative...
*One of our investigators wasn't answering his phone, so we figured that he wasn't going to meet, so we went home and started cooking dinner. We had peeled, chopped, thawed and seasoned everything, and thrown it into the pot to boil, when he calls and says he's two minutes away. (30 min after his appointment was supposed to start) 
So, what do we do?
we grab our pot of food, grab all our clothes because we had to go straight to Düsseldorf to overnight there, and cooked the soup at the church.
And then had to store it in the fridge for a couple of days until we could get back to it.
#onlyonamission
*We gave a musical Family Home Evening to a family in the ward and two of their neighboring family friends. What a great time!

World-o-meter
This we week we met with or talked to people from:
*Germany
*Bangladesh
*Poland
*Albania
*China
*Brazil
*Lebanon
*Holland
*Syria
*Nigeria
*Ghana
*Ukraine
*Turkey


Deutsch:
So the phrase "Christ suffered for us" in German is "Er hat unter uns gelitten", which directly translated means "He suffered under us". I just love the idea that Christ is supporting us through our pain, and because He "descended below all things" the depth of our pain is matched, and then outweighed by the depth of His redemptive suffering. He truly knows how to succor us. I am so grateful for that knowledge.

Once upon a time, we were going by on an an investigator, and we ran into this older lady who was supporting herself with the wall of the apartment building.
Me, in my generosity, walked right by her, but Sister Johnson stopped to offer to help.
She needed help walking back to her apartment building, so I took one arm, and Sister Johnson took the other, and we walked her down the street. 
She led us to an apartment door, and said 
"my name is "Wienheim"  "
or something like that.
We looked at the klingel box.
Her name wasn't there.
We started to get worried.
We told her that her name wasn't there
"Oh, ok. I guess it is one door further."
We kept walking and found her door.
She fumbles around in her bag and through her pockets, trying to locate her keys.
She didn't have them.
But she did have her bag packed with a pair of pajamas...
Now we were really starting to get worried.
What were we supposed to do? She definitely wasn't all there, and we couldn't leave her! 
Then, she reached into her pocket
"Maybe you can open the door with these"
And with a flourish, she pulls out the bottom half of her
DENTURES 
At this point we were in open shock.
She literally went to the front door and tried to pick the lock with the metal wires on her dentures. 
They looked like they hadn't been washed in a few years...

We finally got her into the apartment building by klingeling the neighbors.
Then the real party started.
First she bangs on the door of the WRONG apartment before we figure out which door is hers. 
Then she accuses us all of having her keys and hiding them.
A random neighbor from upstairs decides to help us and calls some unknown person in the phone to come help. It obviously not the first time this had happened. 
Then the creepy, but unfriendly man in the apartment across the way kept staring through the crack in his window at us, which meant that we could only see his nose and eyeballs. Which made him seem very creepy indeed.
At one point we looked through the opaque front door and saw a yellow arm with a red cuff about to ring the bell, and we got super excited, because emergency vehicles in Germany are sometimes red and yellow. So, Sister Johnson runs to the door and throws it open, and we see the startled features of a twenty something German boy delivering a DHL package. His surprise was matched only by our disappointment. 
Eventually, a lady came with the key, and who turned out to be our friend's caretaker, so we went on with out lives.
I have learned one very important things.
Every survival kit should contain the bottom half of a pair of dentures.
They always might come in handy.



We were teaching a lesson on Sunday, and we talked about Christ and what He had done for us, and how without Him, there would be no chance that we could live with God again, and how He loves us so much that He gave us this church, and the priesthood, and prophets, and revelation, and our investigator, in his broken English says:
"Please, tell me what I must do to please the God."

That is what hit me harder than a two-ton rock this week. Are we willing to do what it takes to please our loving Heavenly Father? Are we ready to lay aside every ounce of rebellion and pride, and submit totally? 
My challenge comes from Alma 5. If you have felt the redemptive, sanctifying, purifying, healing power of Christ in your life before, can you say that you feel it today? I promise that an open, honest evaluation of where you are at will lead you to your knees in humility and hope. 


Love always,

Sister Roderer

I thought the color of this door was so great, so I wanted to take a selfie to capture the weirdness of our day. So we did. Then some guy pulls up on his car and calls out to us "young women" and asks us why we took a picture of his house. We showed him the picture and explained to him that the selfie setting was on, so the lens was not
pointed at his house but at our beautiful faces.