"Deutschland ist Weltmeister."
obviously we didn't watch it, but we did hear massive screams and yells, assumably that one goal that Germany made, I think in overtime. Then after I got that text (there were other updates as well from the member of our ward) it wasn't too long before I heard blowhorns sounding, people yelling, and cars driving and honking probably up until 1am, haha. Life is surpirsingly normal looking today though. No drunks passed out in the street, no streamers strewn across street lights. I heard something this morning though that sounded like street cleaner trucks and it's likely all the partyers partied themselves out and won't wake up until Tuesday. Guess we'll see.
This week I had a really cool experience with prayer. My companion and I had a day where we didn't have any other appointments, so we figured we take part of the day to go to a small town/dorf in our area that we don't get to spend much time in and kind of explore and familiarize ourselves with it, at the same time perhaps finding someone who'd like to learn more about the gospel. We decided though in that same morning, that whatever we were going to do, we should pray about it and ask Heavenly Father if that's really what we needed to be doing at the moment, or if there was anything we needed to do. We prayed about it, asking for a specific place to go to find someone, a street, a park, something. But at the end we both actually felt like that was what we should do, and a name had come to my mind of a brother in our ward, so I decided to call him. We'd often done service with/for this particular brother, and I knew he had a ton of little projects he was working on, especially during the summer. So we called the family up to ask. The wife answered and said her husband was still sleeping (Saturday), but as we talked further she explained (in german), "Oh! Actually it's really good timing that you've called, I've been trying to get a hold of you for a couple days now because I talked with a friend of mine about the church and she got really excited and wants to come, and it's been so long since this has happened to me that I don't even know what to do anymore!" We talked on the phone for about 10 minutes about missionary work and how exciting it is to share with others something that makes us so happy. I'm super glad we prayed about what to do that day so that we could share that moment with that family. We also went later and helped in the yard for a couple hours.
Another thought: I listened to a talk from Hank Smith this morning called "Real Life" and that whole gist of it is that people think that if they keep the commandments and live good gospel lives then their lives will be beds of roses, and for people who don't keep the commandments, they should be miserable... But that's not how it is. In Helaman 5:12 it never talks about nothing bad ever happening to us, it says that times really will come
"when the devil shall send for
But, what it says after that, is that despite all of the craziness going on around us, through Jesus Christ we don't have to be miserable and swallowed up in pain and hurt! We can be happy despite the bad things. Even when we have mountains to climb. Or Gorges to climb out of. The the strength of believing, the strength of the atonement, the power of prayer.
Ultimately it's Freedom. Freedom from the effects of the storm, from Satan, from Sin. "The truth shall make you free
love,
~Elder Standring
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