9/22/14 Dream job, etc.

That will be interesting to come back to Crescent City and see everything like halftime shows again. How is everything in the music program?.... I'm not particularly looking forward to leaving either. I've grown to really like being a missionary, and the Darmstadt ward and the Dortmund ward are both just great. The family of the bishop in the Darmstadt ward lives in the Dortmund ward, plus I think a few other families, so they know each other and are connected. If I were ever to live anywhere in Germany I would want to be one of those two cities. The ward missioon leader here wanted to have an interview with all the new Elders here (4 out of 6 are new, and besides that, there's also a senior couple here) and in my interview with him he asked what I want to eventually do for a job.

I told him my thing: I'd have a laboratory (like Dexter; his is secret though and it's underground) and I'd sit in my office doing something and someone would come in and say "Hey, I've been trying to invent this .  (thingawhaty)  . but it keeps on break/doesn't work because this Material (glass/wood/plastic/metal) keeps on breaking/bending/heating up/melting/catching fire/isn't strong enough/is too heavy/etc. and I need a different matierial so that I can invent this thingawhaty and make my dreams come true...." And then I'd think about it... and either say, "huh I think you could probably try this, let me do some testing and then I'll send my report and conclusion (and a bill) in the mail." or I'd say "Wow, you're right, I don't think I've ever heard of a material that can do that...sorry.... but hey, tell you what... You pay me lots and lots of money, and I will INVENT a material for you so all your dreams can come true and you can finally invent your thingawhaty" and then he'd say "Oh please! please! Can I pay you lots and lots of money so that all my dreams come true?" and I'd say "Okay, I'll do it." and then he'd walk out of there like the happiest man in the world because all his dreams just came true and I'll march down to my little secret underground lair and do some sweet, awesome experiments until I'd found something that could do the job he needed.

even though I've never heard of anybody doing that and I don't even know if that's an actual job I could do, I always tell people that's what I want to do (probably since graduating high school), and so I'm telling the ward mission leader this, and he says, huh, well there's a goverment office by my house that kinda does that...WHAT?!

He said it's called a Materialprüfungsamt (Material Testing Office) and that's where inventors take their stuff to see if it works right before they really get going with it! Haha! I'll have to talk to him more about that, but that sounds really good.

As far as the work goes, we've gotten 6 referrals this first week, which is probably a record for my mission. We don't have any solid investigators yet, but we're going to call basically all the former "friends of the church" in our area book that have any potential, and there's got to be at least one of them that will progress. We've also decided to consecrate 90 mintutes every day to solid finding time, as in the mission's "standards of excellence". Before in my mission, we haven't done that everyday, and there's so many other thing good things you can also do besides just finding door-to-door or on the streets, like working with less actives, planning and preparing for finding activities (a fireside/street display/...) and other stuff. But Elder Kitchen and I really feel good about this area and think if we really wanted, we could probably handle having up to 12 investigators we'd work with and meet with for about 30 minutes, twice a week. That doesn't include time we'd spend going to meetings and teaching active and less active and part member families or working with the YSA Outreach Center.

So it feels like the work's going really well right now.

The other Elders-companionship is about at that same stage too. They had a goal to get 12 potential investigators and they already have 20. Then the Zone Leaders are still just cruising. They're teaching a husband in a partmember family who has a baptismal date, and then I think about 3 or 4 other progressing "friends of the church".

     Quicky:  Elder Kitchen and I really feel good about this area. We've had a lot of people referred to us to be taught, so that's always exciting. Something that's been kind of different coming into Dortmund is that both me and my companion have never been here, so we're both pretty lost most of the time. Since the first day, I've gotten a lot better idea of where we are, and the members of our congregation and the other 4 elders help as well, of course, but in a way I kind of like it. It's an adventure. The good kind. :)

~Elder Standring