My move to Bielefeld has left me feeling more or
less like a new missionary again, back at the beginning of my mission instead
of the aged missionary I'd become. Vulnerable, exposed, prone to getting lost,
torn from my cozy home in Berlin. That's about how it goes. Which is good for
strong bones (just like calcium) and ideally, it should (and likely will, with
time) help me be in a focused state of growth for the next few months.
Unfortunately, that didn't happen this week and it was kind of hard. At every wrong
turn and knocked on door, I just thought of home and missed it dearly. Whatever
home is now. I was most homesick for Berlin and my peeps there at the beginning
of this week, but then that changed to homesick for my family and America this
weekend. But then you can't really do anything about that when it comes except
buck up and keep going because someday you'll be home, but right now your home
is here.
So we did that.
Three by three.
Normally, missionaries go two by two, but
sometimes you get uneven numbers of missionaries and so you go three by three.
Which is actually more different than I thought it would be.
Here are the pros:
·
we can
accept rides from men because we meet the proportion rule
·
we can
also visit and teach men without awkwardly standing outside the door because of
aforementioned proportion rule
·
we can
talk to three people at a time when we are street contacting
Here are some of the cons:
·
we don't
all fit on the sidewalk so someone walks awkwardly ahead or behind
·
it takes
more effort to unite our thoughts and ideas
·
it's
slightly overwhelming (to others) to approach a person on the street when there
are three of you
None of us know how long we'll be together, so
that's where that's at.
Bielefeld Beauties
The good news is that Bielefeld really is
beautiful--a lot smaller, quieter, and more rural than any of my other cities.
There are little dorfs (villages) around Bielefeld where a lot of members live so
we take real trains to visit people fairly often. Or at least we will as the
ball gets rolling. We all came to this area new and had approximately zero
investigators left for us. We went to work and found eight people this week, so
hopefully we'll be able to build up a teaching pool pretty quickly and I won't
be so dang trunky. Despite taking the wrong bus an hour away to a wrong address
anyways and also losing a 114 -euro monatskarte (train pass) that I'd bought the day before, I am glad to be
here.
Also....I would like to introduce Bielefeld as
the mini-Nigeria.
How Ghanaians picked Hamburg, Cameroonians
Berlin, and Nigerians Bielefeld, I'll never know.
But rest assured, Africa lives strong in the
smaller western cities as well.
and lastly.
General Conference.
was.
great.
Like usual. General Conference really is like
Christmas for missionaries. And maybe some normal people too. It will have been
my last time watching it in Germany and I got to watch it in English again J. I
really loved President Uchtdorf's talk about gratitude and how we should be
grateful in things and not for things. Sometimes it's easy to be
grateful and see our blessings and sometimes it takes more effort, but
gratitude increases our happiness. There are a lot of things that end in life
that we tend to mourn, but really we just have a bunch of everlasting
beginnings.
So I didn't end my mission when I left Berlin.
I'm just starting another everlasting beginning
in Bielefeld.
Love you all J
--
Sister Claire Michelle Woodward
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