For my letter this week, based on popular request (well, mostly just Dad), I thought I'd provide a little more detail on my day to day life this week, even some of the boring parts. So I'm gonna make this a kind of Q and A thing...
Do the members help much with finding new people or go with you to appointments?
Here, more than anywhere else I've been on my mission, the members really do all that they can to invite their friends to learn about the Gospel and to eventually meet with us. Granted, that mostly has to do with the American and British members. The other, more European ones, they're kind of on the same level as the French. The Oliver family, for example, almost literally invites all of their friends to meet with us or gives us their address so we can go visit them. They're amazing! As far as going to appointments, that one's a little bit harder. A lot of them are really busy, working in Luxembourg and all, and a lot of them just have really dynamic schedules that make it hard to organize. But we do pretty well here, compared to France.
What do you do when you have nothing scheduled to do?
Well, to be honest, that's about half the time here, if not more. The hard thing here in transportation. We're only really able to fit in one appointment in the entire 3 hour evening block. So, having just a few things to do during the week takes up most of our time. And, as Preach My Gospel says, we fill all of our empty time with contacting and porting. Our usual contacting approach in the streets is "Hi, my name is Elder Bigler and I'm from the United States. I'm here to share a message about Jesus Christ because I know that He lives and I know how important he is in each of our lives." Or something along those lines, we change it up to not be all scripty. The big sign thing is what the Jehovah's Witnesses do here, and it seems to work well for them, but we're kind of trying to avoid looking like them, so we don't do it at all.
Here in Luxembourg, we don't do as much door knocking as we do contacting, just because people are almost always eating (they eat around 7 or 8, which is when we're out) and because they semi-often call the police...contacting is a little better for us here, but pretty much anyone who's outside these days, with the cold and everything, is either on their way to work, home, or the get food. It makes it a little bit harder, but we keep talking to everyone who crosses our path.
Most of our days, after studies, start with an hour and a half of contacting, then lunch for an hour, then a few more hours of contacting until dinner at 5, unless we have a lesson in that time period, which isn't very often. Lately, we've been spending a half hour to an hour making calls of old investigators from our area book, and that's been going well. And, usually, here in Luxembourg, after dinner we have some sort of rendezvous to go to, or, we skip the dinner hour and have dinner with someone at 6 or 7. In between all of that, we spend a lot of time on buses and trains, going from place to place. We probably ride 8 to 10 different buses on an average day, and take the train a couple times a week.
Really, a lot of the time we spend isn't really that exciting to recount in my letters so I usually skip over it. :) But, we are always working.
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| Vianden Castle Luxembourg On Adam's To See List |
Well, this has actually turned into kind of a lame letter, but I thought it would be good give a little more detail about things. The Elder's Mom on facebook is probably Elder Libby's mom, he's the blond one in my district (I think I sent a photo of us from last transfer). And I'm definitely gonna check out the castle in Vianden before I leave! It's one of the things I pretty much have to do.
I've really got to get going now, unfortunately. The days always go so fast! I love you guys and I think of you always. Don't worry about all the stuff that went down in Paris, we're totally fine here in Luxembourg. Have a good week and keep up the good work!
Elder Bigler
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