Elder MJ Smith Hamburg Germany 2026-2028

Thirty Friends in a week... Sorry friends and family for the buzzer beater email. The Bremerhoven Elders overnight with us last night, so I did not get my usual time to write the email. I also only have 15 minutes until bed, so I will only share a couple stories. 1. 30 club, this week I made 30 new friends, which apparently is unheard of for anyone in their training, and a super elite "club" in a German mission. I accomplished this by finding 18 friends with Morley and 12 in one day on an exchange with Elder Fredin 2. Adrian. While on Tausch with Fredin, we talked to a miracle friend. He was full German from Köln, very strong Christian, loved the message of the restoration we shared, and even at the end tried to give us money to get something to eat for the message. 3. Roberto. Fredin and Bain's friend King Robert got baptized on Sunday. He is a miraculous conversion story that I would be glad to share with any and all when I have more time.  The work rolls on. I have beg...

"Today was the sort of day, that when reflected upon, is accredited to altering the trajectory of a man's life. The Crucible is most certainly a condition, or experience, designed solely for our betterment. However, the opposition comes with such ferocity and relentlessness that the experience therein could hardly be termed joyful. It against such opposition, engulfed in the flames, that we must reach a decision. We are afforded only few decisions throughout our lives, amidst the heat of the Crucible, that truly alter our destiny for joy or for sorrow. It is therefore necessary that we prepare to face our own dragons, so that when we are inevitably dragged into the valley of the shadow of death, we may come off conqueror." - July 10th.  Surmise what you will from the opening excerpt of this email, but it sufficeth to say, that this week was far from the idyllic cornfields of Kentucky. When the opposition came, it came in bunches, but a particularly bleak weekend has yield...

  Was geht ab? Wir hatten nochmal eine schoene Woche hier in Hamburg.  This week was chill. After my little mini crashout last week though, it would have been pretty impossible to get worse. Often that is the brightside about hitting the bottom. This week was really super chill though. It rained every single day, we taught some really good lessons, I had an awesome Tausch with Elder Bain, and England beat Mexico in the World Cup. What more could you ask for? Also it was like the fourth of July or something. However, I was about run out of the mission for not being over the top patriotic. I guess I can relay a few stories and updates as follows. P-Day: Last P-Day we went to Neugamme, the former concentration camp, which is now a memorial in Bergadorf - Southeast of Hamburg. It was an absolute Odyssey to get there, as the S-Bahn line to Bergadorf was shut down due to a police situation. So, we had to get off ten minutes before the Bergadorf Hauptbahnhoff, and then walk twenty mi...

  Moin Sie.  I feel it most prudent to address first the title of this email. As the saying goes, a star rookie season paves the way for the eventual Sophomore slump. This week, the sophomore slump hit me like a brick wall. It was a relatively challenging week on the errand of the Lord. There were many times this week, where whether suffering under the oppressive heat, or the discouraged feelings that always follow lukewarm success, that I wanted to quit. I discovered a lot about myself this week, and how I have changed a lot now that my first three months have come to a close. I discovered I was being very hard on myself, because we just weren't having enough success. My work ethic and tenacity had increased tenfold from my arrival, but I had become the very villain I swore to always abhor. Well, abhor is a strong word, but I found that because often it is hard to see the evidence that you are really helping people in small ways, that I began to cling to the evidence that we ...