Elder Michael Cziesla

Elder Michael Cziesla remembers the struggles of 2017 very well. On a Tuesday in January, he lost his employment with an international law firm when the company declared insolvency. The next day his home was flooded when a water line broke. Burglars ransacked his house the third day trying to take the family’s valuables. In a few days, his life turned upside down.

“I smiled that Sunday as usual as I sat on the stand as stake president,” he said. “No one knew what was going on. But inside I was grieving terribly. I was in a very dark place.”

After the meeting, a quiet, gentle man in the ward asked him what was wrong. “He simply listened, and then he hugged me,” Elder Cziesla said. “I felt the Lord embracing me, that He knew my plight, that all would be right.”

Michael Cziesla was born to Armin Ludwig and Irmtraut Hanna in Neumünster, Germany, on July 26, 1972. He grew up in Schleswig-Holstein and later served in the Utah Ogden Mission. His wife, Margret Anne Rauh, served in the Temple Square Mission. They married in the Frankfurt Germany Temple on April 4, 1997. At the time of his call, they lived with their five children in Griesheim, Germany, where they have enjoyed wandering through the forests and vacationing on an island in Denmark.

Elder Cziesla earned a law degree from the University of Mainz in 2000. He completed his law career as senior corporate partner at McDermott Will & Emery.

Prior to his call as a General Authority Seventy, Elder Cziesla served as an Area Seventy in the Europe Central Area, interim mission president in the Germany Frankfurt Mission, stake president, high councilor, and bishopric counselor.