Experiences

The past days has been very rewarding. Mainly, we have had some wonderful experiences visiting with people. Beginning with a little over a week ago, right after our church meetings on Mother's day, we had some very beautiful flowers for the women of the branch (thanks to my first counselor and his wife) and there were a number of them left. Our attendance was a bit lower that day because some members were out visiting their mothers elsewhere. Anyway, We took several of these flowers - living plants in a nice arrangement - to some of the mothers who usually do not come to meeting. Sister B made the first suggestion and when we arrived there, the Sister seemed somewhat annoyed at first, because she was busy with tending some children (grandchildren, I believe), but as we gave her the plant and a Mother's day greeting, she smiled back at me at the end. Later I heard from one of our active sisters, that she greatly appreciated the gift. We hope it is a beginning of helping her feel welcome about coming to church with us some day. We also took plants to two other sisters that day where really brightened up as they received them. One was a non-member.

We chose a day last week to visit the city of Wangen. First we went to the special hospital there to visit a young girl and her mother. They are from a branch near Stuttgart and a brother from her branch asked that we pay them a visit. The little girl, about 9 year old, is suffering from tuberulosis and has been there for 3 weeks. We found them and were admitted and were given face masks to wear. It was a wonderful visit. We enjoyed every moment of it. We discovered that she was going to be released the following day, so they were very happy about that as well, but seemed to love having someone come to see them. It is too bad we did not know about them earlier.

Also that day, we dropped by a less-active member and found him home along with his young daughter (about 6). They did not have much time, but we had a very nice visit at the door. Sister B hit it off really well with the girl. We hope we can help influence them to start coming to church. The mother (who was not at home) is not a member of the church.

On another day last week, we had hoped to visit with two of our members in a more distant town, a mother and daughter, and had made arrangements with the daughter to visit her with her mother in the retirement center where the mother lived. Communications did not work out very well, so we were not sure we would be successful in our visit. The mother was at home, but the daughter was not there. We really loved our visit with her. She has several cats which she cares for and enjoys very much, She has not been to church for decades. We talked about a lot of things and learned that the Book of Mormon she once had had been loaned out a long time ago and was lost. She was very happy to get a new one from us. We hope that we can help her (and her daughter) feel comfortable about coming to church. They are quite a ways away from Ravensburg so we hope it can work out.

We had a nice visit with another couple last night. She has started coming to church lately and we hope he will start coming now. They welcome us warmly and we always have a nice visit with them.

Some of my other experiences involve the process of finding people. I have always enjoyed the detective work used in finding lost ancestors and relatives at home, but I am having some success here in finding lost members. Often, the address on the books for some of our non-attending members is incorrect. It takes a bit of work to figure out if they are really here, but at a different address, either a misspelling of the name or just a different place (having moved). So far, I have been able to locate  several and the process has been rewarding (and fun). I know that the Lord helps with the work. He helps me try things out (internet searches, phonebook searches, guesses) and it works!

Earlier, I mentioned a little about the size of our branch. I fine tuned the statistics a little. Our branch covers an area of  2162.43 square kilometers (835 sq miles) which is roughly 1 1/8 times the size of Salt Lake County (and similar dimensions). As you can tell, we need to do a fair bit fo travelling. The area has 443059 inhabitants (about 43% of that of Salt Lake County).  LDS membership as a fraction of the population here in our branch is 0.00187% .  That is a bit smaller than that of Salt Lake County.

Next weekend we have stake conference. Our Saturday meetings are in St. Gallen, Switzerland and the Sunday meeting in a convention hall in Weinfelden, Switzerland. We will have the visiting general authority, Elder Teixeira who is our area President. We met with him in a special mission conference two weeks ago. It was wonderful.

Well, that was a long one. I hope you made it through it all (even without any pictures)!

Clouds

One of our sons has an affinity for clouds. These are for him. It was very beautiful coming home from Sigmaringen that day.

Sigmaringen

We have a game at home that we play sometimes. It is called "Thurn and Taxis." One of the cities shown in the game map is set apart in its own category. I wondered at the time we played it whether it was a real, current-day city in Germany. Well, last Monday we went there and visited the castle there. It is less than 60 kilometers from our home (about 37 miles). This is the town and castle of Sigmaringen. It was the residence of the Hollenzollern dynasty (line of local kings). They did not allow photos inside the castle, but we got these fun pictures.

This shield contains the words (in latin) at the bottom:

Nothing without God

Sister B in a local roadway. The building behind her has a name on it that interested us.

The Field Prepared

I loved this picture when I saw it as it was uploaded to the computer from our camera. There are some very beautiful bright yellow fields all over the place around here. We are not sure what the product is, but it definitely livens up the landscape.

Our intrepid elders here wanted to get a close-up picture of the field.

I just could not help myself here.

The field is ripe, ready for harvest!
                                (obviously not "white, ready for harvest", but it looks great anyway).

A Birthday

Sister B had a birthday recently and we wanted to show the "birthday party pack" she received in the mail, complete with the whole family included!

This comes thanks to our wonderful Hungary family. Thanks!

Each of the paper people represents a member of the family. Thanks for all of you coming!

Conference, country drive, birdsong

This one is a blog summarizing some of our past week.

We first (on Thursday) had a wonderful conference in Zürich, Switzerland. Elder Teixeira of the first quorum of Seventy, also the Area President of the Europe area, did a mission "tour," visiting Austria, then Switzerland and then Munich, holding conferences of three days for the missionaries. It was a marvelous experience. He taught us some important points of our mission work. It really motivated us to improve our work as missionaries. Below is a picture I took of a group of us who are celebrating birthdays. Sister B is in the picture, the third from the left, right next to President Miles. Elder Hyatt is on the right side, the last one still with the black curtain behind him. I am sorry I cut off the last few missionaries on the right side, but you probably would not know them anyway.

On Friday,  we had an appointment to visit one of our sisters in a far corner of the branch. We had to delay our arrival an hour, so we took the opportunity to go to a village (dorf) a little ways out of the way. It was a pretty little town called Wilhelmsdorf. We bought a few pastries there and took this picture of the main building in the center of the town. I noticed that it had four golden angels on each end and thought of the angel Moroni on our temples. This is an angel blowing a trumpet.

We also went through some beautiful forests and Sister B took some pictures.

They show the new bright green growth within the darker evergreen pines. The next one shows a beautiful view of the area of our destination. The glow on the country road is the reflection of the rain.

Lastly, we were out today and walked into the wooded area behind our neighborhood. We see a lot of people who are also walking and enjoy greeting them. Mostly, we enjoy the greeting of the birds. The last item is a small movie where you can hear the birdsong.

Bowling, Sunday meetings, Trip to Freiburg

The last few days have been great. We had a branch activity at the local bowling alley (American bowling). We had a lot of people come, including quite a few investigators. One member lady who hasn't come to church in a long time brought her friend and family (who are not members). We also had two young men come. They play volleyball for a local professional team. One is a member who has played for BYU and the other is his friend, who is a German young man, who wants to attend BYU. The German volleyball player pretty much showed us all how to really bowl. He was good.

The following Sunday, The less-active member lady who was at the bowling with us came to church and we had another family come who just started to attend. It was nice to see more people come to our meetings.

On Saturday, I was able to contact Tobias, who lived with us as a foreign exchange student from Germany 26 years ago. We have kept in touch with him some via letters and email, but we found out this weekend that he and his family were in Freiburg for a family wedding. Freiburg is in the western part of our mission so we can go there. We decided to take time on Monday and meet him there. We had a nice trip (about 2 1/2 hour drive) and spent a couple of hours visiting with him. Here are some pictures along with some pictures of the road along the way. Freiburg is right near the Black Forest, so there are some forests visible in the pictures.

Spring, Storks and visits

We travelled out to visit two of our faithful sisters of the branch yesterday. They both live quite a ways off in the western part of the branch, one actually just barely outside the boundaries. They are both anticipating long trips to America soon, one to family in Post Falls, Idaho and the other to visit her mother in Ogden, UT. We had wonderful visits with them.

As we traveled, we could see the changes in nature as Spring has arrived. Things are so much greener than before. The birds are amazing and it is nice to finally see the new life come after the long winter. Here are some pictures. Most are from the area of Deggenhausertal and the last three are from Affeberg, near Salem, Germany, where they have storks nesting on the building rooftops. They are huge birds and were amazing to see.

I included the one with the crucifix because they are found everywhere, along the roads, in the fields, in the churches (of course) and in many places in little shrines in the cities and towns. That one is in a very remote area along the country road.

District Meeting and a May Day walk

It was a beautiful day today. It has been warming up very slowly and today is the best we have had in almost two weeks.

It was also good because we had district meeting here this morning and we always enjoy having the elders at our apartment. There are 4 elders from Dornbirn, Austria and the two elders here. They always bring such a wonderful spirit. Today we all spoke about what it is that we love about being missionaries. Most everyone said something about having the Spirit of the Lord with us, being led, seeing the influence of the Lord on others, having the opportunity to focus on the Lord's work, etc.

Sister B served a wonderful luncheon of stroganoff and nice home-made chocolate-chip cookies (we have to make our own chips, chipped off a block of baking chocolate - that was my job). After the meeting the elders went in to the city for a "Find Day," where they all work together in an area of the city. It happens that this is a state holiday today and many people are out or relaxing at home.

In the afternoon, while Sister B was relaxing from the meal preparations, I took a walk up the hill behind our place. I took a few pictures that I am sharing with you.

After a zig-zag walk up a few small roads and runs of steps (less than a half-mile), I get to the beginning of the various pathways through the woods on the hill behind us. Here is one path that I chose today, not having every tried that one before. There were quite a few people along the trail, though I was able to avoid getting them in most of the pictures.

Through the woods and over the hilltop, I come out to a farm area.

Here is an apple orchard. In this area of Germany there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of apple orchards like this. Mostly they are very carefully pruned so that they are only just a littler taller than a man and all the branches are fairly short. Here you can see that they are starting to blossom. They are quite close together in the orchard as you can see here.

Next are a few views from the pathway where I am walking. There are farmer fields everywhere there is not forest. These fields are freshly plowed. I believe that this field will have corn.

Now this looking back to where I was when I took the picture of the apple orchard and forest path.

This is looking in the opposite direction towards the south part of the Ravensburg area. It is hazy, otherwise you would see the alps in the far distance.

Last is another picture towards Ravensburg from on top of this hill. Notice that the fields are full of flowers, particularly dandelions.

The whole walk, up and back again, took about 45 minutes. What a wonderful place to be - both for the spiritual blessings and the countryside close by.