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)!