Sau guat!

This one is a long one, so if you want to see my dear sweetheart posing by a colorful autumn tree, scroll to near the bottom.

The title, "Sau guat" is not German, but Swabish. It means "very good."

Some of you see Sister B's weekly epistles and so you heard a little about our last week. I will repeat some of that here.

First, I need to mention a fun experience we had in the middle of last week. We went to the local psychiatric hospital to visit one of our members who was staying there for a few days. We met her and started singing her a few songs (hymns), which she really loves. There was another woman who joined us, but kept interrupting our singing, saying that we should not be singing "funeral" songs (e.g. I Need Thee Every Hour), so we sang "happier songs." That was fun. She asked us to return on Sunday to sing some more (even though our member was not there any more).

On Sunday, we invited some people to join us for lunch. One of the people was a brother who is my second counselor. He always has interesting stories to tell. He is an author and is the lead editor of the local (Germany) section of the church Liahona magazine. Later in the day, we tried to find a lady in the local psychiatric hospital who asked us to come back to sing for her. She was not there, but we left her a note. We did get to sing for someone, though, as we visited one of our members who is in a senior care center. She is 90 years old and does not get visits from her family. We sang to her and did the sacrament for her.

We visited five people on Monday, had district meeting in our apartment on Tuesday, Sister B providing a wonderful lunch, and were out and about a lot on Wednesday. We helped the Elders with their hours at the church "open doors" time and then headed out to the western part of the branch to visit a sister who recently spent 3 months in Washington state with family, only to experience a heart attack after returning home. She is doing OK now. She tells us of her daughter and the daughter's friend who joined them in America for a while. They were in Salt Lake for a wedding and spent some time at temple square. The daughter is not a member of the church, but really felt the spirit of the Lord as she saw the Joseph Smith film and visited the Visitor's Center there. She now has a Book of Mormon and may soon be willing to visit with the missionaries. From there, we visited another member couple  and then drove to the eastern part of the branch to pick up a young lady who is an investigator to bring her to our Institute class that evening. We enjoyed a wonderful evening at Institute, with six young people in attendance, including our investigator.

The Lord is working with us. We do not know how things will turn out and many of the people we visit do not come to church (yet), but we know that the Lord knows their hearts. We cannot see the ends of our efforts.

As we were traveling about, especially the last few days, we took a lot of pictures of the autumn leaves and scenes. It is beautiful here. I am not used to such a gradual change from summer into Autumn. I must admit, though, that these autumn colors still do not compare with those we saw in Maine a few years ago. Still they were beautiful see.

Here are the pictures:

(... but I thought she wanted to get a picture of the fall colors...I'll get her back...)

They grew large fields of hops in these structures. Now they are bare

The village of Grünkraut

The village of Knollengraben

The rest are of a brief walking tour of the hill behind our house.

The ivy grows on the trunks of a lot of these trees.

See... I got one of her as well...

... but she did not know about this one. 

Looking straight ahead, you can see our garage. (The door is pale yellow. The one immediately to the left of is has a car part-way out of the garage.)

October trip to Swiss temple

As our good brother put it as we arrived, "it feels like we have come home."

Thanks to our High Counselor, Brother Klaumünzner, we were able to once again travel to the Swiss temple and bring a few members with us. Again, one of the members had not been in a long time (about 30 years), so it was a blessing to have her with us. She was very (VERY) apprehensive about it at first, but really loved the experience. We started out leaving the house at 6AM and were able to do two sessions, then arrived back at home at about 6PM. We so appreciate now what we have at home with the nearness to temples.

Here are a few of the pictures I took.

We had a lot of fog, most of the way in. . .

... but as we arrived, it was beautiful.

Here are Sister B and our members entering the temple doors.

( a little out of order ) Here is one of the roads coming in to the temple. The temple is in Zollikofen. We go past a place called Moosseedorf. (No I am not stuck on the keyboard, it is spelled that way.)

She had a very enjoyable time with us.

Here are a couple of views of the Bodensee (Lake Constance) on our return trip.

I have often remarked that we could replace this church with one of our temples, but I don't think they would go for that.

District meeting, etc.

We had district meeting in Dornbirn, Austria this week. Two of the elders are being transferred so it was a goodbye lunch as well. When asked what they would like, one said: "Meat!" and then "Chicago Italian Beef." Sister B makes some amazing lunches. The meeting was incredible. The elders are really strong in the spirit and have a maturity you would not expect from 18-21 year old young men. They also have a lot of fun together.


These first three pictures are of the mountains as we were going to Austria.

Yeah, I know, we have mountains like this in Utah. We miss them. (But they do not have monster marshmallows like this, though!)

Elders Morey and Moon

Elders Thompson and Sumsion

Here are a few pictures on the way home. We have been trying to get some good pictures of this particular countryside since we have been here. Enjoy!

And last, this really has nothing to do with the district meeting, but they are interesting pictures, I think.

We got stuck in traffic on our narrow major highway. The van in front of us was a "Renault Traffic."

Lastly, they are really into selling squashes and pumpkins, but not generally for halloween. Halloween is not much of a holiday here. They usually cook the pumpkins and squash.

Squash and pumpkins are collectively called "Kürbisse."

A new apartment (not a missionary apartment)

Derick needed to move to a new apartment. His former one was about 96 square feet. He had to share cooking and toilet facilities with four other sets of people. Recently, they assigned another young man from Africa to be in his room with him. He started looking right away for a better situation and they helped him find this new place. It is really a lot nicer and more roomy (and no roommates or shared facilites), but it is farther away. We are happy for him, though, and here are a few pictures showing him and his new place.

Here is Sister B coming down the stairs of the apartment.

This is a view towards the southwest. In the distance you can see the alps. From a little ways up the road they are more visible. Right in the middle you can see them putting a new roof on a building. That is quite a project. They have these wood grids and then place the red ceramic  roof tiles. The crane is there to lift up the tiles. 

The elders and Derick.

Winter is coming - more inspections

Winter is coming,  so it seems. We headed out last week to make inspections of apartments, mostly in Switzerland. It is beautiful to see the seasons change in this countryside, but what you don't see is the beautiful people we see - the missionaries. The day was also "transfer call day." Since Switzerland does not allow Americans (or other non-European nationals) to receive visas, almost all the missionaries we see in Switzerland are from European countries. Most are first or second generation members of the church and are very enthusiastic in the work. One of the elders, though, is Elder Moore, who is returning to the U. S. this week. He is one of the last Elders to have arrived before the current Swiss law. He definitely has a strong accent so to hear him, you would not know he was not Swiss. One of the Elders is new from Bulgaria. There are elders and sisters from England, Germany, Finland, Holland, Denmark and other places. They are amazing!

Here are a few pictures from our trip, so you can drool over the beauty of the landscape. Sister B. put one of them in as her Facebook cover picture, so some of you have already seen it. I will just leave these all unlabeled.  Enjoy!

Well, this one probably needs a comment, at least...  Elder Christensen had to model his lederhosen for us.

Wedding and Temple Trip - Stuttgart and Frankfurt

It is a wonderful experience to see a young couple in our branch get married and sealed in the temple. Sister Schaal has been with us since we started here, she studying at a school near here. Brother Barluschke served in this mission the last couple of years and got a job and schooling here as well and they were married this past week.

We headed out to Stuttgart on Tuesday. The wedding ceremony would take place at a Rathaus in Stuttgart on Wednesday afternoon and the sealing in the Frankfurt temple on Thursday afternoon. Due to legal requirements, people in Germany must be married civilly first and the sealed soon afterwards in the temple.

I like this picture that Sister B took of some of our niece's family in Stuttgart. As you can see, Jenny is so busy with her family, that she is just a blur in the picture. We had a very nice time visiting with them in our stay in Stuttgart.

We went to the Rathaus in an old part of Stuttgart where they have their official offices. It was a beautiful old building. The elevator is all glass. You can see it a little in the picture Sister B took of me while we were waiting.

 Looking down, you can see some of the guests gathering, including another missionary couple that serves in Stuttgart.

The ceremony took place in this official room in the building. They took pictures here and then had a formal signatures ceremony as well.

 They have a log-sawing custom. This is a large white-birch cut by the newly-weds using a two-man saw.

Here is the couple with her parents and his father (his mother passed away a few months ago).

 I had to get a picture of the father and brother taking pictures

Sister B wanted to pose with this interesting set of statues near the Rathaus.

 Earlier that day, Jenny took us to see the castle, Schloss Solitude on the hill overlooking Stuttgart.

 You can see the view from the Schloss overlooking the city.

On our way to the temple the next day we saw an interesting sign. Traffic is quite often waiting a lot at the lights. They want you to turn off your engine while waiting.

 When the temple was built, there was an old estate house on the property. The sellers required that the church keep the old building, so the church set it up as the residence for the temple presidency and some missionaries. It is interesting that the initials on the door are HLT (German for LDS). This was the name of the original owner family of the building.

Here is the Frankfurt temple.

The sealing ceremony was beautiful. There were many present. It is often the case that young people do not marry in the temple, many not even marrying members. We are so happy to see this couple united in the temple and especially that they are now living in our branch!


We experienced a number of "tender mercies."  As I was in the temple. I noticed that a brother worked there whose name I recognized. It turned out that he is the father of one of our less-active members and we have been having troubles locating here exactly. He will be helping us find his daughter now.

We left the temple after visiting a while with the family and with some missionaries who were there (including an Elder Thompson from Indianapolis, who lived in a ward where our son served on his mission a while ago.)

We left to head home, planning on trying to visit the sister of one of our members (the one we took the sacrament to last Sunday). She lives in Weinheim. As we arrived in Weinheim, it was almost exactly 5 PM. The lady runs a restaurant there and we hoped to visit the restaurant and perhaps talk with Frau Schmitt (our member's sister). The restaurant was closed and we were about to leave, when they opened the doors. We went in and had a nice visit with Frau Schmitt. Had we been any earlier, we would have abandoned our visit, thinking they were closed because it was a national holiday (Unification day). Had we been much later, it would have been open, but she would have been busy cooking for customers and we would not have visited her. These were a few of the "Tender Mercies" we experienced on this trip.