Friday, October 25, 2013

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.)

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