First week of the year

Well, the new year is upon us. We now have been on our mission a full year. Also with the new year we start receiving our Christmas packages! The mail system has been really slow. We promised to let family see us open the packages, so here is the one we received on Friday.

The paper chain you see is a chain of notes written by family members. We have opened only one per day and they have been very enjoyable. It is wonderful to read personal and heart-felt messages from family. Thank you. We also love the other gifts as well. After church yesterday, I started playing songs in the new hymn arrangements book. I look forward to spending a lot of time with it when I can.

I started out somewhat discouraged on Sunday because of low attendance. It was a beautiful meeting none-the-less. Sister B described the meeting in her epistle: 'I Love Sundays!  Today we had 10 at church.  Yes, that was including Four missionaries.  I think we all wondered how Fast and Testimony meeting was going to go.  It ended up all of us bore our testimonies and we took up the whole time!  The last one to bear his testimony was Bro. Trautmann who tends to worry the most, maybe since he is Joseph's first counselor.  He said the meeting was phenomenal!  And it was!  There was not a minute between testimonies.  It was amazing and the spirit was so strong!  "When two or more are gathered together, there am I in the midst of them!"'

In my testimony, I talked about how we started a year ago and I have a goal of helping our attendance to increase and the branch to grow, but expressed how wonderful our stalwart members are. When I sat down, Brother Staubach, my second counselor, patted my back and said "nicht aufgeben!" which means, "don't give up!"

After our meeting and a nice lunch with the elders, we headed out to visit one of our wonderful sisters who is in a care center about 20 miles north of here. We had a beautiful time visiting with her. On the way home, we enjoyed the clouds. They formed a beautiful long bank, running to the south, with rippling clouds and blue sky to the west. The sun was going down. Unfortunately, we did not have cameras with us, so you just get the description. Sister B did get a picture after we got home, so you can see a little of the cloud bank (the left side of the gap).