Laanjak: An Amazing Week

This has been a wonderful week. We have been quite busy every day. Last Monday we went to Singen to see the Hohentwiel castle ruins and then we had our district meeting in Dornbirn. There are three new elders in our district, Elder Thompson with us here now in Ravensburg and Elders Weston and Stuart in Dornbirn. We enjoyed getting to know the new elders in our meeting. Elder Weston is going to be getting his education as a cook and already has some wonderful recipes to share. He gave Sister B a very good recipe for Chicken Alfredo that we made last night that was simply delicious. Later that day (Tuesday) we visited a Sister in the branch and a family. In both cases, we showed talks from the most recent conference. I have only had time to download two talks, the one by President Uchtdorf on Thankfulness and the one by Elder Bednar about loads. They fit so well with the struggles our members are facing.

On Wednesday, we went to the church for our open hours there, watching more conference while we were there, and then visited a few more people. One lady we visit is not a member of the church. She is older and does not always remember us, but when we meet her, she always starts beaming and then says, I was just thinking about you today. We visit with her and read some out of the Book of Mormon to her. We also visited a less active sister who has been really good in helping us introduce the Gospel to her friends. Last week we gave a missionary lesson to one of her friends. In the evening we had our usual Institute class and had a visitor from the area who is over the seminaries and institutes here.

Thursday we did our turn at cleaning the church and also visited one of our younger sisters. Friday we had an appointment with two sisters who live in the area of Salem, Germany. One is the daughter of the other. Also in the meeting was the niece/granddaughter of these sisters. We had a very nice discussion, including doing a missionary lesson about the restoration and the Book of Mormon. The niece was interested and accepted the Book of Mormon. We will be returning in a few weeks. They requested that we also bring the younger missionaries and to come when the husband of the one sister is home. The niece will also be there so we see this as a good missionary opportunity. Generally, we as a senior couple do not have many direct missionary teaching opportunities by ourselves, mainly helping the elders in their work. We are loving these great opportunities.

Saturday, we got tickets from one of our less-active members to go to the Aviation expo here in Friedrichshafen. It was fun seeing all the new styles of flying machines. They also had a lot of flight related products and education. They even had a used-plane lot. I have a few pictures to share.

Later in the day, we went to Dornbirn, Austria again, this time for a baptism. We took our investigator with us. He has a baptism date for April 26 and we wanted him to see a baptism. The Dornbirn ward is fairly large and the service was well attended. Our investigator was a little nervous at first and has some concerns about the baptism. He enjoyed the service and the baptism and felt a lot better about things after that, but the best thing is that he met a member who had served his mission in Russia so they spoke in Russian together (our investigator is from Kazachstan). It was a great thing for him.

Today we had 34 people in Sacrament meeting! There were three families with children who came who are here on holiday for the Easter season. We also had a couple of visitors from the stake so it went very well. It was great.

Well, here are some pictures.