Mission work

As you can see, I am not as diligent in posting about this mission as I was with the mission in Germany. The primary reason is that the work here is more intense, but also more personal. It is true that we had a number of people with whom we worked in Germany and the branch there, but we also had a lot of experiences beyond that that were more of interest to the people back home. The personal struggles people had in our Ravensburg Branch were private and not suitable for a blog. I sometimes mentioned a few people and posted their pictures. Here, we almost always are working with individuals and families with serious difficulties and our work primarily is encouragement and support in bringing them to full activity in the church.

In our small area - our stake - we are now working with about 50-60 families or individuals. Since all are quite close together, we often visit upwards of 4 or 5 per day (sometimes more) - even on our preparation day. The issues range from basic health struggles and weakness in faith to serious addictions and serious family problems, unemployment and life-threatening health issues. In the past four months, we have helped people get to Addition Recovery meetings, visited (or taken) people to the Emergency room, visited people in Intensive Care units and psychiatric lock-down units, faced domestic violence face-to-face, helped people receive Bishop's Storehouse orders, donated some of our own food, labor, baby-sitting, dog-sitting, even used a breath-a-lizer to move someone's car when they were unable to do so. The work is more intense here than it was in Germany because everyone is so much closer and there are so many more people and many in desperate need.

We have also had great success in finding family names in the genealogy of a number of people, had a number of people start to come to church who had not been for a while. We had a baptism a week or so ago, a beautiful experience where a man was able to baptize his 9-year-old daughter.

We love the work here and are very blessed my the Lord in the work. I am always learning more and more about the love Our Heavenly Father has for everyone. I am just starting to get a little understanding of how many suffering people there are in the world, knowing that the Lord has such compassion for them and relies on us to help make their lives even just a little bit better.

We love working with our sister missionaries. Right now we have a three-some, with Sister Malufau and Sister Ricks (who have been here a while) and Sister Ballif who is awaiting a visa to serve in Sidney, Australia. We don't have a picture of Sister Ricks (yet).