Castle Zeil

I hope you don't mind traveling with us on some of our outings. Yesterday, we had a little mixture of business and pleasure. It was Preparation Day, so we can do a few of those things with the elders (sight seeing, etc.), but the elders still had some missionary work in the process.

First, we went up to Bad Waldsee, about 20 miles north of us. "Bad" means Bath, or health resort. When cities meet certain criteria, they qualify to have the word "Bad" added to their name. It usually involves some therapy resort where people can come for rehabilitation or health purposes, often a hot springs or something natural.

Anyway, in Bad Waldsee, we visited a man who was visited by the missionaries a year or so ago. He wondered why they stopped coming to see him. We had a nice visit with him. After that, we visited one of our elderly sisters who is in a care center here. We sang to her and gave her the sacrament. After that, we visited a man in city further out who has lost contact with the church and we have newly established contact with him. He had a stroke recently and is doing better.

After our visits, we went a little farther to the Schloss Zeil, a castle on a hill overlooking the valley where the freeway runs. We look a lot of pictures, but I will only show a few. It was getting dark, so some were not as good as they could have been, but it was an interesting place. This is not a popular castle and did not have any kind of tours or facilities. We just walked around and took pictures. People still live in it and most of it is not open for the public.

 These two are just of the land area we went through on our way to the castle. This actually was in the area of Bad Wurzach where we met with the man last mentioned.

Also near there we saw a lot of stacks of wood, preparations for the winter.

Welcome to the castle.

Posing next to the guard (painted on the wall - not me, the guard)

a nice fountain in the middle (without water)

painted on the ceiling in a passageway. Sister B thought it looked like Kermit the Frog.

Near the overlook out into the valley below.

 And a couple pictures of the valley view. See the freeway in the distance

There was a herd of deer right by the castle. Look at those antlers.

Here is a church which is part of the castle. Most all castles also have churches.

This was painted on the ceiling. The room was very dark, but my flash on the camera helped.

OK. This last one has nothing to do with the castle. We took that picture earlier. It shows the main highway between Bodnegg and Tettnang, two small cities in the area. As you can see, the road goes right through a barn. At this point, the speed limit is 100 kph (about 60 mph). I hope no one tries to go that fast through the barn.

Meetings

We have had some good missionary meetings over the past week or so. Last Tuesday and Wednesday, we were in Singen, Germany for Zone Training and Zone Conference meetings. We stayed the night with the Gurneys, the Senior couple serving there. Zone Training is a set of meetings where the Zone Leaders bring training and information they received recently in a leadership meeting in Munich. They teach us a lot of things we need to do as missionaries and help us work on our goals in our work. It is not common to have this meeting back-to-back with Zone Conference, but that is how it happened this time. Zone Conference is a meeting where we are taught by the Mission president and his wife, along with the Assistants to the Presidents. We have a goal for the mission to have 290 baptisms for 2013. So far we have 110. They talked about miracles, and we are seeing them. In order for the Lord to bless us, we need to be obedient and the miracles will continue to come.

I got a few pictures, though we were pretty involved with things so there are not many, but for the families back home following the blog, I wanted to make sure I got a couple.

Here we are gathering for an official picture. We hope to see that picture soon. It is kind of fun to see the confusion in getting us all together for the picture.

The Singen district sang a beautiful hymn. Elder Pope is in the district. We were so happy to see him at the conference.

Elder Christensen will be going home in January so he was asked to bear his testimony.

We hope he won't be transferred next week.  We get pretty attached to our Elders.

Today we had our regular district meeting. This includes the elders serving in Dornbirn, Austria and they come on the train to join us. I snapped a quick picture just before we started eating.

 The rest are some fairly random pictures. The first one is a building where they held services here in Ravensburg in the late 1960's. We had a nice visit from Elder and Sister Mower. They are a missionary couple serving in Innsbruck. He served a mission here 43 years ago and was the branch president here. The meeting house back then was on Zeppelin Strasse 11. They held their meetings on the bottom floor where all the windows are.

Now for randomness...

We got approval to get two beds for our second room. Pictured here is the load. I was going to take the picture before we unloaded, but forgot. There is no way I was going to load it up again, just for a picture. Also pictured are our groceries (black bags) and dozens of copies of the Book of Mormon in various languages (smaller boxes by me). Yes, this all fit in the car in one load.

We see this flock of geese along the road near our church quite often. I finally had the camera with us for the picture. Sister B took the photo.

We picked up a jigsaw puzzle at the second-hand shop. It had two puzzles together in the same box, this one of modern Athens and another of ancient Athens. Sister B put them together, and yes, all the pieces were there.

Stake Conference

We had stake conference last weekend. The Saturday meetings, including a leadership meeting in the afternoon, were all held in a chapel in Winterthur, Switzerland. I am always impressed when we get the members of the church together to see the power that is in a gathering of the Saints. There are really wonderful and caring people here, besides the few we know and love in our little branch.

One of the training sessions was about missionary work and making family mission plans. The most powerful suggestion that was made was how our family home evenings can be a powerful influence on the friends of our children. Of course it is different here in Europe, with so few members, but even at home in America, if our children's friends feel comfortable coming over and seeing the example of our children in a gospel centered life, it can have a profound effect on other families who may be struggling in the gospel or may not be members. One thing they mentioned was that, as the friends of the children were over and happened to stay for a meal, they became accustomed to praying before meals. Then when they were home, they asked their parents about praying before meals. In most cases, the non-member family parents were positive and appreciated that influence in their home.

The trip to Winterthur took about 2 hours (one way) and we were fairly late getting home that night. We were blessed to be able to ride with a member, so we could save on expenses together.

The Sunday session was in the city of Weinfelden, in another part of the stake in Switzerland. There are no buildings in the stake large enough to accommodate the meeting so they meet in a convention center there. This time we got there early enough to get better seats than last time we had conference there. They had a wonderful family orchestra and choir provide the music for the session. They had a large stage behind the speakers and it was well filled with about 100 people in this orchestra and choir, including many small children. Their first (opening) song was an arrangement of "Give, said the Little Stream." I hope to get a picture of the choir and will add it to this post when I do.

The meeting was really wonderful. Sister B had headphones for the translation in English. I understood most of it and struggled only on a couple of times when the Swiss dialect was particularly strong. The closing talk was by the stake president, President Conrad, who talked about dealing with depression, quoting some from Elder Holland's recent conference talk. He had a powerful message for us all about being patient and relying on the Lord to get through our struggles and the power of getting preisthood blessings to help in our difficulties.

We had the elders with us as we traveled on Sunday. On the way back, we took the "short cut" over the mountain. It was raining, but I wanted to show a couple of pictures. The last two are actually from another trip, but I added them here.

and the others:

This one is from near our city, showing the alps in the distance - actually in the direction of where we went for Stake Conference.

More fall colors

The Wiengarten Basilica

We took a little excursion last week to see the Catholic Basilica in Weingarten (the next town north of us). It is famous because they have some blood of Christ there (according to legend).

This is the walkway up to the building. The main building is under construction (restoration) so they put up huge pictures of the building in front of the scaffolding.

The main ceiling fresco depicts the event of the Roman soldier who was converted by a stream of light from the cross and used a cup to catch some of the blood of Christ, which is in this chapel.

We were fortunate to be able to join a group that was going through the Basilica at the time,

This is the famous altar.

Around home and church

I thought I would post some more pictures of where we live and are about most every day. They are pretty ordinary for us now, but they might be interesting to you.

We are on the third floor, but in Germany, they start numbering the floors after the bottom floor, so to them we are on the second floor. Here are our stairs. We often wish we had an elevator here.

This is a typical view in an apartment building. People often leave their shoes outside the apartment door.

Our building front door and our mailboxes. We get a lot of advertisements and newspapers stuffed in the boxes as you see here.

As we leave our front steps, we always see this "castle." It is really just a shed building or something that the neighbors built. The flag on the top the flag of Ravensburg.

This is the walkway towards the street. It is a very busy street, just singles lanes for each direction, but a major (only) thoroughfare for all traffic coming in and out of Ravensburg headed this direction. The concrete bin cabinets on the left are where we put our garbage can. The big green ones out on the street are for paper and cardboard recycling

This is the row of garages. Ours is the last one. We are actually quite lucky to even have a garage, though it is really quite narrow. I have only dinged the car twice on it.

Over the hill from our place is this pathway - a very long stairway going to the top of the hill towards our house from the main part of the city. There are 274 steps on this pathway.

Here it is a ways farther up.

This is at the church. We do have an elevator there, but it is a bit crazy. It stops working at times. The stairs go around the elevator. We are on the 4th (third) floor in the business building.

Brightness of our scriptures

In our scripture reading this morning, I noticed something interesting. We were reading in Alma 37 where Alma was speaking to his son, Helaman, talking about the Brass plates.

5. " And now behold, if they are kept they must retain their brightness; yea, and they will retain their brightness; yea, and also shall all the plates which do contain that which is holy writ."

I thought that brass, by its nature, tends to lose its color and shinyness when it is left alone. It is by constant touching that it stays bright. Have you ever seen statues or door knobs that are brass, that the parts that get touched a lot are the shiniest parts. So, the "holy writ," or scritpures, that are touched daily are those that stay bright. This is a way of telling us to touch, or read our scriptures daily, to keep them bright.

Then the next verse adds an important point. We tend to think that reading scriptures daily is no big deal - not high on our priorities, because it is so basic and simple.

6. "Now ye may suppose that this is foolishness in me; but behold I say unto you, that by small and simple means are great things brought to pass; and small means in many instances doth confound the wise."

We Truly Need Each Other

I love being with people in our church work, both here and back home.
As part of our Sacrament meeting last Sunday, I spoke a little from the words of President Uchtdorf, including his words about how we need everyone. Some may not feel that they "fit in," but everyone helps us learn and we all help because we all have different talents and ideas. The Lord helps it all fit together. In an earlier week, we had a lesson from President Snow's life and I was impressed by his statements concerning unity. We have always been told that we should be "one." I always have thought of it as meaning that we should be be against one another - avoiding contention. That is good, of course, but a group of one usually doesn't experience contention. It is important that we be with each other. One means that we come to church! There are many who say that they do not need church, an organized religion, or even regular church attendance. It is so important that we come together. Even if you come away without a specific new point learned, we have come away better by being with others of the faith and feeling the spirit we have when we are toegether. I have never had a problem with wanting to stay away from regular attendance, but I see a lot of people who feel contented with only an occasional interaction with others that we experience in church meetings.

Last Sunday, we had a good group of people come to church, including a new investigator, a young man from China. Later in the day, we had a very nice dinner together (mid-day dinner), including people from four continents: Africa, Asia, North America and Europe. After the Elders left, we played a game together and helped our new investigator see how the Gospel is intertwined in our lives. Much of our casual conversation touched on Gospel subjects.

I have mentioned before our interactions with people of other languages. One day last week, we visited a family who are from Macedonia. We could not find any materials or conference talks translated into Macedonian, but found some in Serbian. I saved the video clip of one of the conference talks onto my iPad, with the voice of a Serbian interpreter, and we played it for this family. It was wonderful to see how these people could finally understand what we were talking about. They both understand Serbian, but cannot read it, but at least they were able to hear the Gospel in a language they understood.

We had a fun Institute meeting on Wednesday and Sister B had made some Halloween candy bags for people and shared them with people, including our Institute young people, so they could share them with friends. It is interesting that Halloween is starting to catch on here. It was un-heard-of when I was here in the 1970s. We still only see a few children dress up, but they were out on the streets on Halloween visiting some homes. We were also amazed to see some of the parties that were advertised, but I guess they like to try out the fun as well. The real holiday was today, November 1, All-Saints day. Everything was closed.

Well, after all that, here are some pictures for this week - quite a mixture.

First, we were in Dornbirn, Austria on Tuesday for the district meeting. If you look closely on this mountain, you will see the restaurant that is on the side of the mountain. It is about 3/4 the way to the top. They have a cable car for it, but one of the elders here told me that he and his companion hiked up to it one day (on a preparation day).

Buy a brand new Ford Kuga (pronounced almost like Cougar). It is really a Ford Escape. Only 24,000 Euro (times 1.3 dollars per Euro)

I have mentioned the "Pin Cushion" before. It is a fountain in the middle of Ravensburg. They shut off the water this week. I still think it looks like a bunch of bent pins and staples in a pin cushion.

Out fun institute group last Wednesday.

We went out looking for a warehouse store the other day. Our GPS (a a bit old and confused at times) led us to the dead-end by this Monastery. Well, we saw that it was not much further, so we decided to walk the rest of the way (not knowing exactly where it was).

Well, down this path we went for quite a while, including a side trip. We could not find it.

We headed back (on the way back to the Monastery). We finally found it on some roads that were too new for the GPS.

This is in the building where the Elders live, in the middle of the city. The building owner is a member of the local Druids. V. A. O. D. means (United Ancient Order of Druids).

Here is an advertisement for the events at the local concert hall. Lovely.

More autumn leaves.