Dear Family,
It has been another great week in the work here in Austria. Grammy really outdid herself in the meal she cooked on Monday with Sloppy Joe"s and a yummy Peach Cobbler for dessert!. Then on Tuesday for district meeting we had to present a 10 minute contribution on the keys of the restoration, emphasizing the Book of Mormon as the Key to Conversion and listed all the great Book of Mormon references to each of the discussions that are taught investigators out of Preach My Gospel. Then Wednesday we began Summer Institute where I'm still teaching an English class for as long as we have YSA's who don't speak any German. They primarily come from BYU and the group here presently will be here until the end of the month when I'll likely be off the hook. We do have a couple of folks who come from outside the country like Mexico or Iran and whose German is poor enough that they prefer to learn the gospel in English so we'll see what happens when BYU leaves but for now we're teaching the Doctrines of the Gospel for up to 13 weeks.
Our Tuesday and Thursday language classes, taught by the missionaries as an investigator finding tool are going quite well with people coming in from Serbia, Italy, Spain, Ukraine, and Russia among others, most wanting to learn German but not a few wishing to freshen up their English. I met a woman off the street a week ago while we were there for a rare Saturday opening during the closing festivities for Institute who heard the Joseph Smith story from me, accepted a Book of Mormon and has now been back twice, making a little progress and I think probably with quite a bit of interest in the church. Our young lady from Kazakhstan who spent a year in Taylorsville going to church every week with her host family and now studying at the University of Vienna has really come on strong with our sister missionaries, loves cooking waffles (picture included) and has now indicated she wants to be baptized, but only in Kazahkstan where she knows we have a branch of the church in her home city so she can introduce the gospel to her family.
For our waffle night on Friday, Grammy decided she would celebrate properly with cupcakes frosted like the American flag, which let the sisters take over and finish the making the flag. Grandpa thought it was lovely because there was plenty of frosting between all the empty spaces between the cupcakes though he had to take a little flak from Grammy for partaking too freely.
One of our responsibilities is to take care of the physical needs of the 9 apartments the missionaries live in here in Vienna. One of them is really hurting with some water seeping from the shower into the walls and we've had trouble finding out who the landlord is to come in and see if it can be fixed. We had a refrigerator that wasn't working but once the elders found out how to defrost it, it began to function again. Lastly was a non working washing machine which somehow had been squeezed into a spot between a sink and a shower that necessitated it being lifted up and over the sink to get it out. Anyway we went to the apartment, measured the space, bought a replacement and with the help of a member with a car, got it picked up and delivered and re-wedged into its proper location again. All kinds of new skills we wouldn't have guessed we'd need. That was the beginning of our P day on Saturday. We spent the rest of the day doing our own wash and hanging the clothes out around the apartment and then spent the rest of the day really going over the main cathedral here in Vienna known as St. Stephens.
We found a great little book in the apartment left behind by one of the previous couples and written by a BYU professor entitled "8 Great Walks around Vienna." It started with St. Stephens and led us to little mysteries like the mysterious "5" written on one of the walls, symbolizing the fifth letter of the alphabet which of course is "e". If you add the "e" to the O which starts out the German name for Austria, you get Oesterreich, literally Eastern Kingdom and it became a symbol for the Austrian resistance to the Third Reich in World War II. There was also a small chapel where the mortal remains of Mozart were laid after he died prior to his being buried in a pauper's grave, and sure enough, on the inside, a nice painting over the high altar symbolizing the stoning of Stephen, who looked up into heaven and saw Jesus standing on the right side of the Father. Take that! Nicene creed! The steeple on the church was at the time it was built, the reason it was the tallest building in the world. It still is the tallest steeple in Vienna and I found that a church just down the street from us about a two minute walk has the third tallest steeple in Austria. Lots of quite amazing Gothic architecture.
Today we visited the last of the five wards that are close by in Vienna and knew many of the young people who have visited the center. We were able to make some important contacts, one with a man who may be able to help us with the hurting apartment mentioned above. The first counselor conducting asked us if we would be willing to share our testimonies prior to the meeting and although Grammy gulped, she was the first one up with me following and did a very nice job for the first time at least on this mission of bearing her testimony to a congregation in German. I was very proud of her. The weather here is getting quite warm again, up to 90 degrees over the weekend and it's a bummer wearing a coat and tie around but we do it for the glory of the Lord! Our new mission president has arrived and on Tuesday the entire zone travels to Salzburg to meet him and his family, be interviewed and have lunch before travelling back again. I guess we'll close the center that day though we should make it back by around 6 or 6:30 so we'll see how it goes.
I think Elder Parker covered just about everything that happened this week. It makes us very tired every day. Here are a couple of pictures of our sister missionaries and our little investigator. We have a lot of fun together and they are very dear to me. Glad to see some of the pictures of the balloon fest. Hope you all had a great 4th Celebration. Enjoy your air conditioning. It is hot here too, but our air is from fan and windows. It works.
Love You All, mom, dad, grammy, grampa--Elder & Sister Parker
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