Dear Beloved Family,
It has been another great week as always with good interactions with several investigators. We have a young lady, a new convert from Italy who has been showing quite a bit of interest in a young man she met here in Vienna. He seems like quite a fine young man but told her he had completely lost his faith when he was 13 years old and his mother died of cancer at the young age of 39. He has one younger brother and his father who have also been without faith for years though all were originally Catholic. He has showed real interest in the church and our activities and the spiritual thought on Monday was essentially how we deal with difficulties in our lives. Afterwards we took the opportunity to let him know we were somewhat familiar with his disappointments and told him we'd like to set up some time to tell him a bit more about the church. He was back on Wednesday for Institute but we haven't yet quite made the connection to the elders so we're working on that.
Additional visitors to Institute were five young adults from an hour away in Wiener Neustadt including a young returned missionary from Hungary who went to England on his mission. His English is still a lot better than his German and he would like to continue to attend our Book of Mormon class in English. He'll be a good resource for us as we had our Hungarian make up artist and her husband also come on Friday for our waffle night. It turns out this week we weren't doing waffles for a change as the YSA's decided they wanted to have a cooking contest. Several got together with some food items and they divided up into two teams. Both had to work on appetizers and desserts and they split up the work on the main course.
It was really quite fun, we had a total of three investigators there, but we didn't get home until about 11. Fortunately, we seniors can sleep in the next day when we need to!
For our P day we decided to try something new. Sister Parker was looking for something Elder Parker could give her for Mother's day and we found two new malls to investigate. One of them was pretty nice and were giving away free little potted plants to all motherly looking ladies walking by plus Sister Parker found a nice scarf she'd been looking for for quite a while that finally fit the bill. Our second mall was way out in the tulies and it turned out the train we took didn't stop at that stop on the way out. So we got off and took the train back in the other direction but got wrapped up in looking at our map and bypassed it a second time. We decided it was a good omen as glancing in the direction of the mall as we passed by made it look a long ways off and not a great idea without a car. So we spent the rest of the day exploring interesting architecture on a power plant designed by
a guy we mentioned several months ago named Friedrich Huntertwasser (his made-up name).
We'd seen it several times from a distances but had never stopped to explore the surroundings. Then we decided to go visit the crypt of 12 emperors and 17 empresses who made up the royalty of the great Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Impressive caskets to say the least and a few of them we knew from visiting their various castles. Note the small casket of the stillborn baby underneath its mother's casket in the middle. It was sobering to see how many children had died amongst the nobility.
Then we visited a cool Russian Orthodox Church and along the way happened to pass by a huge memorial to all the Russian soldiers who were sacrificed in freeing up Vienna from the Third Reich.
May Day is the traditional "Day of the Worker" and May 8 being the big celebration of 70 years since Austria was freed by the Soviet Union there were people everywhere, likely of Russian descent laying literally truckloads of flowers all over the memorial and still going on. We saw one man having his picture taken by his wife and daughter who was unmistakably the same man in a younger photo of him they placed within the flowers.
For Mother's Day we trundled off to the same ward where our five YSA's had come from on Wednesday, We got up at 5:30 AM but still were about 5 minutes late on arriving. Sister Parker found it unique that they didn't sing "Love At Home" for their closing song, choosing "Love One Another" instead. But they had a cute little Primary choir singing "I Often Go Walking" after which the kids distributed small goodie bags to all the mom's in the ward.
Here she is with her mall flowering plant and the Primary treat.She really appreciated all the lovely messages from the family and the opportunity to talk face to face with all of you.
It's all been said, but I guess we can never express enough what a great treasure Family is to our lives. My husband, my children, and my grandchildren are my greatest joy.
Love you forever
Grammy, Grampa,
Mom, Dad,
Elder and Sister Parker
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