Repentance, Prayer and on to Thanksgiving!

It has been a very special holiday week. We have seen pictures of many of your Thanksgiving celebrations in a variety of places around the country. We celebrated our Thanksgiving on our P day on Monday with the other temple missionaries and the temple presidency. Included is a picture of all of the sisters who helped including our new arrivals. On the left is Sister Stapley who just arrived with her husband from Arizona this past week, followed by Sister Linford, Grammy and Sister Thornock who was really responsible for the lovely decorations as well as providing real turkey! Next to her are the two new assistant matrons, Sister Bartsch and Dzierzon, then Sister Lindsay and finally our temple matron, Sister Wadosch. In the second picture with the feast laid out is Grammy’s wonderful sweet potato casserole just above the dressing using a wonderful recipe that she’s hung onto from Aunt Laurel Rohlfing who picked it up down south when serving on the Relief Society General Board. I was probably biased, but I thought it was the hit of the meal😊.

Although Thursday wasn’t a holiday here in Germany, Wednesday was, known as Repentance and Prayer Day and hence the title of our letter today. It turned out to be a very busy day in the temple because everyone was off work and hence they followed President Nelson’s advice to arrange their schedules to spend more time in the temple. Although temples are closed for most holidays in the states, that doesn’t seem to be the case here in Germany other than two days for Christmas and New Year’s Day. It’s actually pretty special because we do get a big attendance on holidays and a lot of saving ordinances are performed.

We do have a lot of fun in the baptistry and although the big groups are generally made up of youth with their leaders, it’s not unusual to have older folks come in as well wanting to do ordinances on their own family members. We had two elderly sisters come in early in the week when we didn’t have any other baptisms scheduled and Bro. Linford was gracious enough to become the baptist and help them both get their ordinances performed. Friday nights tend to be busy, again because everyone is free and this week one of our local temple workers, Brother Kux, was happy to welcome members from his ward in a little city known as Mittweida. So, we had his help but Saturday was the really busy day with three different groups coming in. The first group at 8:00 was from Prague and they were very organized and were followed by the rest of their people at 10:30. Then a very large group came in at 1:00 PM from Berlin. We were just finishing up the confirmations on each group as the next ones arrived, so it was kind of like a fast day as we didn’t have a chance to get to eat until about 3:30. We took the opportunity to take the Stapleys out to dinner that afternoon to a restaurant owned by one of the members of our branch and he was very gracious in attending to us. We didn’t realize it previously, but she is a Type 1 diabetic and was following some proper eating guidelines. They have three children, the last of whom was delivered 5 weeks early of necessity and only weighed in at 11 pounds! One of the other mothers in the newborn ICU wondered why such a large baby was there with the preemies and was surprised to find out that the baby was a preemie as well.

The weather here has really turned cold and most of the week was quite overcast and although mostly drizzly it did snow just a little bit. I’m apparently still subscribed to emergency weather alerts in Utah and have been getting numerous warnings about the snow fall that was expected over the Thanksgiving weekend.  Hopefully you all survived. As we came home from the restaurant with the Stapleys last night and were walking in from the parking lot we saw a first-time interesting sight: Images of the Angel Moroni shadowed on the low hanging clouds by the illuminating  lights. We’ll be showing these pictures off to the other missionaries as no one else but the Stapleys saw it. (Late addition, we just found out that Sister Stapley’s father just passed away unexpectedly, last evening. We’re waiting to discover their plans.)

 
Yesterday evening our temple matron hurriedly rang all of our doorbells and told us to bring pots and pans over to the church cultural hall where they had lots of leftovers from a dinner they provided to a group not identified to us. We got lots of great food that we consumed today for our Sunday dinner (including a bit of Mom’s leftover sweet potato casserole). Today at church we found out what it was all about. They held a correlation counsel last night and we found ourselves sitting next to the Polish Mission President and his wife.  In the congregation were the presidents of the Czech Republic mission as well as the Berlin mission president and their wives. The latter spoke to us along with our Dresden Stake President and our Area 70 representative who presided at the meeting. All of the speakers were quite wonderful and we had a very spiritual meeting.

I can’t believe that this is already letter number 45. Apparently, we missed the first Sunday we were here and didn’t start up until January 21, a week before Mom’s birthday. We definitely only have five more weeks in December and one in January, so I guess we’ll be cut short at 51 but time is really flying by. We’ll be celebrating First Advent next Sunday and plan to put up a tree sometime this week to keep in tradition.

      Mom: It was fun to start out the week with sort of a Thanksgiving Day Holiday, we even had a fun little trip with the Lindsay’s to help celebrate Gordon’s (Br. Lindsay) birthday which was also Monday. We went over to Dresden to a museum featuring “Life in the DDR”. It was quite interesting to see how controlled and deprived they were on one hand, but on the other, they tried to make copies of various items that were available in other parts of the modern world. It was unbelievable what their cars were made out of and how they could be crumpled into a big kind of lump. Yet, they kept on living the best they could and looked forward to days of freedom and were more than ready for the wall to come down. They rushed across all the borders and the guards just stood back. The third picture is Dad standing in front of a delivery table.

           

 Apparently, the kids were mostly raised by the state while moms went to work. We enjoyed these two pictures shown below.

 

I enjoyed our missionary Thanksgiving feast. It turned out to be quite a big group. Somehow, we came up with most of the traditional feast items and a few that were creative like pumpkin pies made with honey and guava. Yummy, but they tasted ok, just not like the real ones at home.  We seem to have a few people who are sugar free. I tell them that I don’t eat anything unless it has real sugar in it. Ha, Ha.

      As I thought about Thanksgiving at home, I was so thankful for families coming together to support one another and it made me a little homesick for all of you. I missed all the fun and games, sitting by the fireplace and gathering around the piano to sing and also putting up the Christmas tree to begin the Christmas season.

        May the Lords blessings be upon you. We also send out prayers for all of you from the temple.   

Love, and big Hugs,
Grammy, Grampa, Mom, Dad, Elder and Sister Parker