L: Vierwaldstaetter See; M: Elders Harris & Pine w/backpacks; The white train was the snellzug (fast train) back to Zurich from Buelach.


MARCH 22, 2009 SUNDAY

Today was a very nice spiritual lazy Sunday. In correlation meeting Elders Pine and Harris announced to the group that a baptismal date has been set for Solange Baptiste and maybe for Patricia Rames as well for April 12. Diana and I also reported we had met two less-active members that hadn’t been contacted for a long long time and had an appointment with one for next Wednesday. After that meeting Diana went to Relief Society and I went to priesthood meeting. Brother Martin had the lesson for today which was the conference address from Elder Uchtdorf entitled “Die unendliche Macht der Hoffnung” or “The Infinite Power of Hope.” He asked me to perform the object lesson on faith and hope using the tea bag we set on fire. None had seen it before except Peter Martin and it worked like a charm. We described it in the last few journal entries so we won’t go into more detail here. But it really added to the lesson in a dramatic fashion.

Charlotte was confirmed a member of the Church in Sacrament Meeting by Elder Jensen and received the Gift of the Holy Ghost. Charlotte asked me to stand in as well as Elder Evans and the bishopric. After that she was sustained as the newest member of the ward and then she bore her testimony. It was a great experience. Nikolas and Sister Sigrist sat by us today and that was special for us. Since we visited them three and a half weeks ago, they have been coming to Church every Sunday. Nikolas is the one we gave a BM to and put a video clip of him on our blog. After Sacrament Meeting we came home and then made our way down to the hospital to visit Suwang. She is in a room by herself and she says it’s very boring. Now that she can get around a little with her walker, she says she goes out and walks up and down the hall as much as she can and then sits in the visiting area just so she can see people once in awhile. When we come, she talks a mile a minute and sometimes so fast, it’s hard to understand her. She has given us some good tips on what food not to buy at certain stores and which to buy at others. She told us today that she’s paying 1800sfr. rent for her apartment which is smaller than ours and is looking for a cheaper one. We only pay 950sfr. plus utilities, phone and internet for a total of around 1150 a month. It is very hard to find affordable rent here in Zurich.

For the rest of the evening we are reading and I’m preparing my assignment for district meeting on Tuesday. My assignment is to give a ten minute talk on “Being Nutured by the Good Word of God.” Anybody got a good object lesson I could use? Later on Sundays our children normally call us on SKYPE and we’re looking forward to that. They said they had some friends of ours who wanted to talk to us tonight too, so that’ll be exciting for us.

We got SKYPE’d at 8:00 pm and had the privilege of talking to Bill and Kathy Holmberg who are dear friends from our home ward. It was fun catching up on all the news, but sad to hear about some of the health problems happening to some of our neighbors. They told us about the Draper Temple open house and the dedication, one session of which they will attend today. After we said goodbye to them we talked to Monica, Remi, Jade and Rees; we only got a peek at Robby. Brad stopped for a minute and told us our ward choir sang at the dedication and it was awesome. Our final phone call was from Elder Norris wanting our stats for this week. And so another great Sunday comes to a close.