E. Harris, Charlotte, S. Hewitt, S. Stoddard; E. Nilsson, E. Jensen, S. Hewitt, E. Larson seeing who could row their boat over the finish line first; building with all kinds of road signs on it.

MAY 16, 2009 SATURDAY

When the day begins one never knows what awaits or how the Lord will use you to further his work. We wrote our journal entry this morning for yesterday and got it posted. I finally had a little time to work on my talk for Sunday while Diana worked on her assignment for district meeting next Tuesday. Diana wanted the computer, but I beat her to it. Diana called Suwang to see if she needed any help, if she got her cats moved ok and if she got her wardrobes put back together. She said she was too busy today getting her change of address documented with the local authorities and arranging her appointment with the doctors to get her operation on her lung set up. She is still suffering with one collapsed lung from the pneumonia she had recently. Whenever a person changes addresses, he has to go into the government in the city district where he lives and let them know they’re moving and give a forwarding address. Then they have to go to the city district office where they move to and do the same thing. The government keeps track of everyone pretty closely here. As I was finishing my rough draft Diana had the impression we should call some members who may need some support and the first one she called was Suki. Diana could tell right off that Suki needed someone to talk to because she was crying as she answered the phone. She talked to her for a few minutes and hung up saying we needed to go. It took about 45 minutes to get there and when we did, she let us in. Depression is not a fun thing to deal with for the person who experiences it nor the ones who try to help. She has had problems at work and doesn’t get along with her boss, took two weeks off with a doctor’s release and will go back to work Monday. She’s afraid she is going to get fired and just can’t deal with it. She says she lives the commandments, pays her tithing and does everything she can so why doesn’t the Lord bless her so everything is wonderful without any problems for her. The short story is the Lord does bless us, but that doesn’t mean we won’t have trials and tests. Ultimately that why we’re here on this earth is to be tested and tried to give us experience and also to see if we have faith and trust in the Lord and will endure to the end. We can’t just be sunshine Mormons. We talked of Joseph Smith’s trials as he was incarcerated in the Liberty Jail and what the Lord told him as recorded in D&C 121. At one point she went running out of the room into her bedroom crying then throwing pillows. I was ready to leave at that point, but Sister Larson said to be patient and she’d get the crying out of her system. Sure enough a half hour later she had cried herself out and came back and apologized. We continued on, Diana hugging her all the time, with giving her encouragement and giving examples from the scriptures we thought might be helpful for her. Before we left she had a tired smile on her face and it seemed she felt a little better. As we left we said we’d see her at Church tomorrow and she said she’d be there. We told her we’d fast for her on Sunday to give her spiritual strength to go to work on Monday with a positive attitude.

We came back to Schwamendingenplatz, got off the bus and went into COOP to get a few grocery items. As we came out we ran into the Neidharts who were in a hurray to get to some sort of appointment with some investigators. They also said they ran into a couple of old investigators they’d lost contact with and pointed to a crowd of people in the square where some sort of festival was going on. As they hurried off to their appointment it seemed they wanted us to go over there and find them, but not knowing who they were, we went home instead.

We didn’t have much time to sit around because we had a dinner appointment with Charlotte at 5:30. Elder Harris and Nilsson called at 5:00 and wanted to use our computer to find an investigator using his phone number as locator. They arrived and were unable to locate him. We asked them if they were going to Charlotte’s. They said they were and that they were already late and hurried off. We decided if they were late, we were late too. Before we could leave the building, Charlotte was on the phone asking if we were coming or not, that no one had shown up yet. We explained we had mixed up the time and would be there in a few minutes. Charlotte always invites other members along with the missionaries and this time there was also an investigator there. Charlotte is a newly baptized member of a couple of months, Solange was baptized a few weeks ago, Patricia is an investigator, Cornelia is a recently re-activated member and then eight of us missionaries were invited. That’s quite a group, but she loves it. We had a nice meal and then played Extreme Uno for awhile. We broke up around 8:30 and we came home to do our journal and report for tomorrow. And that ends this day.