AUGUST 12, 2009 WEDNESDAY

For some reason the clothes built up for today’s wash day and we also washed our sheets and pillow cases. This necessitated two white loads and one dark. We started at 7:30 and we didn’t get done washing and drying until a little after noon. While I was running back and forth to the building with the washer in it, Diana was busy vacuuming and cleaning the kitchen, scrubbing floors and etc. in preparation for us being gone for a few days. It’s been a habit with Diana for her to leave our home spic and span when we’ve gone anywhere for an extended stay and, this is the first time we’ve been away from our apartment here, the habit continues here as well. We got all of this done and then we packed the few things we’ll need for our little service trip. We’ve been invited to go to Klosters with Pres. & Sister Bolt to help them with the construction of their home there. We’ll be leaving this evening and won’t be back until sometime Saturday, so we’ll have a couple of blank days in our blog journal. However, when we get back, we’ll have a full report.

We’ll be gone for a few of our birthday people, but we tried to visit the one we had for today, Ricardo Vogel. No one was home so we did the usual, left his gift and card in his mailbox. We thought his mother would be home since she has three little kids, but she wasn’t either. From there we continued on to Suki Ehrensperger, our problem on-again-off-again member. When she’s happy and everything is going good, she comes to Church and. When troubles come, she has a tendency to get despondent and sad and quits coming. She’s been absent for about a month, but last Sunday she came. She invited us over today and that’s a good sign. We had a good visit and were able to teach her about trials and adversity, that it’s part and parcel with this life and built into the Plan of Salvation. When we are willing, the Comforter or Holy Ghost, will be there to help and guide us if we have the faith to persevere. We shared a couple of stories with her, one using Malachi 3:3 and the refiner’s fire. We also used the illustration of a camping fire. You can have a nice fire going as long as all the sticks are in the fire, but as soon as you take one stick out, the big fire keeps burning, but the one stick taken out dies. The moral to that story is that we need to keep coming to Church and the activities to keep our testimonies strong and burning. Not only does our “fire” keep burning, but we also help others to keep their’s burning too.

We hurried home, but stopped at Migros on the way to buy 12 liters of apple juice that was on sale for half price. We had enough time to write this abbreviated journal entry, get a bite to eat take a shower and now were leaving to walk over to the Bolts. We’ll stop by and give Joerg’s and Irene’s plants one more guzzle of water and hope it lasts them until we get back Saturday.