Bern State Capitol Bldg. (I may have put this one on before); anotherfountain in Bern; waterwheel at Einstein Museum.

AUGUST 9, 2009 SUNDAY

Hooray for Sunday! We always look forward to Sunday so that we can rub shoulders with the saints, renew our covenants by taking the Sacrament and to be able to discuss the progress of the missionary work in correlation meeting. I was even looking forward to giving the lesson in High Priest Group. And that came rather quickly because Priesthood/RS meetings are first in our block of meetings. I had everything perfectly laid out and prepared to take the full time, but five minutes into the lesson, answering one question Bro. Kummer gave most of the lesson in that one answer. Now what???? I held up my lesson outline and showed it to the brethren and told them they’d have to slow down because we’d already covered 2/3 of what I had prepared. They all got a laugh out of that and then we continued. The lesson progressed nicely and I didn’t stumble around too much with the language and, before we knew it, time was gone and we didn’t get everything covered anyway. Jan Tolman, the wife of Bishop Tolman whom I served with, authors a blog about the Relief Society and she asked us to solicit conversion stories and other related information from members here to put on her blog. That is the last thing I did and many brethren wrote down the blog address, so I hope they provide some stories for Jan. The blog address is www.ldswomenofgod.com.blog/ if anyone is interested in looking it up. I did and it is full of interesting stories and history about the Relief Society organization.

When we got to Sunday School, Tony Viegas-Hawes told Diana their little two year old daughter, Jasmine, was upset last night. She thought it was Sunday and when she found out it wasn’t, she was really upset. The family had been to the temple Saturday and Jasmine wanted to tell “grandma” (Diana) all about. Her dad told her she’d have to wait until in the morning and today she was so excited to tell Diana all about it. Loic, her older brother (3) was just as excited to tell us about their trip too. Another little guy, Nikolas Sigrist (5), always comes and gives us a hug too. Fun little kids.

We are always anxious to see who from our newly activated members will come to Church. Today we were pleased to see Cornelia again as well as Gabriella and her two kids, Julian and Siskea. After about a month of being absent Suki Ehrensperger came too. Our newly baptized members, Solange, Priscilla, Neide and Charlotte were all there which is gratifying to see. They are all remaining faithful. Solange will be moving back to her homeland in South America this month and intends on staying there. Heinz & Lily Locher brought Verena Bosshard from the care center so she could attend Sacrament Meeting. She seemed happy to attend a meeting again.

Fraser Daly blessed his and Isobella’s little newborn son, Dominic, and he didn’t seem to be very happy about it. He was good up until the blessing during which he cried the whole time. After’ he was good most of the time. The three speakers gave inspirational talks and then the meeting was over. We were able to get around and greet and talk with a lot of the members and that’s always fun to do. Irene & Joerg Moeller-Russo asked us to water their plants while they are on vacation so we walked to their home to get instructions on when, what and where. They gave us a key to their apartment and told us we could move in for a couple of weeks, if we wanted to, or at least come over and watch TV or movies. We told them we didn’t want to get spoiled because we would eventually have to come back to our dinky apartment and the pain would be too great. They invited us to eat whatever was in their fridge so it wouldn’t spoil before they got back.

This afternoon Diana called Denise Maurer, Nelly Rathgeb, Suwang, Neide, Suki and Charles Aboussou. Denise was ill today and that is why she wasn’t at Church, and Angela didn’t answer. She invited Neide and Suki to FHE tomorrow at our home, but Neide has to work. Charles Aboussou said he couldn’t understand English very well and so I’ll have to call him back. Nelly must have gotten our number off her caller ID and called us back. I happened to answer and talked with her for a bit. She said she was really busy during August, but in September we’d have better luck to try and catch her home. We told her we’ve been trying to find her home for the last 10 months and she thanked us for not giving up. That is a positive sign she wasn’t just putting us off, but that she really may want us to come visit her. She runs some kind of a school in Buehlach and is only home for short periods on the weekends. I called Pres. Bolt and Charlotte and invited them to come to FHE too. The two sets of Elders have been invited elsewhere tomorrow evening so they won’t be attending our FHE. We assigned Charlotte the game and we have the lesson and dessert. We have little time to prepare so we hope all goes well.

interesting bldg. in Bern.