Kære Familie, October 23, 2016
We have had company again this week. Even though this has not been much trouble, it still disrupts our schedule a bit. Our first guest included a group from Bornholm who came to Copenhagen to participate in a youth temple outing. Because last week was Fall Break and the youth were out of school, both of the Denmark Stakes plan a 2-day youth conference. Normally the temple is not open on Tuesday, but last week it was open for 4 baptism sessions for the Århus Stake.
When I see the sacrifices these people make to attend the temple, I realize just how blessed I am to be close to a temple. Other than the 10 years we lived in Houston without a temple close by, we have always had easy access to the temple. We were still able to go to the temple often even when we went to Dallas. I just never have had to make the kind of sacrifice I see these Saints make—and I am in awe of their faithfulness.
Our second group of house guests were the Yates again. They arrived at 6 p.m., just one hour after Dad took the other group to the train station. I made dinner for them as they had spent most of the day on the road (from Fredericia where they serve) and then spent the rest of the day at Frederiksborg castle (Carl Bloch paintings) before coming here. They came back to Copenhagen because their daughter and grandson flew home today. This time, they had another visitor—their daughter’s friend who is going to school in London. She came for a visit to spend some time with Mary (the daughter) and to see Denmark. In preparation for the new guests, I was doing laundry—sheets, etc., most of the day. We also went grocery shopping to replenish a few items eaten by the previous house guests. So it was truly a P-day for us (emphasis on PREPARATION), much to Dad’s dismay. He likes to be out doing something. The other two senior couples took a train ride to the top of our island and back to see the leaves changing colors. It really is beautiful here—so different from Houston. We got to see a lot of the countryside, and the beautiful fall colors, on Friday when we drove to Helsingør to help the elders there, so I don’t really feel we missed out. (It was lousy weather anyway—rained all day and was cold.) The Yates were only here last night and this morning, but there is still laundry to do tomorrow as we get ready for more guests on Tuesday night. The Halls are coming from Bornholm because of Zone Conference on Wednesday. We enjoy visiting with the Yates and comparing notes. Even though we saw them just a week ago, we still had things to talk about.
I had a break from making dinner this week for Institute. Twice now I have passed around a sign-up sheet to help prepare dinner. Each time I have only had only one person sign up. This time it was our stake YSA chairman—a young man. He even said he would buy the food. He planned soup, salad, and bread. He said I could do dessert. So I made brownie sundaes. The soup was cauliflower, onions and potatoes with milk. He blended everything in a food processor after it had cooked. I guess that is how you thicken a soup. Some of the boys grumbled that it wouldn’t fill them up but it was fine. The salad was kale, carrots, broccoli and apples, pureed in a food processor with fresh lemon juice—an interesting combination—but hey, I didn’t have to make it. The bread was delicious—I love the Danish bread. Of course I was there to help with all the preparation.
This week I will have a lot more cooking to do. I have the usual FHE refreshments but also Zone Conference preparation (beef stroganoff and apple crisp), dinner for Institute on Thursday and dinner on Sunday for our fireside. I am only making one crockpot of beef stroganoff for Zone Conference, but I am buying the food for some of the other missionary sisters who are also cooking. It is hard to shop too far ahead for these activities because I don’t have room in my freezer/refrigerator. So I will be shopping for each of these events as well.
I am enjoying our institute lessons. Lately we have had missionaries translate for us during class which is nice, especially for the comments the YSA make. But we study the lessons before Thursday night and read the supplemental material. The lessons are filled with quotes from the General Authorities. In other words, we turn to the brethren (and sisters) to support the doctrine. That is what sets the church apart. We don’t go to Wikipedia, blogs, or the opinions of the world. We turn to the General Authorities. One of the class members is a non-member we have been working with. She posted on Facebook her study of the lesson prior to class. It was on Eternal Marriage and she listed all the reasons we need to be married in the temple. She also listed the blessings that come from a temple marriage. It was pretty amazing, and shows the depth of her study. She had excellent comments in class as well.
We had an appointment today with a young man (Johan) who is less active. We have not met him. He agreed to meet us but wanted us to meet him at his friend’s house (Joachim)—someone we know fairly well. He had spent the night there so we assumed he was still there. But instead of going to church with Joachim, he went home and planned to come back to meet us. So we called Joachim who invited us to come join his family and Johan for dinner. He lives at home with his parents. It turned out to be a very enjoyable visit, although Johan never showed up. After 2 hours we felt we were imposing and suggested we come another time. Supposedly Johan was still coming—but who knows. He may have been avoiding us. The family was delightful and very welcoming. The father was not at home because he was in Utah on business. He works for the Church and is the chief translator for Danish. He has been doing it for 29 years. It would have been nice to visit with him—I’m sure he has many interesting experiences. The rest of the family included the mom (also very nice), and two married sisters with their husbands, and two grandchildren—cute as can be. The sisters were very open and shared a lot of things about the YSA program. Both sisters were very involved before they were married. Joachim, the YSA, does not attend FHE, but is fairly regular for Institute. There was light bantering back and forth with his sisters who were giving him a bad time about not attending all the activities. He is an interesting young man—27 years old. We find that it is more difficult to keep the older YSA’s (26-30) interested in the activities. Joachim is a deep-thinker and I always enjoy his comments in class. I could tell that he probably feels a lot of pressure from home to find a young woman and get married. I hope that we can go back there again. The family is very enthusiastic about helping us and offering their home as a meeting place for some of our visits with the youth we are trying to reach.
The other visit we had today was with our friend Daniel. He seems to have it all together. He is very bright—speaks 6 languages, went on a mission to Greece, and is going to school. We see him at the temple often. He is a really good guy, but he is troubled. Dad gave him a blessing about a month ago. He doesn’t struggle with his testimony, but more with getting direction and feeling peace about where his life is going and understanding what is next for him. Even though he appears confident, he doesn’t feel that way. You might remember that he asked Dad to give him another blessing. It was a sweet experience. We have really grown to love our young adults.
Kære Familie Sunday, October 23, 2016
This is Denmark's fall holiday week. They take both a spring and fall holiday for a week. Many of the schools are out and our language classes are canceled for the week. Too bad, as we were just getting a good head of steam in those. We have missed that effort 3 times a week to improve our skill.
The weather is not cooperating with a holiday week. It has been colder, wet and windy most of the week. Not a lot of fun to be outside. The highs have been in the upper 40’s with temperatures dropping into the lower 40's.
Tuesday morning has become our house cleaning day before we go to district meeting at 11:00. It is just enough time to clean and still have breakfast and some study time. It also frees up Saturday morning for temple days with the YSA or for special outings. Mom and I are trying to switch every other week the responsibility for the bathroom and upstairs vs the kitchen and downstairs. This week worked out perfectly and the apartment got a good cleaning.
At district meeting, I asked the district for suggestions for our visits with less active YSA's. Some of them were the following. I think these are some pretty good suggestions.
We had the monthly dinner with Knudsen’s on Tuesday. They prepared venison, potatoes and brown gravy, an apple salad and desert was citron fromage. Everything was delicious. I think this may be the first time we have eaten venison. It was a little dry without the gravy but quite good with it. I am still amazed that this wonderful family has been feeding missionaries every month for something like 30 years. There were about 20 of us there this time. We can’t even help with the clean up as there is only room in the kitchen for at most 2 people.
This week we also started looking at the December slide show with Christmas music that we have been asked to put together for special zone conferences. Pictures have begun to come in. Each family is supposed to provide 4 photos of their missionaries at different ages. We played with a video program on Mom's laptop but we may try to use Movie Maker since that is what they used last year. We will need to download it. Any of you have experience using it? We could not figure out how to get music into an audio file and get it to play. In I-tunes, they do not seem to be mp3 or mp4 files so they don’t copy??? Technology is sometimes so frustrating. We have an office elder who seems to be a whiz with programs so he can likely help us.
After district meeting, we got the mission purchasing card and permission to get some apartment supplies. We got Hilsingør a coat rack, 2 cookie sheets, window blinds and a blender. I expected the window blinds to be tricky to install as size and window width, etc. will be a problem for an off-the-shelf product from a Home Depot type of store. We also were able to buy us a mixer that came with a blender. This should really help (mom/us) in making breads or cakes, cookies, etc.
We drove there first thing Friday. As expected, the blinds were the hardest and the ones we purchased and brought with us would not work because of the way the windows open. They tilt in at an angle and the blinds would prevent the windows from opening. I was ready to give up but Mom had the idea to hang them from the ceiling instead of the wall and moving them 6" from the windows to leave room for them to open.
We drove to Silvan to get the other blinds, then had to turn around and go back for an exchange because we got the wrong size. We needed 120 cm and only bought 100 cm. We were measuring with a US tape measure in inches and mom did the conversion in her head at 2.54 inches per cm. (Whatever happened to the US changing to the metric system? When I was in 4th grade, we were told that we had to learn the metric system because the US was going to change and join the rest of the world!?? What were you told?) Anyway, something was funny with the math because the blinds we bought were too short. We also had to buy two because they don’t come in long enough lengths. They were hard to hang up because Denmark has not learned about sheet rock yet. They use some other construction method (sometimes just cement walls and ceilings) that make hanging things really hard, but Elder Evans helped and we made them work. The finished product should work well for them. However, we finished and left to come home at 1:30 so I had to call and tell the temple we would not make it until 3:00 instead of the 1:45 prayer meeting for our Friday temple duty.
My first assignment they gave me was the 4:00 veil and they wanted me to do sisters in Danish. I worked with a Dane and then Elders Larsen and Mordue (US temple missionaries) for a little over 30 minutes but I could not get the harder, longer parts and I felt like it was a disaster. I took 4 sisters through the veil and I think I totally destroyed the sacredness of the veil ceremony for them as I stumbled over words and mispronounced them. I am sure that anyone who did not already know the name of the second token did not receive any help from me. If they did know it, I hope they recognized it a little bit. I felt like crying and had to go find a corner to hide in for a little while to compose myself again. It is so discouraging to learn this darn language. To give a little perspective to the problems, as I worked with the 3 different people on pronunciation, they pronounced some of the words 3 different ways and they could not agree on which way was the most proper. You would think the Dane was correct, but it depends on what area of the country they come from and whether I want to learn that dialect or something that may be more common to Copenhagen. The two Americans didn’t even talk the same on all of the words.
On the last session, I presented at the veil and did 3 brothers in Danish. I was coming from Initiatories and had no time to prepare. I had not practiced presenting so I was hesitant to do it all in Danish. Thus I did the opening paragraph in English which has some hard words but the closing one in Danish which is a bit easier and I felt I could stumble through it on the fly reading from the card. I am sure I miss pronounced some words but that paragraph is not too bad. I did feel a bit better for my efforts but still down because I was too scared to try the whole thing in Danish. Of course in Houston, cards are discouraged at the veil and are only used for the odd language that comes through. They don’t worry about that here and cards are used throughout the temple.
We had 3 temple experiences this week as Wednesday night we joined the Buxton’s and Ottley’s for a sealing session at the temple and then came back to share soups with each other and some hot bread. The temple president was the sealer and we did family names for the Buxton’s.
On Thursday, we also had a special 1:00 temple session for the missionaries who have been out for 30 days and we join with them to provide couples for the prayer circle and the veil. I was supposed to bring them through the veil in English but the sisters wanted to try their Danish. I did not have a card so I did my part in English and they did theirs in Danish. That is interesting as it was not always easy to tell when they finished and of course, I had no idea whether they said it correctly or not.
After dinner on Friday, we talked to the Yates for a couple of hours. That was not really in our plans but was kind of nice as we compared recent experiences. They have had a couple of good stake activities and so we got some new ideas from them for some FHE activities.
Well, I guess that is our week. This next one should be more normal with less temple, no apartment issues and our language classes. We are going to Swan Lake ballet on Tuesday night and we have a zone conference on Wednesday with Elder Johnson of the seventy, who is touring the mission this week. The senior couples are providing the lunch for that of course. Then next Sunday night we have a dinner at 6:00 and a fireside at 7:00. Mom and I are doing the fireside on Family History work, so we need to prepare this week. Doesn’t sound too normal, when I put it on paper!
Love you all. Dad
Our second group of house guests were the Yates again. They arrived at 6 p.m., just one hour after Dad took the other group to the train station. I made dinner for them as they had spent most of the day on the road (from Fredericia where they serve) and then spent the rest of the day at Frederiksborg castle (Carl Bloch paintings) before coming here. They came back to Copenhagen because their daughter and grandson flew home today. This time, they had another visitor—their daughter’s friend who is going to school in London. She came for a visit to spend some time with Mary (the daughter) and to see Denmark. In preparation for the new guests, I was doing laundry—sheets, etc., most of the day. We also went grocery shopping to replenish a few items eaten by the previous house guests. So it was truly a P-day for us (emphasis on PREPARATION), much to Dad’s dismay. He likes to be out doing something. The other two senior couples took a train ride to the top of our island and back to see the leaves changing colors. It really is beautiful here—so different from Houston. We got to see a lot of the countryside, and the beautiful fall colors, on Friday when we drove to Helsingør to help the elders there, so I don’t really feel we missed out. (It was lousy weather anyway—rained all day and was cold.) The Yates were only here last night and this morning, but there is still laundry to do tomorrow as we get ready for more guests on Tuesday night. The Halls are coming from Bornholm because of Zone Conference on Wednesday. We enjoy visiting with the Yates and comparing notes. Even though we saw them just a week ago, we still had things to talk about.
I had a break from making dinner this week for Institute. Twice now I have passed around a sign-up sheet to help prepare dinner. Each time I have only had only one person sign up. This time it was our stake YSA chairman—a young man. He even said he would buy the food. He planned soup, salad, and bread. He said I could do dessert. So I made brownie sundaes. The soup was cauliflower, onions and potatoes with milk. He blended everything in a food processor after it had cooked. I guess that is how you thicken a soup. Some of the boys grumbled that it wouldn’t fill them up but it was fine. The salad was kale, carrots, broccoli and apples, pureed in a food processor with fresh lemon juice—an interesting combination—but hey, I didn’t have to make it. The bread was delicious—I love the Danish bread. Of course I was there to help with all the preparation.
This week I will have a lot more cooking to do. I have the usual FHE refreshments but also Zone Conference preparation (beef stroganoff and apple crisp), dinner for Institute on Thursday and dinner on Sunday for our fireside. I am only making one crockpot of beef stroganoff for Zone Conference, but I am buying the food for some of the other missionary sisters who are also cooking. It is hard to shop too far ahead for these activities because I don’t have room in my freezer/refrigerator. So I will be shopping for each of these events as well.
I am enjoying our institute lessons. Lately we have had missionaries translate for us during class which is nice, especially for the comments the YSA make. But we study the lessons before Thursday night and read the supplemental material. The lessons are filled with quotes from the General Authorities. In other words, we turn to the brethren (and sisters) to support the doctrine. That is what sets the church apart. We don’t go to Wikipedia, blogs, or the opinions of the world. We turn to the General Authorities. One of the class members is a non-member we have been working with. She posted on Facebook her study of the lesson prior to class. It was on Eternal Marriage and she listed all the reasons we need to be married in the temple. She also listed the blessings that come from a temple marriage. It was pretty amazing, and shows the depth of her study. She had excellent comments in class as well.
We had an appointment today with a young man (Johan) who is less active. We have not met him. He agreed to meet us but wanted us to meet him at his friend’s house (Joachim)—someone we know fairly well. He had spent the night there so we assumed he was still there. But instead of going to church with Joachim, he went home and planned to come back to meet us. So we called Joachim who invited us to come join his family and Johan for dinner. He lives at home with his parents. It turned out to be a very enjoyable visit, although Johan never showed up. After 2 hours we felt we were imposing and suggested we come another time. Supposedly Johan was still coming—but who knows. He may have been avoiding us. The family was delightful and very welcoming. The father was not at home because he was in Utah on business. He works for the Church and is the chief translator for Danish. He has been doing it for 29 years. It would have been nice to visit with him—I’m sure he has many interesting experiences. The rest of the family included the mom (also very nice), and two married sisters with their husbands, and two grandchildren—cute as can be. The sisters were very open and shared a lot of things about the YSA program. Both sisters were very involved before they were married. Joachim, the YSA, does not attend FHE, but is fairly regular for Institute. There was light bantering back and forth with his sisters who were giving him a bad time about not attending all the activities. He is an interesting young man—27 years old. We find that it is more difficult to keep the older YSA’s (26-30) interested in the activities. Joachim is a deep-thinker and I always enjoy his comments in class. I could tell that he probably feels a lot of pressure from home to find a young woman and get married. I hope that we can go back there again. The family is very enthusiastic about helping us and offering their home as a meeting place for some of our visits with the youth we are trying to reach.
The other visit we had today was with our friend Daniel. He seems to have it all together. He is very bright—speaks 6 languages, went on a mission to Greece, and is going to school. We see him at the temple often. He is a really good guy, but he is troubled. Dad gave him a blessing about a month ago. He doesn’t struggle with his testimony, but more with getting direction and feeling peace about where his life is going and understanding what is next for him. Even though he appears confident, he doesn’t feel that way. You might remember that he asked Dad to give him another blessing. It was a sweet experience. We have really grown to love our young adults.
Kære Familie Sunday, October 23, 2016
This is Denmark's fall holiday week. They take both a spring and fall holiday for a week. Many of the schools are out and our language classes are canceled for the week. Too bad, as we were just getting a good head of steam in those. We have missed that effort 3 times a week to improve our skill.
The weather is not cooperating with a holiday week. It has been colder, wet and windy most of the week. Not a lot of fun to be outside. The highs have been in the upper 40’s with temperatures dropping into the lower 40's.
Tuesday morning has become our house cleaning day before we go to district meeting at 11:00. It is just enough time to clean and still have breakfast and some study time. It also frees up Saturday morning for temple days with the YSA or for special outings. Mom and I are trying to switch every other week the responsibility for the bathroom and upstairs vs the kitchen and downstairs. This week worked out perfectly and the apartment got a good cleaning.
At district meeting, I asked the district for suggestions for our visits with less active YSA's. Some of them were the following. I think these are some pretty good suggestions.
- Be direct and don't beat around the bush. Tell them you are there because we are concerned about their attendance at church and we want to help them.
- Show lots of love and concern. Remember they won't want to listen to anything we may want to share until they know we care about them.
- Ask them to tell us why we are there. Use that as a base for our discussion with them.
- Ask them directly what is keeping them from attending. What has happened to their faith and resolve to be active from their mission days, etc.
- Tell them that with 200 YSA's in the stake, the Lord inspired us to come and visit them. Why do they think that is the case?
We had the monthly dinner with Knudsen’s on Tuesday. They prepared venison, potatoes and brown gravy, an apple salad and desert was citron fromage. Everything was delicious. I think this may be the first time we have eaten venison. It was a little dry without the gravy but quite good with it. I am still amazed that this wonderful family has been feeding missionaries every month for something like 30 years. There were about 20 of us there this time. We can’t even help with the clean up as there is only room in the kitchen for at most 2 people.
This week we also started looking at the December slide show with Christmas music that we have been asked to put together for special zone conferences. Pictures have begun to come in. Each family is supposed to provide 4 photos of their missionaries at different ages. We played with a video program on Mom's laptop but we may try to use Movie Maker since that is what they used last year. We will need to download it. Any of you have experience using it? We could not figure out how to get music into an audio file and get it to play. In I-tunes, they do not seem to be mp3 or mp4 files so they don’t copy??? Technology is sometimes so frustrating. We have an office elder who seems to be a whiz with programs so he can likely help us.
After district meeting, we got the mission purchasing card and permission to get some apartment supplies. We got Hilsingør a coat rack, 2 cookie sheets, window blinds and a blender. I expected the window blinds to be tricky to install as size and window width, etc. will be a problem for an off-the-shelf product from a Home Depot type of store. We also were able to buy us a mixer that came with a blender. This should really help (mom/us) in making breads or cakes, cookies, etc.
We drove there first thing Friday. As expected, the blinds were the hardest and the ones we purchased and brought with us would not work because of the way the windows open. They tilt in at an angle and the blinds would prevent the windows from opening. I was ready to give up but Mom had the idea to hang them from the ceiling instead of the wall and moving them 6" from the windows to leave room for them to open.
We drove to Silvan to get the other blinds, then had to turn around and go back for an exchange because we got the wrong size. We needed 120 cm and only bought 100 cm. We were measuring with a US tape measure in inches and mom did the conversion in her head at 2.54 inches per cm. (Whatever happened to the US changing to the metric system? When I was in 4th grade, we were told that we had to learn the metric system because the US was going to change and join the rest of the world!?? What were you told?) Anyway, something was funny with the math because the blinds we bought were too short. We also had to buy two because they don’t come in long enough lengths. They were hard to hang up because Denmark has not learned about sheet rock yet. They use some other construction method (sometimes just cement walls and ceilings) that make hanging things really hard, but Elder Evans helped and we made them work. The finished product should work well for them. However, we finished and left to come home at 1:30 so I had to call and tell the temple we would not make it until 3:00 instead of the 1:45 prayer meeting for our Friday temple duty.
My first assignment they gave me was the 4:00 veil and they wanted me to do sisters in Danish. I worked with a Dane and then Elders Larsen and Mordue (US temple missionaries) for a little over 30 minutes but I could not get the harder, longer parts and I felt like it was a disaster. I took 4 sisters through the veil and I think I totally destroyed the sacredness of the veil ceremony for them as I stumbled over words and mispronounced them. I am sure that anyone who did not already know the name of the second token did not receive any help from me. If they did know it, I hope they recognized it a little bit. I felt like crying and had to go find a corner to hide in for a little while to compose myself again. It is so discouraging to learn this darn language. To give a little perspective to the problems, as I worked with the 3 different people on pronunciation, they pronounced some of the words 3 different ways and they could not agree on which way was the most proper. You would think the Dane was correct, but it depends on what area of the country they come from and whether I want to learn that dialect or something that may be more common to Copenhagen. The two Americans didn’t even talk the same on all of the words.
On the last session, I presented at the veil and did 3 brothers in Danish. I was coming from Initiatories and had no time to prepare. I had not practiced presenting so I was hesitant to do it all in Danish. Thus I did the opening paragraph in English which has some hard words but the closing one in Danish which is a bit easier and I felt I could stumble through it on the fly reading from the card. I am sure I miss pronounced some words but that paragraph is not too bad. I did feel a bit better for my efforts but still down because I was too scared to try the whole thing in Danish. Of course in Houston, cards are discouraged at the veil and are only used for the odd language that comes through. They don’t worry about that here and cards are used throughout the temple.
We had 3 temple experiences this week as Wednesday night we joined the Buxton’s and Ottley’s for a sealing session at the temple and then came back to share soups with each other and some hot bread. The temple president was the sealer and we did family names for the Buxton’s.
On Thursday, we also had a special 1:00 temple session for the missionaries who have been out for 30 days and we join with them to provide couples for the prayer circle and the veil. I was supposed to bring them through the veil in English but the sisters wanted to try their Danish. I did not have a card so I did my part in English and they did theirs in Danish. That is interesting as it was not always easy to tell when they finished and of course, I had no idea whether they said it correctly or not.
After dinner on Friday, we talked to the Yates for a couple of hours. That was not really in our plans but was kind of nice as we compared recent experiences. They have had a couple of good stake activities and so we got some new ideas from them for some FHE activities.
Well, I guess that is our week. This next one should be more normal with less temple, no apartment issues and our language classes. We are going to Swan Lake ballet on Tuesday night and we have a zone conference on Wednesday with Elder Johnson of the seventy, who is touring the mission this week. The senior couples are providing the lunch for that of course. Then next Sunday night we have a dinner at 6:00 and a fireside at 7:00. Mom and I are doing the fireside on Family History work, so we need to prepare this week. Doesn’t sound too normal, when I put it on paper!
Love you all. Dad
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