Today was our Stake Conference and the general session started at 11:00. The translation was a bit iffy at times between feedback noise and a few pauses in the translation. The speaker continues on so you know you are missing something. I appreciate now how difficult translation is to sit through and have to admire our Spanish members back home who constantly had to put up with it (and with my speed in talking). It is near impossible for a translator to keep up with simultaneous translation. If you pause to consider a word to use, you have missed something the speaker said.
After conference, we had a "ox-in-the-mire” type of an incident with the sisters in Rodøvre. They do not have any heat. I feel for them since ours has been on for at least 3 weeks, maybe more. They have suffered in relative silence. I don’t know why they would do that. Sometimes, I think missionaries believe they must be tough and endure hardships in order to be considered excellent. I got the water flowing and the heat coming out. It felt good to be able to render this little service. Tonight should be the coldest day so far this year so it is nice to know they will have some heat.
At 5:30, we got a call from the Assistants to see if we could join them at 7:00 for a discussion with Eline Holm. She is one of our YSA’s who has been attending for over a year. She said it was rather urgent that she meet with them tonight. She had great news for everyone. She has made the decision to be baptized and would like to do it on December 10th. I think our prayers are being answered and perhaps the blessing she received last time we met with her has allowed the spirit into her life a bit more. She has come to the realization that she needs the Holy Ghost to help her every day and she is ready to commit to all of the baptismal promises. This was her problem before. I think she was just not ready to give everything up (the sins of commission) and she was honest enough to not want to make a covenant she did not want to live. I hope this is the beginning of a change of heart for her. She seems sincere and it is truly wonderful news and exciting to have played some small part in her conversion.
After the conference, we met with Jennifer Christophersen and Mark Pedersen to plan our family history FHE activity for Monday night. We went round and round quite a bit trying to decide on the correct approach. Jennifer is a near expert on Danish research, at least with about 4 sites that she works with often. She cannot be there tomorrow night however, and so that leaves a big hole in trying to introduce those steps. We finally decided to push the family search activity back to November 28th when Jennifer can lead the discussion and concentrate on the on-line version of the Family Booklet tomorrow. We don't think many of the youth have done the on-line one, though any of the returned missionaries have done a hard copy and have likely taught some family history. We hope this is a means to discover everyone's comfort level and level set a starting point with some generations identified. It is actually where mom wanted to begin all along, it just took the rest of us some discussion to catch up to her. We left the church about 10:30 and dropped 3 YSA's off at a central bus stop, so they could head in different directions on busses to their homes. More and more, we are ignoring the rule to not have non-missionaries in our car. It is so hard not to offer lifts when not doing so would be almost un-Christian. We also dropped Eline off at the train station near our us. It was right on our way and saved her walking a ways and then waiting for a bus in the cold and rain.
Language class had a day off Friday as it was a teacher preparation day. That was really nice and gave us an extra morning to catch up on things. It was rainy most of the day again however, so we pretty much stayed indoors. I had a chance to begin putting the Christmas devotional together in earnest between some time Wednesday and Friday and have started to get a pattern of getting pictures copied from the mission Gmail account, into a One Drive folder and then renamed so they can be put into the slide show. I also have Movie Maker successfully installed on my laptop but haven't really figured out how to use it yet.
Our temple assignments were nice this week. I was a patron on the first session, an Initiatory worker for the 2nd, and in sealings for the 3rd. I also did 2 veils in English. The new temple presidency was in place and has been functioning all week. For prayer meeting the 6 of them all introduced themselves in either Danish or Swedish. I understand from the temple missionaries that in the earlier training meetings this week, they all used English. They changed for some reason in ours which was our loss as no one translated for us. The president and matron only speak Swedish and English. That will be interesting. He was also our sealer in our sealing session, which he did all in Swedish. It is more "sing-songey" than Danish and must be quite different as I did not understand that many words.
After Institute, I worked one-on-one with Martin Fredberg for a bit. He is the member who was baptized in late August. I had gotten a membership number for Martin so he and I used the I-pad to set him up with a church user ID and password and we looked at Family Search a bit. It was nice to see that he came into his tree automatically with his mom and dad from his membership information. It was then easy to see that with the Family Booklet, he could be off and running with his 4 generations and have some names to take to the temple very soon. I hope he will work on this a bit this week and get the spirit of identifying his family. We also watched a bit of the Face to Face with Studio C as I wanted to introduce him to other things available on the church website. It is just so great to see new members continue to catch on and grow in the gospel. He seems so solid but I am concerned he still has not received the Aaronic Priesthood. In my note to his bishop this week (to get his membership record #) I inquired about that saying that we wanted to set a date with him to do baptisms for his grandparents. I hope that was not too pushy. You have to trust the priesthood leaders, I guess.
Love to all. Dad
Kære familie, November 6, 2016
It is amazing how fast the time goes. It is already November; we are experiencing near freezing temperatures, and the sun sets at 4:10. We see some amazing colors as the leaves change, but more and more of the trees have lost their leaves altogether, so we know winter is approaching. The cold and wet weather plus the darkness doesn’t seem to dampen the citizens of Copenhagen, as they are still biking, riding rides at Tivoli, going to the zoo and doing what they normally do. They are just more bundled up. Even the babies are wrapped in their carriages which have zippered covers and the little children wear snowsuits for coats. They are completely covered from head to toe. No one seems to mind. We even went to see the Halloween decorations at Tivoli on Wednesday night. Officially Tivoli closed at the end of September, only to open two weeks later for Halloween. They bring in new rides, small shops, different food stands which sell warm things like hot chocolate and other warm beverages we don’t drink, and decorate it to the hilt (as you can see from the pictures). We were bundled up in our warmest coats, scarf, gloves and hat. We walked around the park for about an hour and then walked home. Even on a Wednesday night, it was crowded—people riding rides, eating, and families with children riding rides. Tivoli closes again tonight and will reopen in a few weeks all decked out for Christmas. Then it closes for 3 months after New Year’s and re-opens sometime in April.
Here are decorations at Tivoli.
We got a new Temple President beginning this week. The former President and his wife had flight plans to leave for Utah on Tuesday morning, but just before they were to leave, President Williams had a heart attack. They weren’t sure if it was when he was lifting his bags to be weighed or just before, but he went down. There were three doctors in the airport who answered the summons and were attending him within seconds. They had to use the defibrillator to revive him. He has been in the hospital ever since. I’m sure that put a real damper on the welcome-home party their family had planned. In cases like this, the church could send a medical plane to bring him home (the airlines would not let him on the airplane in his condition), but because Denmark has good medical care, he will have an operation here—triple bi-pass—this coming Tuesday. President Williams was a doctor himself before he retired, and seemed to be in excellent health. He has not missed a day in the temple the whole time they have been here. We are praying that all will go well so that they can return home soon.
A new couple arrived on Tuesday—the Jensons from Bear River, UT. They are records preservation missionaries and will replace the Brookes who went home in August. Technically, they are replacing the Ottleys who go home on Saturday, and will be moving into their apartment. But the Ottleys have finished the contract they have been working on, so there is no more work to do there. In fact, they are going home two weeks earlier than planned—because there is nothing else to do right now. They were digitizing records in Copenhagen City Hall. They have taken just over one million images during their 18-month mission. This represents about a million new names for indexing. This is probably triple the number of names as what the Brookes did which is why there is still more work to be done on their project. The Brookes were digitizing records from the Frederiksberg City Hall, so the Jensons will take over that contract. Brother Ottley was a nuclear physicist in his other life, which might explain the ‘drive’ he had to do the most he could do each day. When they moved into our old apartment a few months ago, their bus travel to work was decreased by at least ½ hour each way. Did they use the extra time to relax in the morning? No, it just meant more time to photograph records. The work was evidently mindless as they have both listened to numerous books on tape in the months they have been here. They are going home to a brand-new house, having sold their previous one and all their furnishings. They are starting from scratch. She even gave away all her missionary clothes (having used them for two missions). She will have quite a shopping spree when they get home. We had a good-bye dinner with them on Saturday night at a very good Danish restaurant—probably the best restaurant meal we have had here.
The mission president was out-of-town when the Jensons arrived, so there was not much of a welcome for them. I remember so well the feelings of those first few days in a foreign country, so I suggested we have dinner at our place with the other senior couples. I had a lasagna left over from our YSA dinner on Sunday and was wondering what to do with it, so this seemed a perfect solution. The Ottleys brought a salad; the Buxtons brought dessert; and I did the rest. The next day we offered to drive the Jensons around to get some needed items. We went to Ikea, the mission office (to get a phone) and then to the train station so they could get a bus/train pass. They had already been to the store around the corner from their apartment to get a few groceries and I let them borrow some towels to get by until they moved into their new apartment this week end. They will not have a mission car so we will help them out as needed—like picking them up for the dinner on Saturday night, and taking them to Stake Conference. We are lucky to have a car, but it also means extra responsibility—like rescuing the sister missionaries, inspecting apartments, meeting the missionaries at the last moment for appointments, and running other errands when asked. But the Jensons have an advantage over us because Brother Jenson speaks Danish, having served his mission here. They have also been back to visit Denmark at least twice on various vacations—once when the temple was dedicated.
Our FHE activity this week was carving pumpkins. We bought 10 large pumpkins. There were two ‘carvers’ per pumpkin. The YSA’s are so creative. There was one pumpkin of the ‘Tree of Life’ (which could also have been a scary Halloween tree), one of the SL temple, one with CTR carved on it, and various scary designs. But the winner was a carving of a bottle with little fireflies coming out of it. It didn’t look like much at first, but when we turned the lights out and put a flashlight in the pumpkin, it was truly amazing. It turned out to be a great activity. One of the young women brought us a pumpkin cake (chocolate cake shaped and decorated like a pumpkin) to say ‘thanks’ for all we do. She is a pastry chef so the cake was quite good. We ate it with the senior missionaries the next night. It was a thoughtful gesture and made us feel good.
Our FHE was the first night that David from Romania joined us. He is a new investigator. He doesn’t speak Danish but he did just fine. The YSA’s are wonderful to include him. He came again on Thursday to Institute, and last night to Stake Conference, as well as today. He was recently baptized into the Baptist church and said he is quite happy with his church. But he seems to like joining with the young people here and the missionaries are teaching him, so we will see what becomes of it. One of the young men showed him how to get the gospel library app on his phone so he could reference the scriptures we talked about in Institute. He was using it during the lesson—looking up scriptures from the Book of Mormon. He likes to cook so he volunteered to do the dinner this week in Institute.
Our new temple president is Swedish. He and his wife speak English and Swedish. Today in stake conference they spoke in English with Danish translators. They were the only talks we could completely understand. Sister Olsson told about her first experience in the temple. Her family joined the church when she was a child. Her mother longed for the day they could be sealed in the temple, but the trip from Sweden to Switzerland was very expensive and they didn’t have a lot of money. Finally, they were able to travel by train to the Switzerland temple. She remembers having to sleep on the luggage rack over the seats during the long trip. But she also remembers the great desire her parents had to go to the temple. That is when she first realized just how important temple work is. President Olsson said that he has worked in the temple for over 30 years. He served as the recorder in the Stockholm temple, as well as an ordinance worker. He also served as an Area Seventy. Dad and I did sealings on Friday during one of our rotations. President Olsson was the sealer—it was all in Swedish. Even though the languages are similar, it is still a different language. I am so focused on Danish right now, there is no way I can think of learning yet another language. The Denmark temple serves the two stakes in Denmark and one stake in Sweden (plus Iceland branches), so it makes sense that we would have a Swedish Temple President. There is one Danish and one Swedish counselor.
We only had two Danish classes this week. Friday turned out to be teacher in-service day. I don’t know how much I am improving, but I am enjoying the lessons. I do feel that the Danish I hear now sounds like distinct words instead of a bunch of sounds run together. I can definitely read more than I used to. The missionaries humor us and let us practice on them, as well as our YSA’s. It is better to practice with the YSA’s because they speak ‘real’ Danish.
Our institute lesson was on safeguarding faith and testimony. We talked about how living the gospel brings you joy. Think about that—Heavenly Father’s plan is called The Plan of Happiness. His whole purpose for man is that he might have joy. So, if we want to be happy, we just need to live the gospel. As simple as that sounds, it requires everyday attention to the things that build our faith. Joy is not necessarily all the happy, smiling moments of life. That’s a part of it, but it is also the struggles, the trials, the discouragements and knowing that you are being refined and shaped for godhood. That is the joy—and we often only realize it after the trial of our faith, when we look back and realize how far we have come. We know the greatest of joys when we have also known the pain. How does the saying go— “I never said it would be easy, I only said it would be worth it.” That is the joy.
Have a great week. Kærlig hilsen, Mom
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