Whew! yes, we came here to work...

A week and a half ago we began what was the busiest week since Aug. 1. We....

Spoke in the Utrecht Ward on Sunday the 11th, drove to the Den Bosch ward (40 min. away) for a returned missionary potluck lunch ( I took apple crisp)  and homecoming.    

Monday we drove to Rotterdam (50 min.) for Zone p-day.  We played and afterward Joe & I gave a spiritual message on fasting. (the zone had a fast day on Tues. :)

Tues. we prepped food to feed 56 at
Zone Conference and desert for Wed. Institute.
Soft shell tacos, fruit salad, guacamole, chips, cookies and ice cream.  Elder and Zuster Reeves helped with the salad and desert, thank heavens!
Brownies for institute.

                                                 
         Wed. we left at 7:30 AM for Rotterdam and Zone Conference. We fed the missionaries, gave a presentation on goal setting and helped Zuster Bunnell with a short presentation on exercise.  We headed home at 4:30 PM.


We unloaded, regrouped, picked up our brownies and drove to Utrecht (20 min.) for our first institute class.  We organized the small group of 3, taught a short lesson and had treats!

 

Friday we left very early, drove to Leiden to pick up the Reeves, then south to Brussels to start the process for our
Belgium residency cards.  The office elders took us to the best places in Brussels for frites and waffles!  Soooo delicious!  Almost worth the 12 hour day:)





Saturday I attended the Utrecht Ward Annual Relief
Society activity. It began with a 2 hour tour of a nearby castle (in Dutch), then back to the church for a pizza dinner, followed by a travelogue by a sister who had been to Utah recently (also in Dutch), then a 2 hour movie about a woman who had lived in the castle (also in Dutch!) By then the activity was going on 5 1/2 hours...I begged off and got Joe to come pick me up!

Sunday we drove to Gouda (40 min.) for the monthly Young Single Adult church service. The YSA's in all 4 stakes in the Netherlands come.  Some have a 2 or more hour train ride.  Few of them have cars. They have a 1 hour fireside, followed by dinner, followed by Sacrament Meeting.  Our responsibility that day was the 1 hour fireside.  We were asked to introduce ourselves and speak about 2 Nephi 31:20 "press forward with a steadfastness in Christ....".  We were very nervous!  There were about 70 in attendance.  It turned out satisfactorily :)   We had a meeting during the dinner hour of all the senior couples serving with the YSA's.

By the time we arrived home  Sunday night we felt about as "pressed forward" as we could get!  In the last week we had been in the car 19 hours, done food for 3 events and given some sort of talk or thought 6 times.  YES!  We came here to work!!!