It looks like Spring!

  It seems Spring is here!  The winter was cloudy, with that beautiful, low winter sun occasionally.  There wasn’t as much rain as we expected.  I was wondering if most of the rain arrives in the Spring, so I googled it.  Statistically, April is the driest month in the Netherlands.  Hooray!  Lance, Emily and the girls will be here the first two weeks of April and we are hoping for beautiful sunny weather.

 Joe and I have a walking route.  A few weeks ago we began seeing crocus.  They plant them in the middle of the grass!  We have been seeing more and more blossoms. There is a tree with delicate pink blossoms and an azalea bush starting to bloom. The jonquils are out and some bushes are starting to get tiny leaves. 

Along our route is a very large, old building surrounded by a lake and beautiful grounds.  We have seen lots of ducks on the lake all winter.  Last week we saw two swans!  As we drive from city to city we often see flocks of ducks, geese and swans in the fields.  This is the first time we have seen them close up. 

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They are so beautiful!  I am hoping they build a nest and we can watch “ugly ducklings” become swans! 

We’ve had a few days of sunshine and people are outside enjoying it.  Our missionary zone has picked up about 30 new investigators in the last 2 weeks.  If feels like the world is awakening.  Hooray for spring!  

What do senior couples do to keep busy? (anyone who knows us knows better than to ask that!)

                When we received our mission call, our assignment was “Young Single Adult Support”.  Exactly what that was we could sort of imagine.  We now have a pretty clear idea of what that is.  

What we really had no idea about was what other things we could do to support the Belgium/Netherlands mission and missionaries.  About once a month we have an opportunity to do something new to be of help.  I’m going to start keeping a list of those activities for those of you contemplating a senior mission…so you’ll know how many ways there are to serve!

1.  We gave a fireside at the mission wide monthly Young Adult meeting, discussing the scripture 2 Nephi 31:20.

2. We inspect missionary apartments for cleanliness and maintenance……and found this, a “cereal box wall”! 

3. Joe is editing part of a missionary’s life story for him.

4. We taught the missionaries how to sew on a button and mend a seam (Elder Thornock is using his practice seam and button as a tie tack!). 

5. We have cleaned missionary apartments when the lease was up and the missionaries moved out. (not my favorite activity but so fun to spend the day working with our other senior couple friends!)

6. Joe and I replaced all the treads on a narrow, winding staircase in a missionary apartment.  

 

7. I marked Books of Mormon with the answers to “Questions of the Soul” (Preach My Gospel, pg. 107) for distribution by the missionaries.  

  

8. Joe spent 2 days helping build partitions and shelves in the new storage unit for the mission.

9. I spent a day packing 75 bags with missionary office orders and mail from home to be delivered to each missionary at zone conference.  (and had a great time visiting with my sister missionary friends!)

10. We’ve gone joint teaching with the young missionaries.

11. We went to the mission office in Leiden and picked up Christmas packages for the missionaries from home and delivered them Dec. 23.  (an entire car full! Yea for families!)

12.  Monitored a missionary’s thumb which he very neatly sliced the end from while chopping vegetables!  (it’s looking very good now for which we are all grateful!)

 These things we do along with our Young Adult assignments.  We love the variety of the work!  It keeps us challenged and busy. We get to associate with so many wonderful souls.  And most importantly we feel that we have a purpose and a contribution to make.  We are loving our mission!

"Becometh as a child"

               

Our Dutch skills continue to grow little by little.  We enjoy reading the Liahona.  First we read the story in the very back of each issue for very young children! 

Then I read the Visiting Teaching message, which takes much longer to translate : ) (think forever!)

 I was wandering along the street here in Zeist while Elder Christensen got his hair cut and found a Christian bookstore.  I found these little bible story books.  “The Story of Moses”, “Daniel is not Afraid”, and “Jonah Listens Anyway”!  I only needed to look up one word, “toch”.  It seems so simple, but here we are, the best reading we have is children’s books! 

We sit together on the couch, reading them one page at a time, thrilled as we figure out what it says!  And yes, just like our grandchildren who are learning to read, we look at the pictures first to start figuring out what the words say! 

Today was a good day for Dutch at church.  A member from Romania prayed in Relief Society.  English is her 2^nd language and Dutch her 3^rd.  (yes, we feel inadequate!).  She isn’t fluent in either of them but can communicate fairly well.  When she prayed, she prayed in Dutch, using all the important words, none of the flowery words, and in English sentence word order.   Woohoo!!  I could understand the whole prayer!  

The Relief Society teacher had made an outline of the lesson with the scriptural references by each point.  I could read most of the outline, only needing to look up about a half dozen words.  With that and the scriptures I was able to follow the lesson even though I couldn’t understand what the teacher was saying, just a few words here and there.  As I’ve said before, learning Dutch is a slow, slow process.  We’re farther along than when we just arrived (newborns) and have “become as a little child”!

 One of our Dutch language goals is that by the time we come home we can read this book, “He Was One of Us”.  It is the story of Jesus of Nazareth illustrated by a famous Dutch artist, Rien Poortvliet.  I love this book!  I The illustrations are so beautiful.  We continue to pray for the “gift of tongues”!

It's been a great week for Institute!

   We came with grand visions and high expectations for our work with the Young Single Adults here in the Belgium/Netherlands Mission.  I will confess that circumstances of life here have made our work frustrating at times.  Everyone lives so far apart you can’t realistically run around and knock on doors to meet and invite all the YSA’s.  They are busy just like young adults at home with work and school.  The high cost of transportation, approx.. $3,000 for a drivers license, the high cost of owning a vehicle, and expensive public transportation (it cost $64 for us to ride the bus, train, metro, and tram from home to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam) make it difficult for them to get to church activities.

               

We have re-adjusted our expectations, both of ourselves and the young adults.   We first and foremost want to see them in church on Sunday.  Institute is secondary.  We have reminded ourselves of the fact that the Savior ministered one by one.  We have used the #1 means of communication here, a social media app called “Whatsapp” to reach out to the young adults.  Social media seems so impersonal to us.  So we try to make it personal by sending a group invitation each week and then following up with individual messages.  

               

We decided to reach out to one or two individuals at a time, so we visited one young adult and followed up by going to watch him play “kortball”.  I do love watching sports and this one was a learning experience!  It is not like any sport we have seen before : )  !

 

We have gone to all the stake/mission wide YSA activities we can get to. These activities give us a chance to get to know them personally.  Since we live in the middle of the Netherlands that means we can get to them all!  We have attended firesides, musical programs, dances, YSA sacrament meetings, camp and gone bowling.  We watch for young adults wherever we go.  If we meet a young adult in Den Bosch on Sunday and find out she is visiting from the Gouda ward and should be going to Rotterdam for Institute but it is too complicated for her to get there, we invite her to ours!  It is easier on public transportation to get to our house.  Yea for one more student! 

Den Bosch institute class

We find great joy in these weekly institute classes whether there are 2 or 10.  They are serious about growing in their gospel understanding and it has been wonderful to learn together. 

We find joy in one new convert preparing to go to the temple and on a mission, 2 returned missionaries picking up church responsibilities when they get home, an invitation to help with baptisms for the dead with a few of our young adults who have done their own family history work, two of them with their heads together discussing a point in the lesson, one young man starting to come to our Book of Mormon class to prepare for his mission and the fun and laughter whenever we gather.

Utrecht institute class

As you can see from the pictures, it has been a great week for institute! 

"every man shall hear the fulness of the gospel in his own tongue, and in his own language " (D&C 90:11)

Can you tell I have language on the brain?!

The missionaries in our mission are finding investigators who speak neither Dutch or English. With refugees pouring into Europe this will happen much more often. President Bunnell gave us an assignment a few months ago.  We are to gather the names of members of the Church in our mission who are fluent in languages other than Dutch and English. The missionaries then contact us with their language needs and we connect them with a translator.  It has been amazing! We have gathered the names of about 50 people who speak 24 different languages. We have had requests for Arabic, Farsi, Portuguese, and Mongolian!  We had translators for all but Mongolian.  With Pres. Bunnell's help we were able to contact the Mongolian mission and arranged translation via Skype for a lesson with an investigator.

  “ For it shall come to pass in that day, that every man shall hear the fullness of the gospel in his own tongue, and in his own language, through those who are ordained unto this power by the administration of the Comforter, shed forth upon them for the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

 We are witnessing the fulfillment of this prophecy! It is a privilege to be part of bringing the beauty of the gospel of Jesus Christ to those who seek it!

Langzaam praaten, alsjeblieft!

          We continue our Dutch lessons….. it is oh….so…..slow!  We meet over Skype with our teacher for an hour and our learning coach for another hour on Tues. nights.  The MTC offers senior couples language lessons for 6 months so our lessons will soon be coming to an end.  Our progress has been slow.  We do have a much bigger vocabulary now and can read many signs.  We’ve discovered we can read the little children’s story in the Dutch Liahona : ) We can pray fairly well in church, but can’t yet pour out our hearts to God in prayer in Dutch!

 Our sweet neighbor, Ineka continues to be our best assistant for learning Dutch.  We meet and just talk in Dutch.  I usually have something to tell her that I have practiced in Dutch.   She corrects it for me. We talk about what I want to learn and how I really want to be able to understand what is said in the meetings at church.  One of the kindest gestures we have received here came from Ineka.  Although she says she “doesn’t believe” in God, she came over one day with the Lord’s Prayer translated into Dutch, to help us at church.  I was so touched by her thoughtfulness.  It wasn’t an easy task.  Yesterday she came over with two books she had checked out from the Zeist library for us.  “Dutch for Dummies” and a children’s book with 1,000 Dutch/English words!  How can we not be successful with such love and kindness!

On the first Sunday in Jan. we attended Fast and Testimony meeting in Groningen.  For the first time I understood some of what they were saying!  It felt like a big breakthrough!  I’m sure part of the reason was because many testimonies have similar phrases and because we have been studying the “Missionary vocabulary and Phrase” book.  It was very exciting! 

That said, it has been frustrating that we still can’t follow the talks/lessons at church.  Even though we recognize more words it’s not enough.  Some of the problem is that everyone speaks so fast the words blur together.  I want to yell “langzaam praaten, alsjeblieft!”  (speak slowly, please!).  When people speak slowly we can understand so much more. 

Which brings me to this realization….learning and understanding a language of any kind requires as much or more effort in listening as it does in speaking.  So we have our learning coach get someone to share 5 min. talks in Dutch on a church subject during our lesson so we can practice listening.  We speak up and ask people to speak slowly and repeat what they said.  We are working on listening… not just what we want to say.

Which brought me to another thought.  In the language of prayer, is listening not the hardest part?  Do we want to pour out our hearts to God without the same effort given to listening?  Do we understand what God is saying to us?  Do we understand the language of personal revelation?  Instead of “speak slowly, please”, do we want to say to God, “speak loudly, please!)?  Just as the Dutch are frustrated when we don’t understand, so our Heavenly Father must be when we don’t listen/understand what He is trying to tell us.  I know that receiving personal revelation is like learning a language, that we can practice listening, and we can learn to hear and understand what God has to tell us.  I know that He wants to take us by the hand and guide us through our mortal journey if we will but learn to listen.

These amazing Young Single Adults!

You might have noticed the lack of news about our service with the YSA’s in our recent blog posts. 

 Well, not for having no news to post! 

We began Dec. with the winter YSA “camp”.  It is for all YSA’s in the mission.  It was held at a camp in a National Preserve near us.  Notice the bike parking sign “Fietsen”!  There were about 40 kids.  It started on Friday night with a crazy animal dance and ended on Sunday with Sacrament meeting.  The kitchen and gathering room is in the front of this building and the sleeping quarters in the back half of the building. 

These YSA’s can really work!  They plan and run the whole weekend.  The senior couples mostly come for support. 

They began the day Saturday with a “quest” in the forest.  There were 8 stations, manned by senior couple “angel guides” who gave the teams an assignment when they arrived, then “guided” them on the way to the next station.

We were instructed to bring a white sheet to complete our costumes!  It was a  very cold that day in the woods!  At our station they had to make a doll out of materials they could scavenge.  We then gave them some clues to a scripture and sent them on their way.

 

Good job!!

They had an indoor picnic complete with all the decorations.  After lunch they cleared everything and had a workshop.

Dinner that night was traditional Dutch “stomppot” and “hutspot”.  That meant peeling 40 pounds of potatoes and chopping 8 pounds of onions!  The alternative was to just stand around so I made myself useful!  Femke was the cook, a darling YSA from Den Bosch that I just love.

Two big pots….hutspot (mashed potatoes with carrots and onions) on the left and endive stomppot (mashed potatoes with endive) on the right.  They served mounds of it the size of their plates piled 3 inches high!  (and they ate the whole thing! Rookworst rounded out the dinner. 

They finished the day by completely re-decorating the hall and having a Sinterklaas party, complete with Sinterklass and Swarte Piet. (swarte as you can guess is the Dutch

word for “black” : ).   It was an all-new cultural experience for us!

It is bigger than Christmas here.  There were presents for everyone, games and the YSA’s loved it! 

The camp was concluded on Sunday with breakfast, a devotional (guest speaker), lunch, then Sacrament meeting.  These YSA’s are so capable.  They did literally everything and it was done to the nth degree! 

We express our appreciation to President Bunnell who graciously had the mission house the senior couples in a hotel nearby so we didn't have to sleep with the kids in the camp bunks!

                                                                                                              

We continued to have institute in Dec.  to finish out the semester.  The big dance of the year for the YSA’s in this mission is the Christmas dance which is always held in Den Haag.  Like all their activities it was beautifully decorated and well organized. 

The fellow we don’t know (lol!) but the girls are from left to right in the back; Esmee, Julia, Stephanie and Amber.

Inda is in front with us.  Joe got the bow tie as his Sinterklaas gift at the Oostveens Sinterklaas party and we thought this was the perfect occasion to wear it!  It turned out that most of the fellows were wearing bow ties!  Who knew?!  The girls were all dressed up in their fancy Christmas best! 

There was more food than kids by about 10 times and I’m sure the music was heard the next block over so it was a total success! 

Some of our favorite YSA’s invited us to go ice skating with them on the very tiny ice rectangle they made on the plaza in Zeist.  It was so fun to be with our young friends!

We have had a two week break from teaching/cooking for institute twice a week.  It has been a welome respite but we are getting anxious to get going again!  Happy New Year to you all!