Out of the frying pan and into the fire

We have stayed in Frankfurt this past week, but we have not been resting.   In Sister Rueckert's words, we are out of the frying pan and into the fire.  Besides our normal responsibilities, we have added a few more things to do.  We have been called as self-reliance coordinators in our ward and are now responsible for bringing the self-reliance initiative to our ward.  We have an amazing international ward.  It is full of wonderful members of the Church who do not speak German, so they come to the English ward.  This includes many Church employees that have moved here from Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, United Kingdom, U.S. expatriates and senior missionaries and more.  They have strong testimonies and wonderful experience.  Now we will find out how the Self-Reliance initiative will work here.  Last Wednesday we had some time to share our plans with our ward council and on Sunday we were able to train three more self-reliance facilitators in our ward.  Next week, on April 22, we will have our first My Path Workshop.  So far we have been telling others how this should work in theory, now we have to actually do it.  The emotions are quite a bit different.

Sister Rueckert building manuals for our new Finance course which we will be piloting in our ward.

We have also been asked to work directly with the four Dutch speaking stakes in the Netherlands and Belgium.  We will be traveling to the Netherlands this week to meet with one of the stake committees and a few of the chairman of the other stake committees.  Communication is not always easy with these busy men, something we have heard before, but now we are experiencing first hand.  We spent an hour or so with one of the stake specialist couples who were in the U.S. for three months and learned that they are very dedicated but have taken an approach more tied to the prior employment centers.  Welcome to reality!

We also had a chance to talk to the mission president of the Adriatic North Mission where we will be meeting with other senior couples in a missionary couples conference next month.  We learned his concerns and perspective and will need to modify our approach now that we understand this perspective.  

All of this is wonderful but somewhat out of our comfort zone. Today we spent an hour on Skype with a missionary couple that is serving in Kosovo.  Their challenges are so overwhelming, that it makes our challenges seem trivial.

On Saturday we had the privilege to attend the baptism of four more members of our ward.  We continue to have many refugees from Iran joining the Church.  They are wonderful men, but have the additional challenge of not speaking German or English.  They have been involved in our ward due to one of our members, Brother Hassan, who also is from Iran.  He has been a great missionary force and shoulders all of the interpretation responsibility.  After their baptism, we were treated to a banquet of Iranian food, made by Brother Hassan.

The four men after their baptism on Saturday.

Waiting in line to be baptized.

The banquet of Iranian food prepared for after the baptism

We are going to try to do a limited self-reliance course for these great men from Iran after Church each week.  One more commitment.  We need to use existing materials to work with limited English required.  That is a project for the next few weeks.

Before the baptism we were able to buy a new toaster.  Ours died a premature death caused by the jamming of the toaster by oversized bread which is common in Germany.  Below is the photo of the old taster and the new one that can handle large bread.

Spring has certainly come to Germany.  We have had wonderful weather and the blossoms are out on many of the trees.  The following is view from our balcony.

With the good weather, we have been able to run/walk in the cemetery more often in the mornings.  I have enjoyed listening to conference talks while I run.  I usually stop to look at many of the graves.  The photo below is from the large number of graves that were from World War 2.  I notice a full row of graves with the same death date of November 5, 1944.  These are not soldiers but individuals of all ages and some families.  As I checked this out on the internet, I read of a massive bombing attack on Frankfurt on that date.  It is sobering to tie news from the past with actual gravestones.  I have been wondering who will ever do the family history work for total families that were killed in the war.  That is something for which I am looking for answers.

 Other times I look at headstones to see if I see any familiar names.  This morning, I found this large memorial to the Schenck family.  This is the maiden name of Sister Rueckert's great grandmother.  The dates of the family members are very similar to those in her family history which were in another part of the country.  Perhaps we can find a common ancestor if we can go back a few more years.

This is one of my least favorite chores in Germany, taking out the garbage.  I take the garbage to these bins at the base of our apartment building.  The brown bins are for green garbage, the green bins are for paper or cardboard, the yellow bins are for plastic and the natural colors in front are for all other garbage.  There is no simple process to take out garbage in Germany.

Finally, to finish on a positive note, these are drawings that were sent to us from our Pennsylvania grandchildren.  We love to receive mail from our grandchildren.

Generalkonferenz

This was a wonderful week that ended in a most wonderful way, with General Conference, or in the celestial language, Generalkonferenz.  We were asked if we understood President Uchtdorf's german before he translated it, the answer is no.  However, as we look at it written, we do understand most of the words and the meaning.  However, our ear doesn't pick things up that quick.  The celestial language quote was; “Es gibt nichts Gutes, ausser man tut es!”  or "There is nothing good unless you do it!".  Even though we are 8 hours ahead and many miles away, we can still feel the same spirit of General Conference as we listen prayerfully to the words of our leaders.

We are privileged to at least be able to hear the sessions live.  The first session we watched at our local chapel in the cultural hall with other English speakers, mostly young missionaries.  It is great to be with them.  After that, no more sessions are shown at the Church on Saturday.  Therefore, we have to go home and watch it on the internet, until midnight our time.  We do go to bed and only watch the priesthood session on our Sunday morning.  Finally we watch the Sunday sessions later in the day, finishing one more time at midnight.  We go to bed late, but totally filled with the spirit.

We are able to watch the internet through my Mac, hooked into our television so that we can enjoy the large screen effect.  It was such a blessing to see our dear prophet address us, both in the priesthood session and the Sunday morning session.

We try to keep some of our traditions alive.  On Sunday morning we had a big breakfast as we have been accustomed to do in the U.S., only we don't have to rush ourselves to be ready for the morning session since it doesn't begin until 6:00 pm.  However, the breakfast was still good.

A few other thoughts from the week leading up to General Conference:

Conference weekend gave us time to step up our efforts in learning the German language.  We don't know if we will ever speak fluently, but we are learning to understand more of the written language and to have some small conversations.  We are committing to more on-line live conversations to go with our daily German study.  We hope to be more able to communicate in this "celestial language".

On Tuesday morning, we had our monthly video conference with our full-time self-reliance missionaries in the Europe Area.  We love these other couples and cherish the time that we are together.  In this meeting, Sister Graff, who is serving in France, shared the spiritual thought for the meeting.  She talked about the situation in Brussels and the impact throughout the mission.  They personally knew Elder Norby who was one of those injured in the terrorist attack and his wife Sister Norby.  These attacks are hitting close to home.  However, as Sister Graff discussed this, she noted that in spite of the injuries to missionaries and the efforts of the evil one, the Church has received incredible media coverage from this recent attack.  This has had a very favorable impact on the image of the Church.  Her testimony was awesome as she finished it with a quote from D&C 128:22, "Brethren, shall we not go on in so great a cause?  Go forward and not backward.  Courage, brethren and on, on to the victory!"  We are so blessed to serve with such amazing servants of the Lord!

On Wednesday Sister Rueckert had the opportunity to teach the other Area senior missionaries out of Ether 13-15 and Moroni 1.  Once again we reflected on world conditions and the similarities to when the Jaredites were destroyed.  Also we were amazed to see Moroni's view of Ether's view of the destruction of his people, while Moroni was seeing the same happen to his people.  Both of these great prophets had the same attitude as mentioned in the scripture by Sister Graff.  Sister Rueckert did a great job in leading the discussion and we were all edified.  Once again, we recognize that we live in troubled times, but if we are on the Lord's errand, his will will be done and we are privileged to be part of his work and his plan.

On Thursday, Sister Rueckert finally got her first haircut in Germany.  It was a little bit more than she expected, but she came out of it as beautiful as ever, even if the look is a little different than it has been in the past.  

During this week, we have been making preparations for several upcoming events, including:

• Our first automated self-reliance reporting that will go out to all priesthood leaders during the month of April.  A lot of work, but we believe it will bless the work in many ways.
• Preparations for our visit to the Netherlands next week, as we begin working closer with the stakes in that country.
• An upcoming PEF Loan seminar in Portugal in a few weeks.
• A senior missionary conference of the Adriatic North mission, that we will participate in during the month of May.
• Sister Rueckert continues to prepare many posts for the Church intranet, on the Europe page.  This is including writing stories to go with the videos that are being created on Self-Reliance success stories.
• Video conference meetings with other  senior couples that are working with self-reliance in other countries in Europe, including many that are serving part-time on this initiative in Greece, Bosnia Albania, etc.

We have also received a few new callings here in Germany.  We have been called as the self-reliance coordinators in our ward and will be working on a My Path devotional on April 22 with the intent of starting several self-reliance groups for the members of our ward.  Also, today we were asked to be in charge of the monthly devotional for the senior missionary couples.  As other couples will be leaving this month and next, we are quickly become more senior in our missionary experience.  Time to step up more.

On Saturday morning, I had the opportunity to go and jog for a few miles in the cemetery across the street from our apartment.  It is a large cemetery with ornate graves (see our blog of July 23 of last year).  This time as I ran to the extreme south of the cemetery, I saw many smaller headstones lined up in orderly rows. As I stopped to take a look at them, I began reading headstone after headstone with death dates of Nov. 5, 1944 and then others from other dates during the Second World War.  As I looked further I also saw headstones with the names of women during this same period.  Interesting, I felt like I was one hallowed ground.  These were the graves of the German soldiers and other war victims.  After spending the previous week in Berlin, this had even more meaning.  I recognized that in war, most participants are innocent victims.  So many of the young men of this country lost their lives during that terrible war.  It caused me to reflect over and over again.

During the general conference, including the women's conference of the previous week, we were touched with the need to reach out to refugees of war in our days.  Our hearts have been touched by the video presentations that were part of the Women's conference.  President Uchtdorf was one of these refugees and his talk on Sunday was so close to home, as he shared the challenges of that time in his life in this country of Germany.  This morning in our devotional, the speaker also was from a family that had fled Eastern Germany to arrive in Western Germany before they found the Church.  This theme of war and victims seems to pound deep into my head and into my heart.  As Elder Patrick Kearon, our Area President of the Europe Area shared his touching remarks about refugees, I realized that the little that I have done is so insufficient for the needs to these people.  I pray that I can find ways to follow the Spirit and help touch lives of those in need in the way that my Heavenly Father desires.

Easter Berlin

As we returned from our seminar in London last Thursday, we faced a long Easter weekend.  Both Friday and Monday were official work holidays and many people are away.  So with that in mind, we were invited by another missionary couple to accompany them on a weekend trip to Berlin, Germany.  Knowing that things would be pretty quiet around the office and our apartment, we decided that this was a good time to make such a trip.  So we got home and worked in the office on Thursday afternoon and on Friday morning started on a new adventure.    What follows is the highlights of what we learned on our Easter Weekend in Berlin.

At Check Point Charlie in Berlin

The trip to Berlin is about 5 hours by car.  We went with Elder and Sister Matheson in their car.  They are Family Services missionaries and some of our closest friends in Frankfurt.  We are happy to say that our relationship has only improved after spending four days together and at least 12 hours in road trip mode.  Two other missionary couples also made the same trip in another car, Elders and Sisters Hawkins and Piepgrass.

Since this was Easter weekend, we decided to first stop at the largest Easter Egg tree that we were aware of.  It was in the city of Saalfeld which was about 45 minutes off the path on our trip.  This is the home of the Easter tree with thousands of eggs hanging from it.  This was maintained for the last many years by a family that started with a smaller number of eggs and added each year.  Last year they closed their exhibit with a tree of 10,000 eggs.  They donated the eggs to the city which continued the tradition with a tree in the middle of their park.  Debbie and I had tried to visit this tree a few weeks ago when we were in Erfurt, but arrived in the evening and the park was closed.   This time we arrived in the morning and were successful in our efforts.  All of the eggs on the tree are real eggshells with the inner egg removed and the outsides colored, painted, embroidered, etc.  The photos below attempt to give a little feel of the tree, although it does not show what we could see in person:

From a  short distance, it is hard to see the impact of the eggs, it could look like a tree that is in blossom.

As you get closer, you can see that there are eggs everywhere.

Some branches have a large number grouped together.

This has one of our favorites, the one with the face on it.

These are some with embroidered covers

Many more embroidered egg coverings.

Still before arriving in Berlin we stopped at the city of Potsdam, home of Sanssouci Park, an ensemble of palaces and garden complexes, which were built under Frederick the Great during the 18th century and were expanded under Frederick William IV in the 19th century.  Sanssouci Palace, the summer residence of Frederick the Great, is the main focus.  The palace only had 12 rooms, but they were very beautiful and filled with amazing art.  The weather was rainy and the gardens have not yet come into bloom, but it was still pretty impressive:

In front of an old Windmill.

Back entrance of the Palace

Middle front section of the Palace

We arrived at our inexpensive hotel in Berlin that evening.  The elevator didn't work and our rooms were on the fifth floor, but we managed to use the elevator of the neighboring building and it all worked out well.  We had a wonderful meal at a Italian restaurant close by.  The morning breakfast offered was excellent, we met with the other missionaries and then we took off for a day of adventure.  We started with a hop on hop off tour of the city of Berlin, which is the capital and the  largest city in Germany:

See Sister Rueckert on the second level of the double decker sight seeing bus.

View from the bus, with other missionaries in the seats ahead

After seeing an overview of the sites, we settled into Check Point Charlie and the museum around there for most of the afternoon:

Straddling the line of the Berlin wall, with our right feet in East Berlin and our left feet in West Berlin

The location of the wall is shown in cobblestone throughout the city

In between a remnant of the Berlin Wall near Check Point Charlie

Sign of entry as you passed from Check Point Charlie into East Berlin

We then spend several hours in the Check Point Charlie museum, which truly opened our eyes and understanding to the logistics and the impact of the Berlin Wall and the wall around all of East Germany.  We learned the history and efforts to escape East Berlin and East Germany.  In fact the Soviet occupation began at the end of the war in 1945 and 2.6 million people left East Germany before the Wall was constructed in 1961.  In fact we met a man from Utah who was in the museum.  His parents were some that had left East Berlin in secret in 1953, never again to return.  This man had served a mission in Berlin in 1975 and now was back with his son, learning more of their heritage and East Germany.  The museum highlighted many successful escape attempts over the years of 1961 to 1989.  Some of those are included in the photos below:

This was an escape for a girl that stayed inside of a speaker box while a successful singer crossed through Check Point Charlie

This was the hot air ballon that brought one family to safety over the wall.  A full length film was made about this family called "Night Crossing"

One of my favorite parts of the museum was an entire room dedicated to President Ronald Reagan.  We sat and listened again to the speech that he gave in Berlin in 1987 where he asked the Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev to take down the wall:

Part of the tribute to President Reagan

As we listened to these words on the live filming of the speech, chills ran up and down our spines.  This was a great U.S. President who truly made a difference.

The wall ran in front of the famous Brandenburg Gate.  In fact, President Reagan's talk was given in front of the wall, with the Gate in the background.  So the words "open this gate"  had very significant meaning.

With Elder and Sister Matheson in front of the Brandenburg Gate, originally built in 1791.  The wall was just in front of where we were standing.

This is from the East Berlin side of the Brandenburg Gate 

The total length of wall and fences was 1,391 kilometers, totally isolating East Germany from their western neighbors.  Of that, they have preserved about 1.3 kilometers as a memorial and asked 118 artists from 21 different countries to paint the sections of the wall.  It is now called the East Side Gallery. 

Part of the West side of the wall

More view from the west side of the wall

One of the paintings on the east side of the wall.  Each purple flower represents one of the 136 who died while trying to escape.

1989, the year the wall finally came down

On the other end of the 1.3 kilometers of existing wall

By the beautiful Oberbaumumbrücke Bridge.  This double decker bridge led straight to the wall and was not functioning during all of the time that the wall was up.

Berliner Dom, incredibly large cathedral

While going to Church in a Berlin Ward on Sunday we met a friend of Ammon in our Sunday School class.  The world is small when we are members of the Church.  In Sacrament meeting a young girl gave a talk in Spanish but read quotations and scriptures in German.  We heard a beautiful rendition of "Hands" sung in English that touched our hearts with the true spirit of Easter.  It is wonderful to be fed spiritually wherever we go.  

Although fascinated with the history and beauty of this city, we were left to ponder the incredible costs that were exerted to limit the freedom of citizens, and the lack of concern for human rights.  It was sobering, but then it got more real.  On Sunday afternoon we chose to visit the Holocaust Memorial.  It is made up of 2,711 concrete blocks on an area of  19,000 square meters.  These blocks are the same length and width, but the height varies which according to Eisenmann evokes a sense of isolation and disorientation, symbolic of the events during the Holocaust.  

The monument has an underground "Place of Information" which makes a lot more sense of what it all means and holds names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims.  This sign as we entered into the "Place of Information"  tells a strong message of why we must remember what happened.

After identifying the terrible history of discrimination that turned to isolation which turned to cold blooded murder, the rooms below had a goal of helping you to recognize that the 6,000,000 individuals who were murdered were real people.  The first room showed messages from those who were led to their death, in small journals or notes or messages.  One of them below is shown as an example.

The next room highlighted 15 families who were victims from different countries throughout Europe.  The following are a few examples from one of the families from Austria:

Other rooms shared biographies of many of the victims, a new one every few minutes.  To share all, it would take over 6 years.  Finally it highlighted the death chambers, the concentration camps, the gas chambers, the shooting squads, etc.  As we left, we truly had a little bit more of an understanding of what had occurred in those dark days of World War II.  Millions of Jews (and others) were murdered from each of the countries that the Nazis took control of.

As we have pondered the inhumane conditions not only  to the Jews, but also to the Germans that were controlled by the Soviets for over 40 years, our hearts are heavy.  It was a sobering experience.  At the same time we were celebrating the resurrection and the atonement of our Savior during this Easter weekend.  What a contrast, but it all comes together with our Savior.  So many innocent individuals have suffered so much, but he has paid for the sufferings and sins of all, if we will only reach out to him.  Although suffering has occurred and is still occurring in our world, there is certainly hope for a better world.  

I testify that Jesus is our Savior, that he did pay for our sins and our sufferings and that he arose on the third day.  There are many things that I do not understand, but I know that God is just and that his judgements are just.  I know that when we arrive in His presence, we will understand all of this and we will feel of his everlasting love, not restricted by mortal experience and pain.  I know that he has known and understood all of the pain of the world and that He will make it right for each of us.

As we left Berlin on Monday morning, we met this incredible musician, playing his music on the street.  He plays by rubbing the tips of many glasses that are filled with variable levels of water.  It was fascinating to watch him and heavenly to hear.  Please take time to listen to the video below, which just captured 30 seconds of his music.  It will uplift you!

Click on the link below to hear 30 seconds of heavenly music from this man

Musical Water Glasses - Sergey Karamyshev Glasharfe