STOP, GO, NO STOP!

This picture pretty much sums up the traffic sign situation here in Germany.  This is not trick photography, the stop sign is on the same pole as the traffic light above it.

Mixed emotions as we head home for Spencer’s wedding this next week.  We are so excited for him and Xan and to see, hug and kiss everyone we love, but also realize after this it’s a bit of a slog until we are with our loved ones again.

We are getting ready for a project to film local members answering gospel questions.  This will occur in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and Germany early next year.  We have picked the questions they will get and have drafted answers to each that the members are to put in their own words.  The video clips will go on each country’s church website for the benefit of journalists and others looking for information about the church.

We are in charge of a service project in our international ward and have been organizing the senior missionary efforts to do 12 Days of Christmas for 3 families in the ward.

Last Friday, Elder Brande and Martin spent the afternoon in the attic of our Elders Quorum President, redoing his tile roofing.  They carried the bundles of clay fired tiles up 3 flights then from the inside pushed out the old tiles, sent them off a shoot to the back yard then laid the new tiles on the cross strips of the roof trusses.  It felt great to do some hard work and Martin was just sort of sore Saturday morning, but got more and more sore till he creaked and groaned by last night.  Scary to get old.

No big slabs of cement here. Sidewalks are all labor intensive but easily removable tiles.

My 99 cent fern.  Plants are very inexpensive here

Would you believe a home for insects.  Found along our  forest path.

With fellow senior missionary  members of our weekly German class.

Russian Orthodox Church in Wiesbaden just a half hour away from our apartment.

ANOTHER WEEK AND THE MORMON MOMENT FLY BY?

Is the Mormon Moment over in Europe? The phones were pretty quiet on Wednesday, time will tell and the Lord is in charge.

Enjoyed a nice rainy, windy week here this week.  The video newsroom filming in the UK went well, with many youth and adults participating in answering questions about the gospel and LDS living and bearing personal testimony from their experience.  These video clips will go on the UK's newsroom website for the benefit of members and journalists.  Our director would now like to do the same thing for Italy, Germany, France, Spain and Portugal.  We've been assigned this project to oversee and spent part of the week, reworking the questions and ideas for responses to be given to the participants. Then we will send them off to translation and start working with the National Public Affairs Directors in each country to line up members to interview on camera.  We also started uploading images onto country websites for the webmasters to use with future articles.

Elaine was called today as assistant Relief Society secretary.  We're preparing a musical number with other missionaries for the Church employee Christmas party and organizing a Twelve Days of Christmas service project for some families in our Ward.

Adding to our list of Tender Mercies this week, Toni Fetzer emailed and is having his dad search their records to see if we are related.  I mailed him a T-shirt with the Fetzer Woodwork logo and Joan is checking out the records he scanned and emailed.  Thanks, Joan. 

Two missionary couples joined us for dinner and games here Friday evening.  They raved about how big our kitchen is so we're not anxious for our city apartment to be completed.  As it hasn't been started yet we needn't worry. We enjoyed an English session in the temple (which by the way is closer than the Salt Lake Temple at home) Saturday morning and a baptism in our Ward of a sharp Spanish young adult who has been studying with the missionaries for a year.  The room was full to over flowing with supportive members.

Some more things you may not see back home:

Trees don't go on sale until the 8th of December!

Huge piles of sugar beets in all the fields.

Roadside electric fences.  Pray your kids can read.

No big slabs of cement anywhere.  These small  pavers are easy to remove for repairs.

THE FETZERS OF ROTHENBURG

We change the bulletin board a few times a week with mostly positive articles about the Church. This one says "God in a backpack."

Most interesting experience of the week, while we were strolling down a Rothenburg street, on Saturday Elaine just happens to notice a young man taking his mail of the mail box and sees the name “Fetzer” written in small letters on the mailbox. Elaine immediately accosts this young man like he is her long-lost nephew.  He knows only his grandfather and also knows they are not related to the Fetzer vineyards in California.  He speaks good English and says his house has been owned by Fetzers for about 100 years. We take his picture and leave Tony with our card and tell him to email us and we will share all our Fetzer family history with him.  Also we invite him to come stay with us when he comes next to the US. Needless to say, Elaine was pretty excited..

Friday evening we did a temple session in French with a group of Saints that had been there all week from near Paris.  It got me thinking of the one person whose conversion I felt I had something to do with  - a young single man in Montpellier by the name of Christian Terreaux.  When we got home, just for fun I googled " Christian Terreaux SDJ" (LDS in French) and low and behold up came a French You Tube Video of Christian Terreaux, Director of the Family History Center in Nimes France, which is just up the road from Montpellier.  The video was an interview of him describing what happens at the Family History Center. So good to know he has stayed active in the church and I am hopeful of getting to see him or at least speak to him while we are here. I put a comment on the website with my email address and I can write to the bishop of the Nimes Ward to get his address. I’ll count this a tender mercy.

Our Europe Image Library.  We mailed to 28 countries who each have their own Church website.

We're organizing VIP gifts in the dungeon (our basement storage.)

This is Tony Fetzer who is studying computer technology in Munich and was home for the weekend.

This is the Fetzer home in Rothenburg.

So surprised to see my name on a mailbox in Rothenburg.

Christmas shopping in Rothenburg.

I was interested to read a piece written this week by Bob Bennett, former Senator from the State of Utah, penned during a Paris conference dedicated to analysis of the 2012 presidential election. Among Europeans, he notes 70% would favor the current President.  Not that they dislike Mitt Romney, they know nothing about him, except that he is a Mormon. But if that means he is a religious person that is a big negative.  It seems all religions in Europe are considered suspect.  No European politician, he says, can afford to be seen as devout or he would not be taken seriously.  Mr. Bennett attributes this attitude to a long history of government supported religion in Europe.  After the 2^nd World War these religions lost their privileged positions and when people were no longer forced to give support, religion lost its hold on their loyalties.  In contrast, America’s long separation of church and state encourages continued lively religious discussion as faiths compete for adherents.  So Mr. Bennett concludes American presidents will continue to embrace religion and Europeans will continue to be amazed by it.

This week we finished our photo and video cataloging project by burning DVDs and mailing them with a picture index to all the National Public Affairs Directors.  In our cover letter we encourage directors to let us know what additional local images would be helpful to them and we would come and do some on-site photography.

On Saturday (excited story above) we enjoyed a day trip to Rothenburg to see this well-preserved medieval town a couple hours south.  The town was a major trading center from about 1200-1400, before falling off the main trade route.  It was spared during the war because the wife of an air force general knew of the town’s history and convinced her husband it was worth saving. Nazis there agreed to vacate to spare the town from being bombed.