December Highlights part 2

The members of our little Branch are scattered over a huge area and many have to travel 40-45 minutes to get to church, so we didn't have a Christmas party as such, but a special pot luck dinner after church on the 17th of December.  Our Sacrament meeting that day was very special.  We had a guest from the Stake in Switzerland speak.  We also had our former Branch President, who also lives in Switzerland, speak to us.  They both have to travel over 2 hours to get to our church.  They shared beautiful messages and truly inspired us to have faith and be strong.  Our Relief Society President has a beautiful voice and she played the piano and sang.  It is not easy to be a member of the church here.  Our Branch is small but we have faithful and dedicated members who are close knit and support and love each other.  It is indeed a blessing to serve here with them.  We all enjoyed eating and visiting and sharing the Christmas of spirit with each other.

Connie Hofmann, Alexander Huber, Rudiger Trautmann

Juditha Schilling, Susanne and Jorg Klaumunzner, Deise Van der Heiden

Susann Trautmann and Giampi Tonoli

Vera and Janosh Stevens, Jordie Wijsbeek, Giampi Tonoli, Levi, Jaane, and Rachel Wijsbeek

Rose Marie Pabel and Diane Lake

Bob Lake and Alexander Huber

On December 19, we traveled to Stuttgart, a couple of hours away, to visit with Helga Hoerstel who Bob taught on his mission.  I posted about her earlier.  She is 91 years old and still strong and faithful after more than 40 years.  We adore her and wanted to wish her a Merry Christmas and share our love with her.  She was so thrilled to have us come!  She lives in a tiny room in a care center and on her table we saw a framed photo of us with her that was taken the first time we visited her.  We both teared up when we saw it.  I guess we are as dear to her as she is to us.  We had a wonderful visit with this dear woman.  Her legs are so painful now that she will not be able to travel to her daughter's home for Christmas.  That made us very sad.  But the family will come visit her, of course.  They are very devoted.  This was definitely a highlight of our season.

Diane, Helga Hoerstel, Bob

We spent a wonderful evening with our Young Single Adults on December 20 having a special Christmas lesson.  We worked with our incredible teacher, Gerda Stubbe-Griell, to bring the Spirit of Christ to our students.  We showed some wonderful Bible videos (in German, of course) about the Nativity and the birth of Christ.  There is also one about Thanking Christ.  Gerda had an activity focusing on the names of Christ in the scriptures.  Bob shared a lesson from the #lighttheworld initiative and we had the class write thank you notes to someone who may not receive appreciation very often. We also sang some Christmas songs together.  We finished by playing a fun game that we all enjoyed (even Bob!).  I gave each person a bag of chocolate chip cookies and Gerda put together a very thoughtful gift for each of us.  We began the evening with a dinner of homemade lasagna and french bread that I brought.  The evening was everything we hoped it would be!

Bob, Elder Bushman, Elder Hilton, Christian Szabo,
Julia, Diane, Gerda Stubbe-Griell, Anya 

Julia, Elder Hilton, Anya, Gerda