New Things, Old Stories

Castle on the border of Germany and Switzerland

June 22, 2015

Shonen Woche, meine Familie und Freunde,

I hope all is going well with all of you this week! exciting things are happening in the mission, such as:

 - The implementation of iPad usage in the mission
 - Transfers
 - And actually, that's it.  Not much else has happened.

So, since I know a few of you are really curious about it, yes, I now have an iPad.  No, I don't have internet in my apartment, neither will I soon get it.  I will either be in the church or at a McDonald's.  If I need to use the internet, which really isn't that frequently.  A lot of the stuff we use as missionaries doesn't need internet access to work once it's been downloaded.

Also, no, I'm not back on Facebook (yet).  Within the next month or so, Facebook will be approved for missionary uses.  I'll have to change some settings and such on my Facebook, and I won't be able to chat with people like I used to while I'm  still a missionary.  The point of using Facebook will be to make it easier for the people I teach to be able to 1. have easier and more comfortable contact with my companion and me. 2.  Have more exposure to the things we teach through our posts. and 3. be able to connect with me as the normal (well as normal as I get) person I actually am.

SO, if you are reading this through a link you've found on Facebook, either through my page or through my mother's, I suggest that you either 1) follow the blog itself so you can receive updates or 2) Friend my mom (Yes, my mom. She's super cool and can be really funny sometimes, even if it's an accident (I love you, Mommio<3) so that you can see the posts on her page.  I don't know if she'll be able to tag me in her posts, so you will only see them if you are friends with her.  I haven't received all the information on that yet.  Besides, I've got plenty of time before it even happens, so no worries.
Alright, so transfers! There's been a switch up.  Sister Smith will be going to Graz, Austria, and I will be receiving Sister Fenton, who has been serving in Salzburg, Austria, for a couple of months.  I've met her briefly , and I'm looking forward to working with her. :)

Other than that, the only other thing I was planning on sharing with you guys is a story from one of our recent converts, Christiana, and long overdue photos.

Christiana's story is really long and I probably will not have time to write it all out in this email, but it's one worth hearing.  Christiana is a refugee from Nigeria.  Before she was a refugee, she had a fairly normal African village life.  In her village, there was a woman who sold a mixture of friend beans and meat.  In order to sell the food, she used pieces of paper as dishes/napkins.  She got the papers from a separate vendor.  Keep in mind that nearly everyone in this village is illiterate.  No one can read.  Also, there are only two religions in this village: Muslim, and Christian.  At some point, these vendors sold her paper that had been ripped out of the Quran.  The wrong person with the wrong attitude realized what he was eating off of.  He told the higher up Muslim folk, and they came and destroyed this old woman's store.   They also came with intentions to kill her, but she escaped.  Unsatisfied, they rallied and angered up a lot of the Muslim community, and the Christians in the village began to be slaughtered.  Christiana, along with hundreds of others, fled the country.

In order to flee the country, however, they only had two options.  One has to ride in a cigarrette truck that would carry 6 people.  It cost the equivilent of #350, which was money non of these people had.  THe other option was to be crammed in the back of a swmi-truck with  200 other people, packed in like sardines.  You were only allowed to bring about 2 gallons of water.  It cost $50, which is what  most everyone could afford.

These trucks would drive across the African desert to Libya.  People died every day from heat and dehydration.  Surviving the truck ride was a miracle.  When someone would die, the driver would simply throw them on the road, tell the others to get over it, and keep moving.  Often times, these trucks would have to wait in small villages for another truck, because if one truck breaks down in the desert and no one knows about it, everyone is dead.

So, Christiana survived the horrific truck ride.  She lived in Libya for a few years.  Her comments on Libya include, "It was a nice place.  I had a job, I had a home.  If I wanted to go outside, I had to wear clothes that would cover me head to toe, otherwise I'd get stoned.  Also there were people, crazy people, who would literally steal food right out of your mouth! The first time this happened to me, I was sitting in the sand eating tuna.  A man a few meters away from me all of the sudden stood up, ran towards me, grabbed the can with one hand and the bite of food in my mouth with the other, and ran away. I actually do not know if these people were human or animals.  I could only ever see their eyes.  I don't think they were human.  They did terrible things...Humans don't do those things. "

SO now there's a war in Libya.  Long story short: Christiana's house gets blown up one night.  She has a one year old daughter at this point, and the baby gets hit with debris and bomb shrapnel. Christiana rushers her child to the hospital, where people with missing legs and chunks of body blown off are getting turned away because there are not enough doctors to handle the onslaught of wounded.  One doctor sees the bleeding baby, takes her from Christiana, cleans and patches her up, hands her back to Christiana and tells her to flee the country.

I think next time, I will have to finish the story of how she did that!  It's a miracle in itself.

Basically I cannot even imagine the things this woman went through.  I can try, but I really have no idea.  It was an incredibly humbling experience to hear her story.

Now for a change of pace, I'll add some pictures. :D

The Bern Temple

Covered bridge

Burns

Monday, June 15, 2015

Hey howdy hey.

The past few days, I've had Disney quote after Disney quote stuck in my head, most of which have been completely random and have made me look like a fool because I had to resist the urge to bust out laughing on the bus/train, such as "Everybody! Everybody! Everybody wants to be a cat (HALLELUJAH!" PUT THAT THING BACK WHERE IT CAME FROM OR SO HELP MEEEE" (the musical version) and "Hey, I"m Woody! Howdy howdy howdy!"

One in particular, though a whole scene, in fact, comes from The Lion King.  You all know the story.  If you've looked at the subject of this email, you also know exactly what quote I'm going to say.  "It does not matter! IT is in the past!"

So why am I even talking about this? Yes, it's a great quote, it's a good lesson to learn, and many people have already applied it to their lives.  I'm talking about it though, because it's very applicable to the gospel - particularly repentance and and the atonement.

Have you ever witnessed a parent ell their child not to touch a hot stove, only to hear the crying of said child after they've touched it anyway a few minutes later? Have you ever paid attention to the parent's reaction? Sometimes, there's a "I told you not to touch the stove!" but always, there is the immediate "Let's put this under cold water" followed by care and comfort.  Did you know that our Father in Heaven is the exact same way?

Everyone reading this has made mistakes, which have caused emotional or physical pain.  It has also caused spiritual pain.  When we consider ourselves as the divine children of God that we are, it's easier for us to realize that we have very similar instincts and reactions as the child who touched the hot stove.  A child who does wrong consequence, or seeking the parents help in order to conquer a problem that is too big for them on their own.  Do you see the similarity? When we, as humans, make mistakes, we either turn away from God (Consciously or not) as to the avoid the feelings of guilt and pain,or we seek HIs help to overcome what is too big for us alone.

So--When Simba receives a smack on the head, it symbolizes an action that causes him pain.  Whether self-inflicted or not, it doesn't matter. -the solution remains the same.  We must learn from our mistakes.  Have you ever seen the freshly wounded child go back into the kitchen and put their hand on the stove again? They tend to avoid the area entirely for a while.  Eventually, they may foolishly give in to curiousity again, but we do that too, and (again) the solution remains the same.  Repentance literally means "Return." The German word "Umkehr" directly translates to "turn around".  When we make mistakes, we turn away from God.  When we repent, we return.

What I'd really like to focus on is what happens after we've repented.  An important part of this process that many people struggle with is the concept of forgiving ourselves.  Because repentance does get to a point where the mistake no longer matters.  It's in the past, and God wants us to move on to the bigger and better things that await us.

Let's go back to the child and the stove.  The child doesn't beat himself up over the fact that he burned himself.  He doesn't guilt himself every time he enters the kitchen.  He doesn't let it rule his life.  So why do we? Because our mistakes are bigger than just a burnt finger? Because we're more mature than a child? The burn may stay for awhile, but it will heal and disappear, just as our wrongdoings and sins will when we correctly apply the power of the Atonement to our lives.

When we hold these mistakes over our own head, we are giving in to Satan.  God does not want us to be unhappy.  He is willing to help us every step of of the way.

I'm out of time, so'll leave you with a scripture to think about.

"For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the HOly Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his rather." Mosiah 3:19 (emphasis added).

Remember that the analogy of the disobedient child and the loving parent also applies to our Father in Heaven.  We may be the disobedient children.  Heavenly Father is always the loving and caring aprent.

Have a good week!

Sister Sally Priest

I'm Just a Person

Monday, June 8, 2015

Hello all! This week, I went to the Swiss temple, took pictures, but forgot my camera at home.  So you'll all just have to wait until next week, k?

Moving on to the letter --

Last night, reality hit my companion and me pretty hard.

Backstory is needed.

We have an investigator, N, who wants to be baptized.  Long story short, she can't get baptized until she gets married, but the German government is requiring a somewhat ridiculously large number of unrelated papers and letters from a country that doesn't have such things, which makes getting married a difficult thing for her to do.  She also does not speak German, which puts another wrench in things.  She's been working at this for over 8 months.

So, a couple of weeks ago, she told us she had an appointment to try to get things moving on June 8th (today!).  We offered to be her translators, but she told us she already had someone lined up.  Well last night, she called us and said her friend had cancelled on her and she needed help.  Sister Smith and I exchanged looks, asked if we could call her back, and went to work.  We had planned to go to Switzerland again today, along with other things.  On Mondays, we only have to do 3 hours of missionary work.  It's basically our "Saturday".  The rest of the day is dedicated to grocery shopping, cleaning, emails, and whatever else we'd like to do (within reason).  We had already planned our 3 hours of missionary time, and needed to go through with them (another story, which I'll tell after this), so we canceled everything we could, rearranged, and figured it out.  While we did this, a feeling of urgency came over us.  We called our Mission Leader, who told us he randomly had gotten today off, meaning he could come and be a much  better translator than us, because his German is better and he understands the government here waaaaaaaay better than the 20 year old American girls.

SO, everything started falling into place last night.  When she first called us about this weeks ago, we really felt like we were the ones who needed to be there, but we didn't want to be pushy.  Now we were going to be there.  Benji (Ward Mission Leader) had the day off.  He knows the people who work there and he's a fantastic influence.  The train times worked perfectly for us.  N. spends half her time up near Frankfurt, in a different mission - We've been in contact with the Elders there, and called them to inform them of what was going on.  They had been feeling that something was about to happen, and they had asked their whole ward to pray for N, whom they haven't seen much of, and they did.  Everything was in our favor.  It felt so right.  There was some definite divine intervention in the organizing of this meeting.

But what goes up must come down.

As we calmed down and processed the good news, our thoughts drifted to someone who will remain unnamed.  This person has been struggling the past few weeks.  As we considered how we could help them, a very real feeling of fear started creeping into our home.  We were discussing the problems and how we could help this person avoid them, the reality of Satan's presence in this world hit me.  I've said this before, and I'll say it again: THe war between good and evil, God and Satan did not just magically end with the biblical times.  It rages stronger than ever on the earth today, and we must be aware of the evil influences that appear in our lives.

I have felt fear in my life.  I felt it when I lay in a hospital bed, unable to move my legs, unsure if I would ever walk again.  I felt it when I realized I had made mistakes that could have potentially ruined my life.  I felt it when I watch ed a child I love turn blue from lack of oxygen, a reaction to a birth defect which threatened her life.  I have felt it many times, and I will feel it many times more.  This fear last night, however, was very different.  I hadn't felt this before.  I felt as if the devil himself was laughing at me.  Laughing at my attempts to help this person escape his grasp.  Laughing at me, the 20 year old girl, living out of her element, speaking a language she doesn't fully understand.  I'm just a person.  And it was kind of terrifying.

And then I laughed back.  I took control, planned, prayed, and pondered.

It's that easy.  Well, sometimes it is.  I think it was only that east for me, because I know where I stand. I know I stand in a higher place than the adversary.  I know that GOd will never be defeated.  I know that, no matter how scary things may seem, everything is going to be okay.
To give you some closure, Nancy's meeting went well.  A lot of progress was made.  Steps forward were taken.  As for the Unnamed, we did see them today, and were were able to help them take a step forward as well.  I would like to point out, however, that none of this would have happened if it weren't for the Lord.  I didn't really do much of anything.  I just followed the promptings I got, inrprovised a little, sprinted to catch a train, and just stood there and smiled.  The presence of the Spirit that came with me did the work.  I'm just a person.  And its kind of awesome.

I love you all!
Read, Pray, Love!

Sister Sally Priest

Changing Hearts

June 1 (really!)

Hallo, meine liebe Freunden.  I hope all is going well with you all:)

I'm going to start off with something cool that happened in a lesson this week.  We've been meeting with a man named Eric.  He's another African refugee.  He's very humble, very intelligent, and knows his Bible very well.  He's been really open to learning about the Book of Mormon, and accepted it as the work of God almost immediately.  He's been asking really deep and meaningful questions about life and how God works, and we've been able to help him find his answers through prayer and scripture study (along with our own knowledge, but we really emphasize that the people we teach need to read and pray for themselves so that they can receive a confirmation from God, instead of just blindly taking our word for it. )

On Monday night, we went to visit him.  He came into the lesson with a question in mind.  He had been reading in 1 Samuel Chapter 16. Verse 14 reads, "But the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him. " He explained to us that, as he read this, something in his mind went, "Uh, hey, that's weird." He read it again and realized that he didn't understand how an evil spirit could come from the Lord.  He expressed great concern about his disagreement with the scripture.  He said that he knew in his heart that there's no way the Lord could cause an evil spirit to trouble anyone, but he felt a little worried that his opinion differed from the scriptures.

Here's the cool part: I looked in my scriptures and searched the footnotes.  For those of you who aren't familiar with the history of the church, we have something that we call the "Joseph Smith Translation".  It is not a translation of the whole Bible - that'd be ridiculous - but what we claim as truth is that, along with revealing scripture from another people from another part of the world (another fold of sheep - See John 10:16) that learned about, testified of, and were visited by Jesus Christ, (the people of the Book of Mormon) God also revealed to Joseph Smith a few of the bible verses that had been changed or misunderstood during the many translations that happened during the era of Church Reformation (Note that the Church of Jesus Christ is NOT a reformation oe branch or extension of some other church, but it is the restored church of Jesus Christ -- the same church with the same principles and guidelines that Christ established while on Earth.) One of these corrected Bible verses is 1 Samuel 16:14.  The Joseph Smith translation reads: "But the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit which was not from the Lord troubled him. "

Ad we read this to Eric, I watched his reaction.    It was as if a light bulb went off in his head, a plug went in, a missing puzzle piece was found, and the HOly Ghost whispered to him that what we were reading was true. Everything made sense to him, and thee same voice that told him something was wrong with translation of 1 Samuel 16:14 told him that the Joseph Smith translation was correct.  His soul relaxed and he rejoiced in his new knowledge.

I find it very interesting how this man, who knows and believes in the Bible, was so open and influenced by the Holy Ghost, that he took two 20 year old girls' word for it without question.  That's the power of the Lord, and it's really cool.  God is not dead, the heavens are not closed, God speaks to His children, this Church is true, and I love it all.

Now I'll add some fun stuff-- Went to Switzerland last Monday, had fun with some other missionaries!

This week we had a street display.  These haven't been my favorite things, but this weekend was fun.  We came up with new ideas.  I bought a bunch of balloons, some of which had smiley faces on them, and we came up with our slogan of the day "Be Happy".  We would stop people on the street and would ask them what makes them happy.  We got some fun answers out of it.:) Our ward mission leader is a street performer, and he showed up in costume and did this robot dance thing, and handed out balloons and pamphlets and invitations to people.   It was pretty (cold? word ommitted) out there, but people got into it and it was great.

I'll be going to Bern, Switzerland later this week to visit the temple there. :) I'll have more pictures and stories next week!

Love you all!

Sister Sally Priest

BOMBS AWAY!

May 25 (written and sent; not posted till June 1)

Dear Family and Friends,

This week wasn't too exciting, what with me recovering from being sick, then my companion getting sick and also recovering, but I do have some fun stories for you!

Early on in the week,m we met with our friend Nancy.  She is also African, and lives in a refugee home.  She has a fiance who lives up near Frankfurt, and she spends half her time living up there with him and the other half living down here with everyone else.  They've been working to get all the papers they need from Africa in order to get married in Germany for a really long time, and they're finally getting really close to having everything they need.  BUT, since she really wants to get baptized, and she also wants her fiance to get baptized, and with all the traveling she does back and forth, we got permission to contact the missionaries where her fiance lives, so that she can still meet with missionaries when she's traveling, and her fiance can start meeting with them too.  They're not part of my mission - I'm Alpine German Speaking and they're Frankfurt Germany, so it's exciting in itself to be able to talk with people outside the mission once or twice a week.  So progress i being made there and it's all wonderful and dandy.

The story I want to tell you however is this:

We go into Nancy's room.  She looks at us, goes "We've received some very bad news! You read German, right??" and hands us this official looking letter that's completely in German.  This letter was sent to all the people living within a 500 meter radius of a World War II BOMB that had been discovered in the vicinity.  So the Africans, recognizing the word "bombe" had called the police and asked them to translate! So we have about 3 people in this refugee home that we visit, and all of them have until the beginning of July to find a new place to live, because this live bomb that has been sitting under the building for how many years now, will need to be excavated, and it might blow up.  The possibilities of it going off are really very slim, but the whole refugee home is making a huge joke about it and it's absolutely hilarious.  Things got loud in the hallway and Nancy steps out and yells "WE NEED TO BE QUIET OR WE WILL ALL DIE!" and everyone just cracks up and goes back to their rooms.

So, essentially, we've been visiting thi splace for quite awhile now, and there's been a bomb underneath it the entire time, and the government has just figured it out.  It's just one of those situations that's unique to the area and that will probably never happen to us again, so we're just kind of laughing at how normal everyone in Germany knows this is, because it definitely isn't normal to the missionaries!!

Other than that, not much happened this week.  It's gone by pretty fast, and I'm a little freaked out by how fast time is flying.  I'm having fun though, making progress.  I've been reading a lot of Jesus the Christ this week. For those of you who haven't heard of it, it's a book written by an apostle of the church, analyzing and explaining the works and teachings of Jesus Christ as they appear in the scriptures, along with historical records backing it all up.  It's an interesting read, and I"m learning a lot from it.

I'm sorry I don't have any pictures this week! Some were taken, but not on my camera, so I don't have them quite yet.  I'll make sure to take some this week though. :)

Liebe Grusse,
Sister Sally Priest

May 18
(This is the date it was actually written and sent.)

Alright, so this week has been:

Crazy
Fun
Exhausting
Rewarding
I'm  out of adjectives.

K, so I'm actually a bit sick today, so my thoughts are totally organized and I'm a bit out of it, but here's my shot at this weeks email:

So the crazy part of other week: Planning another baptism - one for an older lady who cannot walk unassisted, which makes getting her into baptismal clothes, getting into the font, completely under the water, out of the font, and then changed into dry clothes a little bit of a challenge.  Lucky for us, the member who referred her to us works at her nursing home and is qualified to help her with basically everything she needs.  She proved to be a HUGE help in figuring out how this baptism was going to work.  We had 3 people in the font with her.  They helped lower her under the water and raise her back up.  Then we got a stool in the water for her to sit on while we worked on closing off the baptismal area so we could get her privately and safely back up the stairs and into the bathroom, where we helped her get dressed.

Fun: I've been back in a drit all week, which has been interesting.  We made cookies with the American brown sugar that was sent my way (sorry, Germany, you win on chocolate, but the brown sugar prize goes to America) and that was a fun process in itself because our oven is super weird and each batch turned out completely different from the others! Tasted just fine (tasted like home...) but I wish I had thought to take pictures because the differences in appearance was comical.

Exhausting: I got sick!!! GAAHHH.  I ended up staying home and sleeping most of the day yesterday, and I'll probably end up sleeping most of this afternoon as well.  I'm slowly but surely getting better, but dang, it took a chunk out of me!

Rewarding: This week! Dang!  The baptism on Saturday was lovely. Frau Blasche has been waiting for this for over 50 years.  The relief and joy on her face was so --I can't even put a word to it --beautiful, so perfect, slightly tear-jerking, rewarding...I was so happy for her! We also have two new people who we are teaching, both of whom have some serious potential,.  We've only met with one of them once, but he already had a list of questions for us, all of which we were able to answer, and he seems to really understand what we teach and why it's important to know.  We have high hopes. :)

Sorry this week is a bit shorter than most.  This week will be the end of the transfer.  I'll be staying in Singen with Sister Smith. :)

Oh also , you guys, my mission is actually 1/4 of the way through already, which is totally crazy an weird to think about.

Here's a picture of the three of us (myself, Frau Blasche, and Sister Smith) on Saturday.

And here's a picture of a huge fly swatter (Thank you Elder and Sister Lee) that promptly shattered the first time I tried to use it on the huge mosquitoes that get in our house because we have no screens.

Ha ha ha have a great week guys! Feel free to respond :)

Liebe Grusse,

Sister Sally Priest