Pretty Full Week

This past week we had a lot of involvement with Jan.  He is a German who is married to a Russian.  The sister missionaries are teaching him, but he and I have gotten to be pretty close.  Just this past week he and I have communicated several times, where he has only talked with the sisters a couple of times.  He feels the peace and the love of the gospel and has a strong desire to stay close to the Savior.  He knows that he wants to be baptized, but it would create a lot of conflict in his life right now.  That makes it a very difficult decision.  We pray for him daily.

Munich Mission Office

We got to travel to Munich, Germany.  We accompanied two Church ICS employees. Our assignment was to help switch out five old computers for new ones.  This involved saving all the data from the old computer, saving bookmarks from the web, finding out what printers the computers are set up for, saving the church email contact information and, after installing windows and software on the new computers, we were to restore the old data onto the new machine and set things up like before.  In Diane's and my mind, we figured it would only take half a day.  We were hoping that that would leave us some time to see some of the sights of Munich before heading home. 

It didn't turn out quite that way. We left Frankfurt at 4:00 AM and arrived at the Alpenländische Mission Office in Munich at 8:30 AM.  (The mission area is also known as the Alpine German-speaking Mission and covers southern Germany, Austria, and the German-speaking part of Switzerland.) Unfortunately, we didn't finish until 5:00 PM and then had to leave back for home.  As disappointed as we were, there was a silver lining.  The parents of Karolina, one of the employees we accompanied, had invited us to dinner.  They lived a hour's drive back toward home, so the timing was perfect.

Karolina next to Sis. van Hoff

What a treat that was.  To eat with an almost German family.  Her folks are actually from Hungary and have lived here quite a while.  He spoke pretty good English, only having trouble with a few words.  Her mother, however, only spoke German.  They have had a rough life and have now taken on the responsibility of raising a young woman who needs some tender loving care.  We could tell that these people have hearts of gold.

Going to Munich and back was a bit scary.  We were on the autobahn. This is not our first experience, but the first time the driver took advantage of the no speed limit.  It seems that most of the autobahn does have speed limits.  Here is what it looked like from the back seat passenger side.  https://youtu.be/C0JoGugDkjo You actually don't get a real sense of the speed from this video, because almost all the vehicles are going fairly fast.

Yesterday we had our first computer class with the Senior Missionaries.  Diane and I decided to have monthly classes for them.  Yesterday we taught an intermediate course on MS Word.  It was fun listening to the comments as we taught the class:  "Hey, I just learned something.",  "Wow,  I didn't know you could do that.", "I always wanted to know if you could do that.", "That's exactly what I need for my work."