Saying Goodbye Is So Hard To Do

This is a very hard post to write. For the past week or so, we have been saying our "goodbyes." This has been emotionally straining for us. We have developed close, personal relationships with a lot of people. Sure, there is always video conferencing, but as we've experienced with our families, it just isn't the same as being there.

A couple of weeks ago, we visited our chiropractor for the last time. He has taken amazing care of us over the past two years. He is originally from California and has been here in Germany for several years. Diane had it all planned out to give him a Book of Mormon with our picture and testimonies in it. As we said goodbye to him, she handed him the book and told him how it had changed our lives. He seemed quite sincere in his appreciation of our gift.

A week ago last Friday, our floor in the office building was closed for electrical work. We decided to take one last quick trip. I wanted to see a different country, so we went to the Czech Republic. It was quite a distance for a day trip and on top of that it rained all the way there and back.

But, what an incredible time we had while in the Czech Republic. We visited two towns just over the border. When we arrived in each town, the rain became a light drizzle. The beauty of their buildings and the landscape was well worth the trip. I am grateful for Diane's willingness to go. She had been to the Czech Republic before, but she wanted to go on this long trip just for me. Here are some pictures we took there.

Once homes and now hotels.

River through town

Colorful buildings.

A recently restored Orthodox church.  They were

painting the inside during our visit.

Church up close. 

Colorful city.

The next day, we ministered to one of our assigned member families. They are a young couple with three small children and another on the way. The parents very seldom have down time from the kids and have been struggling to work on fixing up their home. We took the kids for a two-hour activity in a nearby park. The activity involved picking up trash in the park and woods.

It had been raining earlier in the day, but during the activity it cleared up. We had such a great time and the kids were wonderful. It was a bit hard to communicate. The oldest sister knows German and English quite well. The middle one is the brother. His German is much better than his English. The youngest sister only knows a very little English. That little girl would just talk to us and talk to us as if we knew what she was saying. Every once in a while, we'd have to ask her older sister what she was saying. From their smiles, I think the kids enjoyed our company as much as we enjoyed theirs. I know, for sure, that the parents were grateful for the time away from the kids.

We had so many invitations for dinners before we leave that we decided to invite some of the people to our place and have one big dinner. That is what we did last Sunday evening. It was wonderful. To have those we have been close to come together for the meal was truly memorable. We had our good friend Jan, whom I baptized a year and a half ago; Thong, whom I confirmed as a member of the church just recently; Eva, a church employee who lives in our apartment building who we have helped out a number of times; the sister missionaries; and the Elder and Sister Mellor, whom we minister to. What an enjoyable evening, but after they left, the reality of us leaving Germany made our hearts heavy.

Last Wednesday, there was a farewell luncheon for the four senior missionary couples who are leaving in the next few weeks. The night before I suddenly came down with a bad cold. Still, I got dressed and made it to the part where the departing missionaries say a few words to the other 14 missionary couples. Diane spoke before me.  She struggled through her words, but ended with by bearing a beautiful testimony by reading hymn titles from the hymn book. Interestingly enough, we both focused on the same thought--how senior missionaries give service. That is just what they want and that is just what they do, they serve. It was extremely hard to talk. Both of our emotions surfaced which made it hard to speak. Of course, the tears that came to the other missionaries listening didn't help either.

Tomorrow, we are confident that we will be called up in sacrament meeting to give our testimonies. This will be the last goodbye to a group. I anticipate that it will be just as hard as our missionary farewell luncheon. We are both prepared with what we will say, but we are far from being ready to speak the words.

View of Frankfurt from our temporary apartment.  Temporary

until we leave Germany.

Our good friend, Jan, will come over after church. That will be another hard goodbye.

As much as we are looking forward to be surrounded by friends and family, saying goodbye is extremely hard. How can you leave where your heart is?

This will probably be our last post on this blog. Soon we will be adventuring out on a new assignment. One in which we expect to grow even more than what we did these past two years;  grow closer to the ones we love, grow closer to each other, and grow closer to our Heavenly Father.

Squeezing It All In

Time is passing all too quickly now. We are squeezing in all that we can. Obviously, we are increasing our efforts to do what we can on our assignment, but we have decided to do some of the things and see some of the sights we have not had time for earlier on in our mission.

Our department had a farewell luncheon for us and for our manager, Brother Santos. He has truly impressed us with his leadership skills, his command of words when speaking, and most of all for his amazing insight on how to apply scriptures to work and everyday events.  He is going to Utah for Training before he becomes the next HR Manager.

It is a wooden shovel

I don't normally take pictures of food, but this is unique. It is called the dirt shovel meal. Notice what the food is served on. Yep, that's right.... a dirt shovel.

Elder and Sister Skoubye went with us to Paris for a few days. However, the day before we left an interesting thing happened.

A non-member woman, distressed because her husband had just died, prayed and felt the impression to come to our office building for comfort. The receptionist called the sister missionaries and they took her to the church next door. After talking to her a bit, they called me and asked for me to give her a blessing. I grabbed Elder Johnson, the Zone Leader, and we found them in the chapel. I was surprised to find that I knew this woman. She was from Canada and would periodically fly over to be with her sick husband who lived in the same apartment building as we did. She found comfort in several different ways, thanks to the senior missionaries and the younger missionaries. She was fed almost every night and was helped with taking care of the items in the apartment.

The day we returned from Paris, we were told that she was safely taken to the airport and was on her way back to Canada. She expressed an interest in the Church and plans to attend one that is only a couple of streets away from her home in Canada. The senior missionaries are amazing.  I sent out an email before I left and, without fanfare, they took care of the situation and helped this sister in need.

Back to our trip! We drove through Luxembourg and Belgium, stayed in Versailles, attended the temple in Le Chesney, and went into Paris on the train. Below are a series of pictures we'd like to share.

It was wonderful to be with the Skoubyes and to see the sights of Paris. Two things stand out the most to me. France is such a beautiful country, but I was more impressed by the friendly and wonderful people. The atmosphere is so inviting and open. They are blessed to live there.

The other thing that stood out in my mind was the experiences in the temple. We were there nearly the entire day.  ]If it weren't for the need of food and rest, I believe all of us would have remained there until the temple closed. It is a beautiful temple, inside and out.

Without further "adieu", here are the pictures.

Church in Echternach, Luxembourg

Sun coming through stained glass windows

Side street

Front of Paris Temple

In the garden area of the temple

Still in the garden area

Selfie

From the top of the Eiffel Tower.  A sea of city.

Cold but amazing

Leaving the area

We ate at a restaurant on this corner.

Notre-dame

Inside Notre-dame

Walking the streets of Paris

The Royal Summer Home.  Yes, all if it.

Church in the small village of Gueux, France

Down the street from the church.  

This is actually a restaurant.

A Hodge-Podge of Mixed Emotions

This is an interesting time in our mission. Things are supposed to be winding down in preparation to leave, but there has been in increase in activities and spiritual experiences.

We just went over calendars and they have never been so full. Literally, there is no more time to fit one more thing into our schedule.

The last two weeks demonstrate how busy we've been.  

Last weekend, we attended the baptism of Kris Sun who is from China. What a wonderful young man he is. I remember the first time he came over to our place for one of the missionary discussions. He expressed a strong desire to be baptized into the church and become a member. He wanted it so much that he would have agreed to be baptized that very day if allowed. However, I knew what the missionaries were thinking; "It's too early. We need to teach him more so that he can know for certain that he is making the right choice."  

Kris and Elder Graf (he is a German missionary)

Weeks later, his dream was fulfilled. I was invited to speak during his baptism. I  talked about the Gift of the Holy Ghost which he would receive in Church the next day. President Boyer, the mission president, also spoke during the baptismal service. The Spirit was certainly there the entire meeting. Sister van Hoff was the piano player. What a spiritual way to begin a Saturday.    

Later that afternoon, I took a bike ride. True, I reported a few months back that I was giving my bike away to someone who needed it more than I. After making several attempts to give it to him, he told me he had no where to park it where he was living. Now he no longer needs a bike. Anyway, I decided to visit a small nearby town, Nieder Eschbach.  At the beginning of our mission I remembered having visited that town. Sister van Hoff and I enjoyed walking through it. At that time we took a tram to get to that there. I just wanted to see it one more time.  

It was great visiting the places we walked on that summer day two years ago. Being on bike I was able to see other sites we didn't see before.  Here are some pictures of the town.

On the way home, I got a little lost coming out of the town and getting back to the Grüngürtel (a bike path that goes all the way around the city of Frankfurt). Surprisingly, just as I turned a corner to entered the Grüngürtel, I heard someone call out my name, "Elder van Hoff!"  It was Elder and Sister Conlin and Brother and Sister Maynes (he is the Director of Temporal Affairs of the Europe Area).  I was amazed at meeting anyone so far out of town. Had I been 30 seconds later, that meeting would not have occurred. It was wonderful to see a familiar face. A small tender mercy.

We ended the day by going to another missionary couple's apartment for dinner. They did such a good job preparing a meal that Diane could eat. The dinner discussions were enlightening and uplifting. It made for an enjoyable evening.

This past week we had an appointment to present a follow-up report to the Area Presidency. They were very pleased with the results of our work with the Technology Group rollout. Diane did the presentation.  She even mentioned some of the challenges we have had to deal with while forming the groups, yet the Area Presidency were not discouraged in the least by those problems.  

Interestingly, they made it a point to tell us that they didn't want us to go. We recognized that as being cordially polite with a hint of humor. But then, they surprised us when they told us that they were aware of our heavy involvement with the ward and other things not related to our assignment and thanked us in true sincerity. How did they know what we did? It isn't like we advertised what we did. They were right, we have done a lot, but it isn't anything more than what we would normally do anywhere else. We left the meeting expressing our appreciation for their support and thanks.

We had our exit interview with Elder Sabin. Walking out of that office made the thought of leaving here more of a reality. This has become our home. This life has become our life. It is a little scary not being familiar with our near future.

Thursday morning we had another wonderful experience, yet not for any reason we would like to repeat. Last weekend we got a phone call from a missionary couple. They asked us to come over to their apartment. We did and were surprised to learn what they told us. 

They had recently found out that the sister had a serious heath issue and was expected to return home for an operation. Recovery could take up to 3-6 months. Then they told us that they would be leaving for the U.S. this Thursday morning. They needed to talk to someone because they were concerned about the fight home. She was in extreme pain and didn't know how they could make it for the long flight and with a layover in the Netherlands.  

We weren't quite sure why we specifically picked us out from all the other missionary couples to share with us this information. We spent the next hour trying to give them comfort and told them that we would honor their request to keep this information confidential for a couple of days.  

Later in the week the other couples were notified and a fast was organized to pray that she could make the flight in comfort and have a successful surgery. I was asked to be the spokesperson. As the senior couples knelt on the floor of the church chapel for prayer to begin the fast the Spirit manifested itself in a major way and I was sure that the faith of the missionaries was felt in Heaven above.

Yesterday was another packed day.  

In the morning, Elder Conlin, Elder Peshell, and I drove together to help with a member move. We had so much fun working shoulder to shoulder with members of the ward.  I think the other two elders were tired like me, but we all had a great time.

Me demonstrating to the guys how to lift heavy objects.

Next up: we were invited to lunch at a member's home, the Fu family. This beautiful couple both came from China. They have 2 adorable boys, 5 and 3. They are the ones who joined the church a year ago and were just recently sealed in the temple with their two boys.

 

After lunch we opened up the new manual, Come Follow Me. We taught them how we have been studying it. We covered only two paragraphs, yet discussed things from those two paragraphs over the next 45 minutes. As much as they learned from us, we also learned from them.  

And still more: that evening we had been invited to dinner with the Jacobe family. They are from the Philippines. The young missionary elders were also invited along with a young couple, Brother and Sister Crucy. 

Sister Jacobe loves to cook and entertain. When it came time to eat, the entire table was filled with bowls, pans, and plates of food. There wasn't even enough room for us to eat at the table. There were only nine of us, yet there was enough food to generously fill 20-25 people. Large portions and trying everything was encouraged!

After dinner I was feeling full and was glad that the table was being cleared. But then, they began to fill up the table again with all sorts of desserts. I had planned to eat just a tiny portion of each one but Sister Jacobe grabbed my plate and piled on heaping portions of each dessert. "You've got to try this, and this, and you have to have this and this." The plate was filled full. 

I have to admit that all the food was wonderful, but I was in pain for having eaten so much.

The conversation changed from cultures, to personal life experiences from the past, to politics, to missionary work. Just before we had to leave, I asked each family to share how it was going with their study of Come Follow Me. It was heart warming to hear their experiences with their studies. They bore testimony of how it was changing them and how much they have gotten out of study with their respective families.  

Somewhere in the week we managed to almost finish our income taxes. Just a few more bits and pieces of information to gather up.

Today, Sunday, we went over calendars. There is so much going on between now and when we leave. I hope to have time to write another post in this blog, but can't guarantee it.  

We love you all.  Thank you for your prayers.  Rest assured that you are in ours.

Music From the Heart

To bring you up to date, we've been very busy with the 2nd rollout of the Technology Group program. We are now rolling it out to non-English speaking areas.  We have been fortunate to find facilitators who speak fair to excellent English. We ask the facilitators to conduct the meetings, under our guidance, with their group members in their native language. So far it has worked out beautifully.

For our 1st rollout, where we have fully established the technology groups, we measure success by the amount of communication going on between group members. Here is an example of different groups texting each other for answers to questions or just to discuss technology. Some of the texts are not English. These groups are not one of the five major languages, so we communicate with them in English and then encourage them to communicate with each other in their native language.

Now we want to share a special experience we just had. Mind you, the purpose of our blog has been to share our missionary experiences and present them in an uplifting way. What we want to share may seem to be gloating over something we did, but, really, we recognize that the Lord's hand was involved in making it happen.

Today was Ward Conference. For over a month now we had been practicing to play a special musical number for that conference -- "If You Could Hie To Kolob" -- with Diane on the piano and me on the tenor recorder. Just this past week, we made a couple of extra changes to the number. They just felt right. One of the changes was to play the recorder solo at the beginning before the piano comes in.

Last night the bishop called to ask if we would do the musical number on another Sunday. He was concerned that the Stake President would not have enough time to present his talk. We agreed.

This morning as we were preparing to go to church, I asked Diane if she felt we should take the recorder and music with us anyway. She said that she, too, had been thinking about doing just that. So we did.

We were standing out in the foyer, greeting people as they came in, when a councilor to the stake presidency walked up to us and said, "I've heard you are going to do a special musical number for us." I told him that the bishop asked us not to do it because he was concerned that that stake president wouldn't have enough time to talk.

Moments later, the bishop walked up to us and asked if we could still do our special musical number and asked how many verses we were going to sing. I told hem we would be using instruments and it would only be the equivalent of 2 verses.

Knowing that we were now expected to play, I began to get nervous. During sacrament, I prayed that we could do a good job so that we would not be embarrassed. Then it occurred to me that this was a poor reason to ask for help. I then prayed that it would be a delight for Him. And Sister van Hoff prayed that the Spirit would be felt.

It went amazingly well. Before I started, I could hear babies crying and children talking. At about the 3rd note, the entire building was quiet. I was told later by Elder Skoubye, who was sitting way in the back, about a child just in front of him. She was wiggling around standing in the aisle. As soon as she heard the recorder, she turned to look toward the podium at me playing and began to sway back and forth to the music.

We were told by numerous people that the music brought the Spirit into the sacrament service.

The Lord really did make it possible. Had He not inspired us to make some of the changes to the music, and prompted us to bring the instrument and music to church, and helped my thoughts to recognize the real reason for playing the music, then we wouldn't have had as spiritual an experience.

This was a small incident, yet the feelings we experience from being blessed like this, outweigh the sacrifice of being obedient and efforts we make to stay close to the Lord. If given a choice to have more freedom and not experience tender mercies like this or forgo some of the pleasures of life and exert our strength and energy in behalf of the Lord, we'd take the latter, hands down.

Just an extra note. We just got a call from the Stake President. He wanted to tell us how much he enjoyed the musical number. It meant a lot to him and we certainly appreciated his phone call!

Changes At Home And Visit To The Home Land

This past week has been whirlwind of information and changes that impact the rest of our mission.  This does not mean changes in our dedication and persistence, but more on our focus.

To start with, we finally got our flight plans to take us home from our mission.  Having those flight plans is helpful for us to plan for our departure from here and our arrival back to North Carolina.  There is so much to do.  It is amazing that there seems to be more involved in returning from a overseas mission than coming out on a mission.

Emotionally it is difficult to even think about departing from here. After all, this IS home. We have made quite a few friends with missionaries and members alike. At the same time, we realize that so much has changed in the lives of those we know back home and we have missed out on those changes.  We anticipate it being a bit awkward to see friends after such a long absence.  It's not like you can pick up where you left off.  Family, on the other hand, we've kept up using Messenger and Facetime.

Along with hearing about our flight plan, we were almost ready to give up on ever meeting our missionary replacements. We never met the two couples we replaced and we thought that was going to happen to us.  However, around mid-week we got an email informing us that our replacement couple will be arriving near the end of March.  It looks like we will have an overlap of about a week.  That's about perfect.

This couple served as Area Technology Specialists (ATS) in Brazil and left their mission close to the time we came on ours.  They were the ones who started up a unique program to support and train technology specialists all over that huge country of Brazil.  They, actually, inspired us to develop the program we are currently rolling out over Europe.  Amazing how the Lord prompts individuals to remarkably be in the right places at the right time so that His work continues to move forward.

One other big thing occurred.  Last week we expected to hear that the new Zone Leaders, we recommended to Elder Sabin, had been asked and accepted their new assignment.  A week went by and nothing.  Finally a few days ago, we found out that it had been done.

Today we were officially released as Zone Leaders during our Zone Conference meeting.  President Paul Johnson, announced it to the rest of the missionaries.  Over the past three days, since we learned the new Zone Leaders accepted, we have been training them to learn their new responsibilities.  We still need to have more meetings.  There is a lot of information.

During our time as Zone Leaders, we accomplished many things which we feel blessed to have been a part of: from setting up ministering between the missionaries, finding "Lost Sheep" in our ward, establishing policies and practices to help those coming into the mission and leaving.  One example is having the Face-To-Face video conference with the new couple coming into the mission.  The organization that Sister van Hoff has done with the responsibilities of Zone Leaders was a tremendous change for the good.

Do we feel relieved of the burden of responsibilities?  Yes, but we both feel a sense sadness and gratitude.  Gratitude that we were intimately involved with wonderful, loving, faithful missionaries and sadness that we will no longer have that same relationship.  We fill confident that the missionaries will be in good, loving hands.

One last piece of information.  Last weekend we took a trip to Diane's ancester's "Home Land".  We traveled down to the area northeast of Stuttgart, Germany.  The entire next day we went from town to town where we knew her ancestors were either born, christened, died, or married.  We took several pictures of the older sections of the towns, possibly existing back in their day.  We took pictures of some of the older churches where they may have gone.  Then we looked for cemeteries and photographed each stone that had her family name on it.

We were told that anyone dying over 30 years ago, probably no longer has a grave site still existing.  Our only hope is to find a connection with someone who recently died.  Maybe their family line can be linked into the information that Diane already has.

I'm so glad we made this trip.  I have felt from the beginning of our mission that this was an important reason we came here.

Here are some of the 97 pictures we took.

This is the first town, Prevosrt.  You can 

tell from Diane's face that it was bitter cold.

This is a church in the 2nd town, Oppelsbohm.

This is an old street in Vorderweißburch.  Notice the snow.

Another older street in the same town.

An old mill turned into a arts business in Schornbach.

This is in Holzhausen, were many of her relatives came from.

Another older place in Holzhausen.

On the way back we drove through Elzach.  A beautiful town.

We also went through a section of the Black Forest.  

Beautiful, don't you think?

Deeper into the Black Forest.

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Good Start For A New Year.....So Far

We made an effort to start the New Year off with a bang. Our effort consisted of staying up to midnight to watch fireworks in Frankfurt and the surrounding little towns.

The night started with several of the senior missionaries gathering together to play card and board games. At first there was a comfortable crowd, but it soon grew to such an extent that it was hard to get around. Everyone brought some sort of snack. Diane couldn't eat any of them, but I heard the chocolate-filled donuts constantly talking to me until I finally gave in. Note from Diane - there were some peppers and celery I could eat, but they're a far cry from a chocolate-filled donut!

Later that night we took up an offer to watch the fireworks at midnight at Elder and Sister Jensen's 11th floor apartment. Prior to midnight, people in the neighborhood were shooting off fireworks.  It was a great show, but at midnight.... oh my!  The entire skyline lit up from the city of Frankfurt to just down the street.  Unlike America, the display show was everywhere, not just by professionals at one location.  For 45 minutes it went on without slowing down or breaks.  Brilliant colorful displays were exploding right in front of us and just over our heads there on the 11th floor.  The boom of some of them were so loud that the entire building shook.  It was a bit scary, but amazing.  What was interesting is that before the fireworks started at midnight, you could see the distant lights of the Frankfurt skyline.  After 20 minutes, you were lucky to see the end of the street because of the smoke in the air.

The whole thing was so amazing that I decided to share the event with my sister, Jill. She was at home in Virginia eating dinner and watched while fire displays were exploding just feet away from us on the balcony in Frankfurt.  This link shows the fireworks at 12:40 AM.  They were starting to wind down. https://youtu.be/Dpx4SycLWVs

Even when we went to bed about 1:30 AM there were still some fireworks going off in the distance.

Corner next to our apartment building.

Corner down the street shown on the video.  

They swept everything out of the street.

The next morning we took our normal walk. The streets were covered with debris from the fireworks.

The day after New Years, we began preparing for Sunday. We opened the new Church's New Testament study guide called Come Follow Me. We glanced over it and skimmed over it and thought, "Well, this will probably take all of 10 minutes to study. Reading the reference scriptures and answering the related questions from the manual did not turn out to be easy answers, though. It could have been easy had it not been that our minds began to come up with all sorts of ideas for discussion. We spend 1-1/2 hours on just half of the lesson. It was an amazing experience and very informative.

This evening, Friday, we had a second discussion with the missionaries teaching a young man from China. This young man is very mature and smart for his age. He is in his 20s but thinks of things that most older adults don't even concern themselves with. His English is excellent, also. Tonight he told us of some miraculous answers he received from God and that he feels certain that God will answer any prayerHe plans to specifically ask God to reveal to him if this is Jesus Christ's church.

So. That is how our New Year has started. It's been great. Hopefully, it will continue that way for the rest of 2019. We have lots ahead of us! We received our 90-days before departure letter from the assistant zone leaders, so we're starting to prepare to come home.

We love you and miss you all. You are frequently in our thoughts and prayers.