Monday, August 24, 2015

13th letter from Eindhoven, Netherlands -- Week 61

Harry, Elder Steenblik, Elder Schmidt and Brother Stewart
Check out Zuster Fredrickson's rockin' helmet  --  Elder Steenblik,
Beautiful canal in Utrecht
Canal in Utrecht

Hey Everybody,

Well, lots of change has happened this past week! I have 3 new Elders living with me.  My new companion is Elder Da Silva and the other companionship is Elder Parr and his greenie, Elder Gleave.

On Monday night we met with a girl named Sarah.  Elder Harrop serves in our mission and his dad baptized Sarah back when he was here.  Sarah has kind of fallen away from the church the past couple of years, so we arranged for us to meet with her and we invited Elder Harrop as well.  We had a super cool lesson! She has all sorts of doubts and has been offended by members and let that shake her faith. We had a great appointment with her and are just working on strengthening her relationship with God. 

On Tuesday after our last district meeting of the transfer, we went out to lunch with some Belgian people that Elder Schmidt had baptized when he was in Belgium.  They were passing through Eindhoven on vacation and called us so they could see Elder Schmidt.  That was a really cool experience for him.  It was so weird to hear Flemish again! This was the first time that I actually understood everything haha. Back when I was speaking Flemish, I was still so new that I couldn’t understand a dang word for my first 4 months.

Wednesday was our transfer day.  Basically the worst day of my life! To sum it up, we woke up at 5AM and got home at 10PM.  In between those hours, I stood at the train station all day.  Most transfer days go pretty well, but every now and then, you have one where everything goes wrong.  That was this day haha.  All of the trains were messed up and we lost some people for a little while.  But all in all, everybody arrived in one piece.  At 9 in the morning my throat got a little scratchy, by 10 it started hurting and by 11 it was just on fire.  I could just feel myself getting sicker as the day went on, so that just added to the whole situation!

On transfer day I was talking with an Elder who just came from serving in Leuven and he told me that the Vanlangenaker family is fully active now! And the 2 kids want to get baptized.  That is great! Elder Cockbain and I started working with them when we were together.  They are a super cool family and I am so excited that they have finally made their way back to church.

These first couple of days of the transfer have just been super busy with planning.  We have had to plan our schedule out and a ton of other stuff, but it is finally all done so now we can go back to working outside. We have such a busy transfer.  It is going to be great!

On Saturday night it was Sister Van Der Riet's 80th birthday partaaay at the church.  There were tons of members and nonmembers, so we got to talk with a lot of people and meet some new faces.

We also have a new ward mission leader that just got back from his mission in France.  We are working with him to find ways to get the ward more involved in missionary work.  We are going to play soccer every week with the young men and they are going to invite all of their friends and we will invite our investigators.  We have also made a plan to invite the members to pray specifically for our investigators. Every week, we put together a list of a couple of names and give it to the members on Sunday and invite them to pray for those names.  The ward was super happy to do it and thought that it was a great idea. It is something simple, but it will help a lot!

Our 4 man is so sick! We have such crazy time together.  Elder Parr, Elder Da Silva, and Elder Gleave are all really cool guys.

That’s basically it for the week.

Have a great week!

                                                    -Elder Steenblik

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