As we have
mentioned before our calling is pretty much a day job, although we sometimes go
to the office on weekends and evenings to catch up on things. During our evening hours we sometimes have
zone events. We have also been inviting
some of the other senior missionaries over for dinner. We have enjoyed getting
to know them better and Eileen has started to adjust to using a smaller
kitchen. Most evenings after dinner
Russell cleans up, does the dishes and Eileen studies German (this doesn’t mean
she learns German, but she is trying hard to study).
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| Eileen stopping for a photo shoot |
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| Poppies and some kind of grain alongside the trail |
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| River Nidda |
Saturday it
was a beautiful day.
Russell jogged about 3 miles, and then we went on a 22 km
bike ride. Bike riding is a popular way of getting around in Germany. We bought some used bikes from some other senior
missionaries who wanted to get rid of them. Elder and Sister Stay have told us of
some nice bike paths. We rode down to the Nidda River and then followed a bike
path along the banks. It was quiet and peaceful and we enjoyed it very
much.
Later we
visited the Frankfurt flea market. Most of what we saw was not worth buying but
it was fun to get out and see a part of the city we haven’t seen yet. The flea
market is along the south bank of the Main River on Saturdays. It was interesting to see a variety of boats,
both sightseeing and personal boats cruising through the center of the
city. We crossed the river and walked
over to the city center. On our way driving home traffic ground almost to a
halt as we found ourselves caught in a Gay Pride parade, which stretched for
blocks.
We are both
grateful to be healing from some previous health issues. In addition to our bike ride, Eileen measured
that we walked over 10 miles by the end of the day on her Fitbit. We may not be
losing weight, but we are getting stronger physically!
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| Interesting home on the way to the flea market-there are no elevators in homes. Imagine walking to the top floor! |
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| Water safety boats on the Main |
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| Passenger sightseeing boat |
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| Restaraunt on the water |
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| This is "Love Lock Bridge" crossing the Main River. Individuals engrave their names on the locks and then keep the key symbolizing the union of two people and the strength of their relationship. |
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| Our first "selfie". Russell has not mastered clicking the button and smiling at the same time. |
WHEN THE RAINS COME DOWN
Having lived most of my life in a desert, I find rain
fascinating and usually pleasurable. For
almost forty years now my wife and children have heard stories of the rains I
experienced in Southeast Asia as a young missionary. Four years ago I returned to serve a second
time in Indonesia, this time with my wife as my companion.
Almost every year during the rainy season, along the north
coast of Java, the rains come down and the water comes up – just like it says
in the children’s primary song! Large
portions of Jakarta are actually beneath sea level. So when the torrential rains come down and
the rivers overflow, many neighborhoods are flooded. In one grade school Sister Healy and I
visited just days after one flood, the level of the filthy water had reached
well over two meters deep, leaving its mark on the walls above my head.
You would think that this calamity would only beset the poor
who could not afford to live on “high ground”.
Yet I clearly remember a picture on the front-page of a Jakarta
newspaper of some flooded-out rich people making their way on a jet ski.
During one of the floods, while delivering food and hygiene
supplies to make-shift refugee centers, we were asked by the stake president to
see if we could give some aid to a neighborhood where an older member of the
Church lived. This man was probably
about my age and lived at the other end of the economic scale from those who
had the jet skis. He and his wife lived
in a crowded neighborhood, under the train tracks, next to a river.
The rains had stopped the day before I got there. But you could still clearly see the water
level mark on the inside walls of his home about waist deep. Outside his door, down the alley maybe ten
meters was the river, perhaps ten centimeters below the level of the alleyway
floor. As I looked at the river it was clear
to me that when it rained again that it wouldn’t be long before this man’s home
was flooded again. Out in the river I
saw one of his neighbors standing with a bamboo pole trying to clear garbage
out of the way so the water could drain out of their homes and back into the
river.
During the worst of the flooding, the man’s bishop had
provided him with a tent and food supplies, and counsel to move from that
location. This was not the first time
that the same counsel had been given to him.
To move one’s residence, away from the known to the less
familiar is hard – change is hard. Not
just for this poor member and his wife but even for the rich with their jet
skis. No one seems to move even though
the floods come each rainy season. Yet
without change nothing improves.
Likewise, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the pathway to perfection, our one
and only way back home to our Father-in-Heaven requires us to change - and
change is hard.
At the end of the Sermon-on-the-Mount, our Lord tells us
that he who listens to His words and follows them is like a wise man who builds
his house upon a rock. And he who hears
but does not follow is like a foolish man who builds his house upon the sand
(Matt. 7:24-27). We have all been warned
and know that trials, the proverbial rains, will surely come into each of our
lives. In many cases we can predict,
because of prophetic counsel, the results of not building our spiritual houses
upon a firm foundation of obedience to God’s commandments. However, it is not enough just to know, we
must do also.
We might not be facing the economic trials of the man I
visited during the flood, or of the physical trials our pioneer ancestors had
to deal with, and given where we work and serve, I assume that most of us do
not suffer many of the spiritual trials rampant in the world today. Perhaps the
trial that besets most of us is one found among those living in relative peace
and prosperity – a trial of comfort! In
Mark 10:17-27, a rich young ruler asked the Lord what he must do to inherit
eternal life. After being told to sell
all that he had, give it to the poor, and follow Jesus, he turned away. He trusted too much in the things which had
made his life comfortable to give them up and follow Jesus – change is
hard.
I hope we can all avoid making the same mistake of the rich
young ruler, who, like the “foolish man who built his house upon the sand,”
heard but then did not follow the Lord.
May we always be willing to repent and change quickly when the need
arises. And may readily sacrifice all
that which we are asked, in keeping with our temple covenants, and follow our
Lord and Savior.
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| Prepared for the worst |
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| Street during flooding in Indonesia |
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| Homes underwater with flooding in Indonesia |
FINDING JOY THROUGH
SERVICE
Sister
Healy and I have six children and 13 grandchildren. As we watch them we see a range of challenges
they face – education, jobs, raising children, church callings and civic
duties. We watch as one child suffers
with a mother-in-law having a terminal illness, and as another child tries to
work through a challenging marriage. I’m
sure our experiences are not unique. There
seems to be an abundance of trials and uncertainty in everyone’s life. The
question is, how do we find peace and happiness in a challenging and ever
changing world?
Addressing
this question, Elder M. Russell Ballard in a 2011 conference talk noted the spiritual
truth that Alma taught his son Helaman: “By small and simple things are great
things brought to pass …” (Alma 37:6).
After which he continued saying, “Brothers and sisters, the gospel of
Jesus Christ is simple, no matter how much we try to make it complicated. We
should strive to keep our lives similarly simple, unencumbered by extraneous
influences, focused on those things that matter most.”
Elder
Ballard then posed a question asking, “What are the precious, simple things of
the gospel that bring clarity and purpose to our lives? I believe there is one
simple but profound—even sublime—principle that encompasses the entirety of the
gospel of Jesus Christ. The Savior spoke of this principle when He answered the
Pharisee (a lawyer) who asked, ‘Master, which is the great commandment in the
law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,
and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great
commandment.
And
the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’ (Matt.
22:36-40).
“It
is only when we love God and Christ with all of our hearts, souls, and minds
that we are able to share this love with our neighbors through acts of kindness
and service—the way that the Savior would love and serve all of us if He were
among us today.
“When
this pure love of Christ—or charity—envelops us, we think, feel, and act more
like Heavenly Father and Jesus would think, feel, and act. Our motivation and
heartfelt desire are like unto that of the Savior. He shared this desire with
His Apostles on the eve of His Crucifixion. He said: ‘A new commandment I give
unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you. … By this shall all
men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another’” (John 13:34-35).
Elder
Ballard then noted that the love the Savior described is most often manifested
through simple acts of kindness and service and suggested three circumstances
in which we can serve and love others. He said, charity begins at home,
followed by service in the Church and service in our communities (Finding Joy
through Loving Service, April Conf. 2011).
A
few years back, the gulf coast of the U.S. suffered the effects of a couple
severe hurricanes. The Church was quick
to organize relief supplies and work crews to help those in need. One of those work crews was from the area
north of Houston where several members of the Church live who work for my
former employer. A good friend and
coworker, named Jim, told me of the work they did cutting up fallen trees and
cleaning up homes hurt by the storm. He
spoke of how much he enjoyed serving as part of that organized effort. The interesting thing is that Jim is not a
member of our Church. Those who invited
Jim to participate in the service project were not only serving the people of
Louisiana hurt by the storm but they were also serving as a friend and example
for Jim.
The
joy and satisfaction that Jim experienced in rendering service is a natural
consequence of self-sacrifice. Service
allows us to look past our own problems.
Often the best therapy for self-pity is service on behalf of
others. It invites the Spirit of the
Lord to be with us and often we end up growing to love those we serve.
Elder
Ballard states, “Through our heartfelt kindness and service, we can make
friends with those whom we serve. From these friendships come better
understanding of our devotion to the gospel and a desire to learn more about
us.”
President
Gordon B. Hinckley took the concept of serving our communities even further
when he said, “We must reach out to all mankind, they are all sons and
daughters of God our Eternal Father, and He will hold us accountable for what
we do concerning them . . . May we bless humanity with an outreach to all,
lifting those who are downtrodden and oppressed, feeding and clothing the
hungry and the needy, extending love and neighborliness to those about us who
may not be part of this Church” (Ensign, Nov. 2001).
It is usually easy for most of us to love our family
members, and close friends and members of our ward. Many people also feel some kinship to those
of their community. However, our Savior
said it was not enough for us to love our friends but that we needed love
everyone, even our enemies (Matt. 5:43-44). This concept runs counter to that
expressed by many in the world today. We
hear prominent civic and business leaders telling us to withdraw from engaging
with those we do not know, to protect that which we have from those who have
less, and to look after “our own people.” Cain’s answer to God of “Am I my
brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9) seems an all too popular attitude today.
In reference to the second great commandment, to love
our neighbor as ourselves, the Savior explained who “our neighbor” was to the
inquiring lawyer. In this parable Jesus
told of a Jew who, on his way to Jericho, was robbed, beaten and left for dead
on the side of the road. A Samaritan
came upon him and had compassion on him.
He bound up the man’s wounds, he took him to an inn and paid for his
stay. Jesus then told the lawyer, that
to obey the second great commandment, that he should go and do likewise (Luke
10:25-37).
That example of service is almost two thousand years
old and while times have changed, the Lord’s instruction to the lawyer applies
to you and me today. He also told us
(Matt. 25:40), “inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my
brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
Love for our fellow men is perhaps best expressed
through service as the Apostle Paul noted (Gal. 5:13), “by love serve one
another.” Service helps rid our souls of
the selfishness which is so common in our society today. As we serve in our church callings, do our
home teaching or visiting teaching we not only help others but we help
ourselves. We should offer charity, hope
and service to each other in good times and bad, making certain that the most
vulnerable of our fellow men are given special care. In doing so we see others not as strangers
but as our brothers and sisters.
Seventeen years ago this month I was transferred to
Belgium. On our first Sunday there we
met two recently baptized young men who were blessing the sacrament. Through the missionaries we learned that
their father, Alia, had fled Serbia with his two sons during the past year,
coming to Belgium in hopes of gaining refugee status. Being Roma, Alia and his family had suffered
persecution at the hands of their fellow countrymen following the fall of
communism. Alia’s sons, Remzedin and
Alit aged 19 and 18, were being drafted into the Serbian army. With rumors of war crimes and ethnic
cleansing being attributed to the Serbian army, Alia was not about to let his
sons go fight for Milosevic in Kosovo.
So Alia left his extended family, home and business, and got out with
his sons while he could.
My son and I were assigned to the family as home
teachers. We had the boys over for
Sunday dinner several times but were unable to get Alia to come with them. They finally explained that their father was
having some stomach problems. A local
doctor had prescribed medicine, which helped with the symptoms but did not
resolve the problem. In November, Alia
went into a hospital for some tests. I
told my wife that I had a feeling that Alia had cancer. It was later in the month, on Thanksgiving
Day that we got a call from the missionaries telling us Alia was diagnosed as
having cancer.
Why I identified so closely with Alia I’m not
absolutely sure. I was an affluent
American; he was a refugee from Eastern Europe.
We didn’t even speak a common language very well. Perhaps it was because he was about my age,
at the time, and he was the same age as my mother was when she died of
cancer. Or, perhaps the reason I was in
Belgium had less to do with my work and more to do with Alia and his two sons.
Being raised in communist Yugoslavia, Alia had never
been taught to believe in God. But given
his circumstances he yielded to his sons’ promptings to take the missionary
discussions. Sister Healy and I were
privileged to participate in some of those discussions. Getting the concepts of the gospel through to
your investigators is not always easy.
Alia did not speak English as his sons sort of did. Most of the time his sons interpreted, and
occasionally French was used. There were
times when you knew that if the message really got through it must have been
because of the gift of tongues. In
January of 2000, Alia was baptized.
Belgian doctors don’t tell patients when they are
terminally ill. They think it
discourages the patient to know the truth about their prognosis. Alia was told that with surgery he could live
three to five years, maybe longer.
Through my employer, we were able to send a copy of his x-rays to the
doctors at the Huntsman Cancer Institute.
The good news we received back was that the medical treatment that Alia
was getting in Belgium was as good as he could get if he were in Utah. The bad news was that the surgery wouldn’t
really help much and that they felt he had only a few months to live. Alia wanted to know the truth so that if he
was going to die that he could go back home while he still had the strength to
do so. He wanted to be buried next to
his wife, who had died in an auto accident several years before. The problem was his sons. They would not leave their father, if he
returned home so would they. But the
boys would either be imprisoned or worse, if caught, for evading military
service during a time of war.
Alia had given up everything he owned to get his sons
out of Serbia. He was not going to take
them back in. Unbeknownst to his sons he
asked Sister Healy and I a difficult question – could we get his body back home
to Nis, in Serbia, so that he could be buried next to his wife? That was the hardest question I’ve ever been
asked as a home-teacher. I was unsure
how to best deal with the challenge. A
lawyer who was handling their refugee papers, also a member of the Church, told
me there was no possible way. So, I
prayed about whether to try a diplomatic route through NATO and the embassy, we
had a few ward members who might be able to help; or should I try a route
through my business connections? I did
have a good friend at work whose wife was Serbian and his in-laws still lived
in Belgrade.
Rarely in my life have I received a more clear answer
to prayer. The answer was dump all your
own ideas and go to this one specific mortuary that you pass on your way to
work each day. I told my wife and the
next Saturday we went mortician shopping.
She knew of one near our home which she thought we should go to. I knew it was not the one we would end up
with, but I thought it best to let her have her way to begin with, as she spoke
French a lot better than I did. At the
first location they would not even open the door for an American. I then drove to the mortuary where I felt we
should go. This time the mortician did
answer the door, but he only spoke Flemish.
He went and got his daughter, Dominique who spoke English. We posed our dilemma to her – how do we get a
body of a refugee from a country with which we are war back home? She told us she had no clue, she only worked
there part-time, and that we got her because she was the only one in the family
owned business who spoke English, but that she would try and help us. After several long phone calls in Flemish she
told us “Serbia no, but could Macedonia do?”
Skopje in Macedonia is only a few hours by car from Nis. Alia’s father and brother could drive down
and pick up the casket there when the time came. It was still very complicated for Dominique
dealing with all the details, but it could be and was done.
Alia died in July 2000. We had a memorial service at the church. By Belgian standards he had quite a showing
of people who he could call friends.
There were people from five continents at his funeral. Almost all were people he had not known a
year before. But Alia had become, as
Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians, “no more [a] stranger and foreigner,
but [a] fellow citizen with the saints, and of the household of God” (Eph.
2:19).
In addition to the fortunate result for Alia of
finding his way back home, both his body back to Serbia and his spirit to God,
the experience has had a lasting impact for good on me, my family, on the
missionaries and the ward members who grew to love him. We were all richer for the experience.
In the years since Alia left us, I have enjoyed the
blessing of seeing his sons serve full-time missions, obtain Belgian passports,
go to BYU Idaho and graduate, get jobs and marry. However, the most rewarding part of being
involved with Alia and his familfy occurred about 10 years ago when we attended
the temple in Idaho Falls. There Sister Healy and I knelt across the alter as
proxies for Alia and his wife, who were sealed to each other for all eternity
and then sealed to their two sons. That
day, with all of us dressed in white, the differences in our past seemed very
insignificant. Paul tells us in Gal. 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek,
there is neither bond nor free, . . .
for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
My Brothers and Sister, may we overlook the
differences between us and our neighbors – regardless of where they might be
from - and serve one another. Let’s do
as Elder Ballard suggests and find joy in our lives through rendering service
in our homes, in our church callings and in our communities. Remember what King
Benjamin told us, that “when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are
only in the service of your God” (Mosiah 2:17).
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