What's inside

If there are things out of the ordinary, I try to share those rather than our daily routine of being blessed to serve in Poland. I could tell you the schedule of our days and how we fill them, but I know I don't find that amusing or even interesting, so you wouldn't either. I'll remark (again, probably) with happiness that we don't follow the white handbook like we did (should have) 37 years ago. Our church leaders must've figured out that there wouldn't be a senior couple serving their second mission if that were required. They must also realize that if we ain't got the wake-up-stay-busy-go-to-bed figured out by our age, we won't.

All that to justify the pictures I've chosen to share this week.

While driving between cities we had noticed, more than once, a picturesque city on a hill next to a bend in the river and so decided on p-day to find it. It turned out to be much prettier from a distance. The city itself was run down when we got to see it up-close on the inside. 

I guess that's often how some things and people make an impression on us.

This view made me think of Symbiotes (like Venom) taking over this very old, very beautifully restored, very brick castle. It turns out you can rent rooms here which might make you feel regal, if you could sleep knowing how many people have lived and died there.

I hope this picture serves for your weekly bridge. Again, no shortage of bricks here. The arches make nice picture-frame setups. This is a church, which I think is remarkable.

Jean went in to check out the inside and walked in on a funeral. No pics.

The places and structures are indeed interesting, but really it's the people that have the most lasting impact. 

This is what our Sunday evenings look like, usually with a couple more from the branch, but we love being with all the exceptional young missionaries (Elders Stewart, Long, Sisters Memmott, Emett). Sister Memmott kept her birthday secret until after meetings on Sunday, but she got found out. In this picture Jean is saying "Hurry and take the picture Elder, the wax is melting on the cake!"

I adjusted the camera for several more seconds to heighten that emotion.

We traveled to another city, Szczecin (the missionaries call it "Sketch-in"), a 5-hour drive to the west of us, right on the German border. Elder and Sister Williams (Bountiful) serve there with one pair of Elders. Elder and Sister Womack joined us also. The six of us took time to visit a Slavic and Viking village that has been recreated on an original site dating from circa 1000. 

Elder Williams serves as the branch president in Szczecin but his main assignment is as an area auditor. We traveled so I could audit his branch, which was interesting to audit the auditor. Sorry they got cut out of this selfie a bit. In appropriate auditor fashion, he acted as if he didn't hear any of my sharp witticisms about financial processes. 

One of the devices they used in medieval audits was this chair. At that time it wasn't so much about identifying financial malfeasance as it was about identifying witches. 

Sister Williams, a nurse, reminded me about my tetanus booster status as I was sitting down to try the comfort of the thing, so I chose not to. At the village they also had a guillotine and an iron maiden (Excellent!)  

Winding up, I'm sorry I don't have any profundity to finish with. Please be assured that we did feel the Spirit many times in our service and study this week.

I just have one missed opportunity to share. About halfway home from our drive to Szczecin we stopped for dinner in a pretty city, surprisingly large for being out in that part of the country. We found a great restaurant and checked the trusty Google maps also for points of interest. As luck would have it, this attraction had a stellar 4.5 star rating.

Regrettably, it was already closed so we didn't get to see what kind of crap they have in there, which they must value from the tightness of their security. But, you can see the grass around it was exceptionally lush.

The sign is an abbreviation, but it says "Museum of Municipal Water Supply and Sewage" 

By the numbers

Not that you could guess our PIN or screen unlock codes or anything, but 8-8-60 is nonetheless important in our family. It's so easy it leaves me no excuse to remember to celebrate Eva Jean's arrival on this planet. If you didn't notice, it happened this week.

A strong young couple in our branch, Czarek & Lizzie, and our Gdańsk Sisters surprised her as we arrived at the chapel before English class with a beautiful cake and decorated cookies and singing. The birthday song says something like 

"100 years, 100 years, may she live for us 100 years"

For our zone conference this week we drove to the city of Poznań which has one of the most picturesque market squares. We got to spend the evening prior with the Womacks (Vancouver, WA) who serve there and also have the assignment, like us, to help with YSA in Poland. They're a lot of fun and it's always cheering to commiserate share uplifting stories together.
Painfully, Elder W had to get his knee fixed recently. Thus he can't wear a tie. 

I think we did a 1000 piece puzzle of this once.
It's so pleasant to eat outside in a place like this.

(I have to add that our steaks and ribs and desserts and tip came to $48! For two!!

[Did I say before I LOVE Poland?]) 

Because we took our car to Poznań we drove our 3 Gdańsk Elders home instead of their riding the train. Though the company during the ride was superb, those three were pretty miserable for 3.5 of the 4 hours. I pushed our little car as much as I could to spare them unnecessary misery. After eyeballing the "kilometers to empty" for the final hour and dropping them off at their apartment, we coasted into the gas station Saturday night, feeling relieved and blessed that I didn't have to make Jean push.

Note the number at top center. 1 km to spare.

A kind man attends almost every sacrament service on Sundays. He's always pleasant and has been coming for years. His WofW challenges make him very frail, but he says it's too late for him to quit. He struggles to get by but every week he brings us a little bag of Polish apples. Yesterday before the meeting he pulled out a 20 (equal to $5). He said "I want this to give for poor." I said, "I know what to do with that." He said again, "For the poor." I told him I understood and put it in my pocket.

As mentioned before, on Sundays we help serve soup to the homeless with a lady (Ola) and her friend (Jurek) who have organized and done this beautiful service for over three years. They also have medical volunteers there to help with the folks' ailments. After things got going yesterday, I felt the 20 in my pocket and had a feeling to give it to Jurek, telling him how I had obtained it from an unexpected donor. 

He said, "The medical staff just now asked me to buy some supplies. It cost exactly 20." 

Quotidian

Made it to August, spending much of our time preparing for September. There's lot's coming up next month and it turns out we won't be at home in Gdańsk for almost 4 weeks in a row.

We're planning a Poland Young Single Adult conference for the end of September, which takes a lot of coordinating with our two countywide young adult leaders in far-flung cities and the other senior couple in the city of Poznań. It's challenging to pull it all together when we are so separate, but amazingly, it always seems to work out at the end. We also have a conference for the senior couples early in September, which will be in the far south. In between those two conferences we have the wedding of Alexander and Katelyn. It's tough for us to help from so far away, but Jean is working on the flower concepts already so she can put them together quickly when the time comes.

So that's boring, I know. Let's see what we have in pictures from this week to add some interest...

Here's a bridge picture for the week. Sister Bridge and Elder & Sister Williams (Bountiful) apparently deeply concerned that I've gone over the side into the castle moat.

Elder Williams performs local unit audits, so they came into town to straighten out our branch's procedures. Fortunately the branch president and I retained our membership, for now.

Here's a fairer picture of this delightful couple we got to spend time with after slogging through financial records.

The castle Malbork in its picturesque setting along the river.

One of the churches that spring up in small towns to surprise you.

One evening we drove to the countryside-seaside and visited this charming lighthouse. As luck would have it, we arrived not long before closing for the day, being the last visitors that day. As we ascended the final flight of stairs to the top a lady was scrubbing the floors. Thus we actually got to witness, firsthand, lighthousekeeping.

(lighthouse keeping; lighthouse housekeeping; lighthouse light housekeeping)

Reflections

We sometimes forget how cool it is that Gdańsk is a port city on the Baltic and that many people make it their vacation destination. Some evenings after our classes or assignments we find a new place to see the sea and it never disappoints.

Elder & Sister Schroeder (West Valley, UT) will complete their two years next month and we spent part of a day showing them around the city. It made us re-appreciate where we live, realizing weeks would be needed to see all there is to see. We're blessed to be here.

In this part of the city center you can see the tallest, brownish building which Sister Bridge affectionately directs people to as "the ugliest building in Gdańsk" where we have our chapel on the 8th floor. Makes it easy to find. Beyond that and to the left you can see a cool bridge (another one, not the one behind the camera) out by the port area toward the sea.

You can see the derelict derricks from this bridge in the middle of the old shipyard. Here Lech Wałęsa and many of his 25,000 friends refused to work until they could have a conversation with their bosses (the government) about improving conditions at work, which led to a movement, which led to Solidarity, which led to martial law, which led to resistance, which led to the end of communist government in Poland, which led to the end of the Soviet Union.

I wish I had a segue to these pictures, but you'll just have to switch gears with me.

Saturday was one of those missionary paydays. Natalie, wife of Mateusz, had her baptism day. Our crew of missionaries, our mission president and his family, and Natalie and Mateusz and baby girls hiked along the blustery Baltic beach to find a potentially private spot for the ordinance.

This view of their cutie-pie, Bohdanka, I think is metaphorical.

My hair is fine, I don't know what the sisters (Bridge, Gornichec, Memmott) are complaining about.

Of the elements in this photo, the churned up water, the blackness of it, the elders needing to get close enough to hear and witness the ordinance, the legs whiter than the wet shirts, the joyful embrace of a husband who just used his new priesthood to perform a saving ordinance for his wife; of all these, my favorite is the reflection.

Part of the plan

Hello and thanks for looking at this representation of our experience as old missionaries in Poland. 

As our life becomes more familiar, it's harder to notice what might be interesting about it. Our missionary nephew, who disappoints his mom by not writing, replied when she asked him what he did this week: "We talked to people and did missionary stuff."

Succinct.

Our mission president and his family have been touring the several branches around Poland, familiarizing themselves with the people and the work. They visited Gdańsk this Sunday and they invited the two of us to join their family on Saturday for a p-day. President Chandler served in the Gdańsk area as a young missionary, so he wanted to recreate some of his mission experiences and pictures. One picture was of him at the train station in Hel. We spent the day there with their awesome children and are happy to report we made it there and back. We did have to pay the boatman, though.

For our excursion on Saturday, in her usual way of thinking of the kids, Sister Bridge had brought along some treats and a couple of card games to keep them busy on the boat ride home after a long, hotter than Hel expected day.

Somebody found a book at our church building with names of former missionaries back to when the work started in Poland in 1990. President Chandler's was the first companionship listed in the book. Sister Chandler started her mission about a year later, also in Poland. At the time they were not allowed to proselyte, but they could talk to people who talked to them. If a person showed curiosity about their name badge, that was a way to get into a conversation. We've found that's still true. Our Sister Halina (92) joined the Church before 1990 and thus we had three real pioneers together this Sunday.

Our friends, Mateusz and Natalie, the young couple who are half baptized (Natalie will be baptized this week now that she has delivered their second baby girl), happened to be reading in the Doctrine and Covenants 20 and saw "Every member of the church of Christ having children is to bring them unto the elders before the church, who are to lay their hands upon them in the name of Jesus Christ, and bless them in his name."

They told the missionaries they wanted to be obedient to everything, so asked what do they need to do for this to happen. I told Mateusz that, like going to the temple to be sealed, he would have to wait a year to become an Elder which is required to bless children. Anxious to keep this commandment, they asked me to bless their babies this week. I asked Mateusz to think about what he would say if he were to bless his daughters and he shared those thoughts with me. I mentioned this as part of our plan for sacrament meeting Sunday while with President Chandler on Saturday and he enlightened me that I was wrong on that point; receiving the Melchizedek priesthood does not have a time requirement after baptism. With this new information, I immediately encouraged Mateusz to change our plan, that in the long view and from my own experience, his blessing of his children would be significant in his life and theirs.

Incidentally, Mateusz's mother had planned to attend that sacrament meeting for the baby blessings, and the bonus is that she did come and was able to see what our meetings are like, She also was able to hear Mateusz talk about the importance of family in God's eternal plan for His children.

Because we had the new mission president and family in our meetings, our attendance was off the charts. I had prepared more than double the water cups for the sacrament, 30 this week. As the passing of the water got to the end, I could see there were only two cups left and Sister Bridge and the two priesthood holders were left. I realized I would have to walk from the front of the room out the back, go to the kitchen area and prepare just one cup of water to bless while everybody waited. As the tray came to Sister Bridge she reached into the bottom of the tray, pulled out a used cup, poured half the water from one of the remaining cups into it and drank it, leaving half of that unused cup and a full one for the men.

Solved.

New leadership. Czech.

I know it's been a fortnight since last I wrote. I'm happy to report that we have just been too busy to write anything down. Because of that, this will be just a newsletter this time and I hope you find something interesting from it.

Let's go back to the previous week and our most recent zone conference. We were happy to welcome our new Mission President, David Chandler, Sister Stacy Chandler, and their family. They shared their vision for the Church in Poland during their time of service and talked a lot about building on the work of leaders who have gone before. President and Sister Chandler both served as missionaries in Poland when the mission was brand new, 1990-92, that time-frame. They confirmed to us that they will do great things and have been prepared "for a time such as this."

Note the size of our zone. This is pretty typical for the zones in Poland, meaning very small. We had a large group return home last month and just one new elder to replace them. I think that in addition to the 5 senior couples, there are 36 young missionaries currently. It's nice that every missionary knows all the others and the small size makes for a very close-knit group.

After returning home from the zone conference (a 3 hour train ride, as everything seems to be) and getting through another Sunday of uncertainty relating to what church will be combined with certainty of what the church is, we left for Warsaw to meet up with the young adults traveling to Czech for a multi-country YSA conference there.

We chartered a small bus to take the two of us with 10 young adults to the conference hotel in the middle of Czech. Of course we would've loved to have double that number go, but lives are busy in the summer, well, and all other seasons too. The ride lasted about 11 hours with a stop in the city of Wrocław to pick up another contingent.

It was a superbly awesome conference. The countries represented, as far as I can recall in order of most attendees were: Hungary (by far the biggest group), Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia.

It's hard to describe the activities because they were so numerous and all of them good, so I'll just throw them in here. We enjoyed: scripture study every morning at 7:30, (on the last morning I counted 23 senior missionaries there and 10 young adults, which, after listing the other events will make sense), morning devotional, Institute (choice of several teachers from across Europe), workshops, futball, volleyball, zorb futball, tennis, disc golf, canoeing, ax throwing, swimming, ping pong, choir, firesides each night, geocaching, we saved a hostage by solving an escape room, lip-sync battle, talent show, dance instruction, fire pit, dances every night past midnight, we made blankets, wrote testimonies for copies of the Book of Mormon in several languages, and ate a lot of good Czech food.

We got back to Warsaw on the bus Saturday evening, too late to catch a 3-hour fast train home, so instead took a slow overnighter getting us back to our home in Gdańsk at 4:30 this morning (Sunday). Whew! What an awesome week.

Can't see much of the bridge we're on, but you see what pretty surroundings this hotel is in. 

We had several profound and spiritual experiences. I want to share just a couple, but I fear I won't relate them well enough. Both that I'm thinking of relate to the Church in Czechoslovakia during the communist era, but we had many other impressive lessons about the role of these young people in gathering Israel.

The socialist government in Czechoslovakia did a good job of eradicating religion during what we hear a lot about, "the communist era," or "during communism." Poland is unique in that the Catholic church was allowed to continue because the government knew it would have caused great unrest, being so entrenched in the culture of the people. Czechoslovakia did not have that advantage. We got to hear from two of the original members from Czech during that era, Olga Kovárová and her friend, the current Prague stake president joined the Church in 1982. She wrote a book Saint Behind Enemy Lines, detailing how she was able to share the gospel very carefully. What she longed for as a student at university was a message of hope. That message was purposefully omitted from any of the "doctrine" in communist Czechoslovakia. When she found it, interestingly through a friend's yoga instructor, she also decided to learn to teach yoga. Her teacher, who she later learned was a member of the Church, encouraged her to share a brief, 5-minute message of hope after her yoga classes, using quotes from communist officials. She was able to find quotes to do this, and if anyone questioned what she taught, they assumed she was a good communist because of who she was quoting.

A side note, our friend Natalie, the wife in the young couple we have talked about getting baptized here in Gdańsk, is from Czech. She said "This probably sounds strange to you but my grandma always tells us 'You should get out and do something useful. When I was your age I was building socialism!'"

Several years ago I came across and snatched up a copy of the Czech Book of Mormon from that era because it is unique. It is printed smaller than other copies, is red, and has the initials of the book "KM" Kniha Mormonova embossed on the cover. There is another book that looks like this which has the writings of Karl Marx (KM) . If anyone noticed you carrying the book, they assumed you were just being a good, studious communist.

This leads to the other experience I want to share. A young man from Czech described the method Church members used to worship during that time. Remember that this was between 1982 and 1990. I know we're old, but this was not that long ago. At the conference we divided into groups of about 15 and re-enacted what these people did. A few things to note. During that time, children were taken to socialist school by age 5. Among other doctrines drilled into them, they were taught to spy on their parents and report anything they did. Religion was strictly forbidden. No meetings of more than 5 people were allowed. Talking about anything related to a religion or ideology other than that of the government would lead to arrest, interrogation, intimidation, threats, and up to 11 years in prison. As a result, Czech is now one of the top three atheistic countries in the world.

We sat silently in a room representing our apartment with the shades closed and the lights out. Two home teachers arrived unscheduled. Children were not allowed to be in the room, parents could not let their children know what they were doing, effectively stopping any family involvement and breaking any trust between parents and children. Apartment buildings were built purposely in such a way that you could hear what your neighbors were doing. People were given special concessions if they reported on their neighbors, or they and their families were threatened if they did not report on their neighbors. In this circumstance the two home teachers arrived. Everything was a hushed whisper. They had us whisper together the song "I am a Child of God." One of the young men who was our home teacher whispered a thought centered on the story from the Book of Mormon about the people of Alma who had heavy burdens placed on them by the government. They were even forbidden to pray. These people prayed only in their hearts and increased their humility and faith and the Lord made their burdens bearable to them. He eventually miraculously freed them. Our home teacher encouraged us to continue in faith and to not lose hope. The other home teacher then whispered a prayer and they left us praising God in the silent dark.

It's all good?

I realized it might appear from what I write that our mission life is always super awesome, which a lot of the time it is. Truly. But, it's important that you know that there are times that fill the role of opposition.

We don't discover delights without frequent fails.

In the summer of life, you sometimes get a thunderstorm; sometimes lightning strikes too close to home.

Not all bridge selfies captivate the way you envisioned them.

Sometimes you cut things a little too close and barriers are unyielding.

Sometimes you cancel a baptism and four of your most interested people ghost you in one week.

I love this saying, probably not by Winston Churchill, but profound nonetheless:
"If you find yourself going through Hell...keep going."