Week of 30 August 2009

Eye-catching vegetation at the Ferney-Voltaire “round point”

An unusual temple experience: We took the Doyles with us to sacrament services in Lausanne, after which we met with Eric, our Young Single Adult President, in preparation for an upcoming training meeting he will conduct. We also enjoyed meeting a YSA who had served a mission in Germany-Frankfurt, and who had served 4 months or so in Worms (where I had served in the fall of 1964). We munched our sandwiches and apple slices on the way back to Geneva, dropped off the Doyles, and went to the Geneva meetings. The topic for the day was temples, and Sister Moira Johnson shared and experience she had had one morning in the Salt Lake temple. The First Presidency (President Kimball) and the Quorum of the Twelve came into the endowment room. Because there were not enough women to participate in the prayer, she was invited to do so, and stood next to President Ezra Taft Benson, who afterwards thanked her for being worthy to come to the House of the Lord. Her heart was so touched that she resolved always to remain worthy to attend the temple.

Dede teaches home evening in Spanish, then a wee miracle: Monday’s French class featured learning and telling each other the story of “Goldilocks and the 3 Bears” in French, with “Barry the baby bear” and other embellishments devised by Elder Doyle. Dede taught the Spanish FHE group that evening and did wonderfully well – she spoke for an hour in Spanish, very fluently, and she engaged the whole group – of about 25 people: she brought up the 7 children

Dede and her unpaid volunteers teach a Family Home Evening lesson in Spanish

to sit on the front row, and she had them participate in five different ways – holding up pictures, reading excerpts, answering questions, and finally in playing “ring-around-the-rosy” with her (in Spanish) to illustrate the family circle. A particularly touching interaction was her having Diego and Johanny come up to stand with
the two of us, who represented their heavenly parents. She sent one after the other to join their earthly families who were sitting in the group. We nearly had tears, seeing the affection they showed when they hugged and kissed their moms and dads after Dede and “sent them down from heaven.”

A rather large Spanish “family” at FHE

A “minor miracle” occurred after Sonia had told Dede about her likely losing her housecleaning job. (She had been a nurse in Bolivia, but had come here and taken any job she could in order to send money back to her family; the owner had threatened to fire her because she had not cleaned the inside of the building’s two-story chimney). When Dede announced the need for anyone knowing of a job opportunity, a YSA from Rive Gauche (Margaret, who speaks Spanish and French, and who just “happened” to stay for our Spanish FHE, since she normally would have only come Tuesday for their French FHE) let Dede know that she had her laptop computer with her and she could help Sonia that very evening to enter her request and her qualifications in a job-web site she used.

Married 33 years, and happier than ever: Tuesday was our 33rd wedding anniversary. From now on, I can say that I’ve been married more than half my life (since we were married in the Los Angeles Temple on 1 Sept 1976, just 2 days before my 33rd birthday). Interestingly, our marriage was performed by Temple President Richard Stratford, who had been the bishop in Portland, Oregon when my father was baptized in 1941. It was indeed a very special day. It took a while to do the calculations in my head, but for Dede, being married more than half her life occurred on 27 Dec of last year. An email came from a couple serving in Cameroon and described the experience of a lady recently baptized: —when the missionaries started teaching her, she told them about a dream she had had about a tree with delicious fruit on it and a path leading to it with an iron bar alongside the path and she saw her family there by the tree, etc. They told her they thought she might recognize something like that in the scriptures they were going to teach her about!

Shideh and Dr Raj: no coincidence In a planning session earlier in the week, Dede had suggested that if our Iranian friend Shideh (who cannot be baptized because she is Muslim and her relatives might kill her if they learn she has become a Christian) is not able to get her visa renewed and has to return home at the end of the month, it would be appropriate to take her to the Bern temple so she could get a feeling for the spirit that is there. Dede called the temple and arranged for a member of the temple presidency to come and speak with us in the waiting room after we arrive. So we needed to drive out to Shideh’s apartment and invite her to go with us Friday. She “happened” to be home, and she was delighted at the invitation. In fact, she told us that just a day or so earlier, she had felt a desire to go see the temple, and so she had asked her landlord how she might get to Bern. It seemed considerably more than a mere coincidence that she would try to find a way to go to the temple at the same time Dede was being impressed with the need to take her there. Then as we stopped by the hotel where Ruvimbo works, to invite her to the Stake Gold & Green “International” Ball, a couple from India overheard us talking in English. During our conversation, we learned that the fellow (GF Xavier Raj) is an emeritus professor of French who taught at the university at Madras. Noticing our name tags, he wondered if it might be possible for us to help him obtain copies of the New Testament in French and German to take back to his students in India. We agreed to help and also promised to bring him a copy of the Book of Mormon. He and we agreed that again it was no mere coincidence that we would both “happen” to be in the same lobby at the same time. On the way home, Dede wondered if the Lord is blessing us with missionary opportunities by bringing people into our path, since we don’t go out contacting strangers as the young missionaries do.

Another special temple experience, with Shideh: Friday, we took Shideh to Bern to the temple, where we purchased 3 German copies of the Bible for Dr Raj at the Distribution center. President Armin Koch, a member of the Temple Presidency from northern Switzerland, came to the waiting room and visited with us for about half an hour. We told him Shideh’s situation, and he told that his daughter had married an Iranian from Tehran (Shideh’s home). When we encouraged him to share his story with us, he told us how after his education, he had gone to Lynchburg, Virginia to work for General Electric. During his 3 years there, he met a young lady from his home town, and they fell in love. Before returning to Switzerland to get married, they decided to see some of the sights in the US. Upon asking his landlord what to see, Temple Square in Salt Lake City was highly recommended. In fact, the landlord, who was a Southern Baptist, pulled a copy of the Doctrine and Covenants from his shelf and said that the Mormons are particularly interesting since they accept books other than the Bible as scripture (we were amazed that a Southern Baptist would have kept such a book). The pair went to Salt Lake City. Pres Koch said that when they saw a diorama of Joseph in the grove, he thought to himself that if God were to come to speak to a person, that is how it likely would have happened. They even filled out a referral card with his parents’ address, since they didn’t know where they would live once married. “Unfortunately,” when missionaries visited his parents (perhaps before his return to Switzerland), the parents had no interest and the missionaries apparently were not astute enough to ask for the son’s current address or phone Nr. The referral card was thrown away, and the couple married and started their family, unaware that anyone had tried to contact them.

Dede and Shideh, between raindrops at the Swiss Temple

About 3 years later, one Saturday while they were strolling in the park with their 1-yr old daughter, two clean-cut young men in suits passed them (that caught their attention, since most young people were wearing blue jeans or other casual attire). Within a minute or so, one of the elders returned,introduced himself, and asked if they might come and teach the family. The wife was quite surprised when Br Koch said OK, since he habitually refused any “sales approaches.” Some months later, they were baptized (1974). Their daughter and her Muslim husband now live not far from the temple. Considering Shideh’s situation, we agreed that the Lord guides our lives: there are really no coincidences.

Shideh and President Koch at the temple entry

Missionaries go boating? Saturday, after writing our testimony in a French copy of the Book of Mormon for Dr Raj, we spent probably an hour driving around the area where the sisters had said we might find French bibles, but with no luck. Even though we feared having to pay higher prices near the lake (the 3 German bibles had cost us $48), we drove over there, where I let Dede off to track down the store while I drove thru the narrow twisting streets of the outskirts of the “Vieille Ville” (“Old Town”). She succeeded and bought 6 copies of the New Testament for a mere 4 Euros each. We then met the Doyles at the Institute and celebrated our anniversary and my birthday with a boat ride on Lake Geneva, after which we went back to Ferney-Voltaire,where we and the Doyles met the Jones at the restaurant “Beaucaire” for a celebratory dinner. It had been quite a week.

Geneva’s landmark “Jet d’eau”

The pot of gold at the end of this rainbow is likely in a Swiss bank