30 October-5 November 2010

Our last P-day was spent with our district in Brussels at this beautiful Chinese Pavilion and Japanese Tower, built by King Leopold around the early 1900's to encourage Asian trade with Belgium. The fall colors were absolutely gorgeous!! This is the Chinese Pavilion.

And this is the Japanese Tower.

Our assistants, enjoying one of their last P-days together on the grounds on these beautiful sites on a gorgeous fall day.

This was my favorite garden at the Japanese Tower. The colors were superb.

More of the gardens.

This gives a more close-up of the elaborate architecture on the Chinese Pavilion.

Inside the Chinese Pavilion - very elaborate, beautiful mirrors - here we are taking pictures of ourselves in the mirrors. This particular building was built with large, open rooms hoping that someone would open a restaurant here. It would have to be a huge restaurant.

Again, the Chinese Pavilion inside. I'm listening to my little audio guide as I wander around.

This is the park by our house that we sometimes walk through in the mornings. I wanted to catch some of the fall colors.

Me jogging in our beautiful park.

This is actually one of the roads in our park, covered completely with leaves.

And more . . .

A pretty view from our apartment balcony.

A very foggy day in Brussels - the view from our office window! We haven't had much fog, but on this day we could barely see the buildings across the street - probably less than 50 yards.

These are all 14 of the sisters in our mission, together in the mission office for a sisters' training. i helped with the lunch and the dinner. They spent the night in the mission home and had a great time together. They are incredibly talented, cute, and amazing missionaries.

I loved this pretty fall garden we happened to walk by one day. It was the back of a restaurant in a town called Diest about 45 mins from Brussels.

We got a new car this week! It's a an Opal Meriva and it's brand new and pretty cool! We drove to Rotterdam to pick it up, trading in an older one. The Andersons, another senior couple, also got a new car the same day. This is one of the benefits of being in charge of the cars in the mission. Actually the car we've been driving is the second oldest car in the mission. We will have this car for about two weeks, until we take delivery of another new one. Then we'll have another new car to drive - until January when we get two more new ones.

We were supposed to have a baptism last Sunday that didn't happen, which was sad, but we still have hopes for this individual. We also spent one day driving furniture around to two missionary apartments in Belgium, delivering things and visiting with the elders. One set of elders was in Gent and we delivered two lamps, which improved the lighting in their apartment dramatically! We then went to lunch with them and had a delightful visit as they told us about their mission so far, different areas they've been in, etc. They had both served in both the Netherlands and in Belgium and loved them both for different reasons. The countries are very different, but both very cool places to serve.

We also got invited to a very nice dinner at a member's home in Antwerpen who are stalwarts in the ward. He's a sealer in the Den Haag temple here. It was fascinating to listen to their conversion stories, 35 years ago. Almost all the conversion stories I've heard from their time were about missionaries tracting and finding them. Something rings true and they listen and receive a witness. This man's wife wasn't interested and wasn't baptized until ten years after he was. He actually stopped attending church for a couple years at the request of his wife, and then received a letter from the church, asking if he wanted his name removed. He said he couldn't stand the thought of that happening because he still knew it was true, so he started coming back, with his wife gradually coming with him. It was a delightful evening of making new friends, wonderful conversion stories, and outstanding Belgium cooking.

I received an exuberant phone call from one of the sister missionaries yesterday in Amsterdam. They had checked out a referral I had sent them and this lady was golden. She listened, wanted to learn more, and committed to a baptismal date in December - said that would be her Christmas gift to herself. It was so wonderful to share in the sisters' excitement and enthusiasm and to feel a part of this work.

We are often asked if we like working in the office. I think many feel that our work must be boring or mundane, because it's in an office. We have felt especially blessed as we've found so much variety in what we do from working closely with President and Sister Brubaker, to visiting the missionaries in their apartments, to teaching a family as we did today, to driving to the Netherlands to pick up some new cars. We are challenged and we love what we do.