11-18 December 2010

This was all of our district on a P-day to Brugge. Our new senior couple, the Beckstrands, opted to come with us even though they had just flown in a few hours before. We all rode in the big mission van with Loel driving. We got an amazing parking place, which is very rare, and wandered around the city together.

As we were leaving Brugge, the Christmas lights started coming on and the city centrums were becoming pretty magical.

This is a manger scene built in the Grand Place. We took the Beckstrands there as well as two elders who hadn't seen it yet. It was all decorated for Christmas.

We had two beautiful baptisms last Sunday - the sisters taught Charles and the elders taught Richard. As each of them came out of the water, they both raised their hands in joy and shouted something like, "Yes!" or "I did it!" It was so inspiring to witness.

These are the two elders from Gent that we took to the Grand Place with us. They liked this chocolate shop.

The Beckstrands and us at the Grand Place in front of a huge Christmas tree they've got there now. Sister Beckstrand loves to travel and has been so excited about everything she's seen.

This was our last district with all of us together - Sis Fritz and Elder Conder are leaving so we needed to take a picture after our district meeting in Antwerpen. I made a pot of soup for our lunch as I wanted something a little more special than sandwiches again.

This is the view from our office balcony after a snow fall. I thought it was a cool picture. Yet the snow kind of messed up travel these next couples days - that combined with many delays in airports from the States.

Here are most of our departing missionaries who left this week minus about 3 of them. Loel and I have had horrible colds and worse and there couldn't have been a more difficult time to be sick with all that had to be done these past two days. And there could hardly have been more things to go wrong, either!
We had 9 new missionaries coming in at 8:00 am - turns out they were delayed until 1:30. Only problem is, we had 12 departing missionaries arriving that afternoon - both sets had to be interviewed and processed and preferably not together. Loel was driving the van all over with luggage, taking them here and there. The trains were having problems and so all 9 new missionaries ended up having to stay overnight at the mission home with all 12 of the departing missionaries! The Brubakers got them upstairs to bed before we brought over all the departing missionaries. We were cooking fajitas for dinner at 7:30 pm and the testimony meeting lasted until midnight. We left around 9:30 pm, too sick to listen to the testimonies.
We were up bright and early the next morning to take the new missionaries to the train station to get to their areas, and to take the departing missionaries to the airport - their flights were delayed. One sister's shoulder bag with passport, wallet, all her mission journals, camera, etc, was stolen in the train station the night before - so she can't go home for 3 more days. Four elders found out when we got them to the airport, that their flights were canceled and couldn't get flights out for 3 days!
Danielle was flying in this morning, also, and her flight was delayed, which was actually a blessing. She's here now and we're all relaxing at our little apartment. It's really fun to have her with us for Christmas!