Hallo!
Oh man, I love serving here so
much. The ward here is like no other ward I have ever been in, nor will ever be
in again. I can't believe how lucky I am that I got to serve here. Transfer
calls are this Friday and who knows where they could send me next. I do know
that wherever they send me will be exactly where I am supposed to go, but I
will miss Vienna a lot.
This week we did an exchange! I
got to go work in Graz for a day with Sister Holmstead. That was lots of fun :)
Graz is a cool city, definitely smaller than Vienna or Munich, so it was a nice
change of pace to be doing missionary work there. Sister Holmstead is one of
the funniest people I have ever met. She is also an amazing missionary to teach
with, because she really thinks and considers her words before she says them,
which makes the people respect what she says a lot more. That is something I
want to get better at. Sometimes I just start talking without really knowing
where the sentence is going and it gets all twisted around itself. The train
ride from Graz was also gorgeous. One of my favorite parts of this mission is
the train rides we get to take :)
On Thursday we taught our
favorite little family from Vietnam again. We had left them the Restoration DVD
and we asked them if they had gotten a chance to watch it. The mom said "I
think I watched it 10 times. Maybe more. It's now one of my daughter’s
favorites" :)
On Saturday we did a
"Finding Day" with our District, which we are now doing every week.
Basically we spend one afternoon a week out on the streets talking to people.
Sister Reid and I were in Baden, a smaller town about 20 minutes outside of
Vienna. We walked around the pedestrian zone for a couple hours. The town was
setting up their Christmas lights :) I am so glad that Christmas is coming soon
and that there will be lights on at night, because it gets so dark so early
here. Seeing all the preparations for the holiday is making me excited!
On Sunday we went to church
twice: once in German, and once in English. We had an investigator that we
brought to the German speaking ward. So fun, but also very exhausting!
One of my favorite parts of this
week was the Relief Society lesson in our ward. This week we were talking about
temporal salvation, so one of the topics we were discussing was food
storage and being prepared with enough so that your family could get along if
something were to happen. Well, as the discussion is going on, the story of the
ant and the grasshopper came up. It's a children’s story that has a
good moral about being prepared. Sister Picard, who is French, told it. It goes
something like this: There once was a grasshopper and an ant. The
whole summer long all the grasshopper did was lie out in the sun and sing,
while the ant worked busily storing up food for the winter. The grasshopper
made fun of the ant and told him that he should just enjoy life, it was summer
after all! Then winter came and the ant was all snug in his house with lots of
food. The grasshopper came to his door and said please, can I have some of your
food? The ant said, no you sang all summer long, and now you can dance.
I kid you not, as soon as Sister
Picard finished telling this story, Sister Appiateng, who is from Ghana, piped
up from across the room "You forgot the next part. And then the
grasshopper died of starvation and the ant added him to his food storage!"
We all DIED of laughter. The timing was priceless. I love being in this ward
for that very reason: we get so many different opinions and viewpoints that it is
never ever boring.
One of our investigators finished
the Book of Mormon on Sunday! I think that is the first time I have had that
happen on my whole mission. I am really close to finishing too, I just have
Ether and Moroni left. And then in January I will start it all over again and
read with it with the whole mission!
Ich bin so dankbar für die
heilige Schriften. Sie bedeuten mir viel. Das Buch Mormon ist ein Beweis dafür,
dass Gott uns liebt. Weil er uns liebt, hat er uns weiter heilige Schrift
gegeben. Er spricht zu uns immer noch heute, durch seinen Propheten. Auf
Mission haben wir viel Zeit, in den Schriften zu lesen, wofür ich sehr dankbar
bin. Ich lerne jeden Tag etwas neues!
(I am so grateful for the
scriptures. They mean so much to me. The Book of Mormon is a proof that God
loves us. Because he loves us he has given us another scripture. He still
speaks to us today through his prophet. On
a mission we have plenty of time to read the scriptures, for which I am
very grateful. I learn something new every day.)
Tschüss! Ich hab euch lieb!
--Sister Stewart
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