Welcome Sister Longhurst!

Sister Longhurst, (right) joined Sister Walker this week, and we think she is great! Here they are in our apartment last Sunday night for a planning meeting with us. They are in the process of getting our district organized to contact young adults on the university campus. Their enthusiasm is contagious, and we see the possibility of good things happening.

I had the priviledge of going with them Thursday to teach Maria, a wonderful woman with two teenage sons. She has a spirit of love and humility about her, and I think she is a good prospect for membership. It is always a priviledge to hear the sisters teach. They know the gospel, they understand the conversion process, and they just are excellent teachers! It is a blessing to be involved with them.

The beginning posts of our blog have shown readers how we got started here, described the beautiful country in which we serve, introduced our missionaries, and told about our involvement in the YSA conference in Germany. This post, we will tell you a little more about the missionary work we are doing.

We have visited every ward in our institute area several times. We attend, and have led gospel discussions in a couple of the YSA Sunday school classes, and we think we are gaining the trust of these amazing young people, who are so key to reactivation and missionary work among their age group. They know we are here and that the outreach center is up and running again, after having been without a missionary couple for a year. In the Sunday School classes, we have started asking them to prayerfully identify one less active YSA in their ward who would be the most likely to be reactivated, and to contact, invite, fellowship, friendship, and love that person into activity. We know of one less active who came to church at least once as a result of our visiting with her.

We are sending birthday cards. We make birthday phone calls to the YSAs we know personally.

Last week, Elder Grassli and I helped Brother Gregor Weidmann, the current Bern Institute Director, prepare a letter that went to all the YSAs in our institute area inviting them to institute and telling them what will be going on this semester. Beginning this week, we will have Family Home Evening on Mondays, institute classes on Tuesdays (we will prepare dinner for them on Tuesdays) and Wednesdays (dessert), and we are going to try having open night Fridays (they bring treats, we provide drinks), where they can come for waffles (seem to be a real hit here!), movies, games, concerts, dances, and other special events, or just to hang out in a wholesome and safe environment. Other successful outreach centers in Europe have open night Fridays and find this a good way to motivate YSAs to bring less active and non-member friends, so we are hoping our young friends here will enjoy these, as well.

We are in the process with the sisters of developing a new flyer for "Inschti Bern" that they can pass out on the campus.

We have been trying recipes at home that we think the YSAs might like. The challenges of limited cooking and serving utensils, difficulty in finding familiar ingredients, a tiny oven (all Swiss ovens are small, I guess!) and a range with unfamiliar dials, only add to the adventure.

This week we have cleaned, rearranged, had painted, bought some furniture for, and generally prepared the outreach center for the beginning of the new semester.

The Lord is blessing us with good health and good friends to help us, and we can't think of anything we would rather be doing right now.

We think this is the ideal mission for us!