Week 25

John at Kwisa 2

Magnetic treatment. Oh boy!

We just returned from our Poland adventure this afternoon having thoroughly enjoyed ourselves with our first-ever week at an “old folks” Kurort.  We enjoyed all the interesting and unusual Behandlungen (treatments) and just having the opportunity to relax together. When we weren’t having Moorpackung (peat hot packs—lovely deep heat to a sore shoulder or back) or Trockenmassage (Why this should have been called a „dry“ massage I don’t know, since the therapist uses oil on your back, but I guess it distingquishes this from Unterwassermassage (underwater massage, which we didn’t have). Going to soak in the Radonbäder (Radium baths) for 20 minutes a day was delightful, if you didn’t mind the Polish attendants popping in on you once or twice a session!

One of our favorite things (besides the foot massages) was to take a nap at one of the local Salz Grottos with their beach chairs and blankets in a salt cave with soft light and Salzluft (salty air being blown in with the positive benefit of getting a 45-minute nap on a beach as the sun slips over the horizon, to the power of 10—great for improving one’s breathing and combating hayfever—I loved it!).

Salz Grotto--ah salty air and a nap!

When we weren’t eating, or having Behandlungen, we went for walks and laughed and then came back to our room to do a lot more of processing of genealogical sources, still ploughing through the basketfuls of items Hugh Laing has sent us. We made good progress but we still have a lot to do.  

Saturday morning we ate our last breakfast at Kwisa 2, dragged our suitcase down to the lobby and climbed aboard the motorbus that ferried us from Swieradow-Zdroj to Görlitz—the nearest point where we could catch a train home to Freiberg the following day.

We were excited to have the chance to visit Görlitz, a little town half in Germany and half in Poland, straddling the Neisse River, which figures so importantly in Church history in this area. The branch president, Thomas Lehmann, met us and enthusiastically showed us around his city. We saw beautiful churches, and old buildings that reminded us of St. Petersberg, Russia, in their grace and beauty. For us, however, it wasn’t these lovley sites that captured our attention most but rather a stop at the location where the Saints met in former years reaching back to the ’30s, and on through WWII, and then the hard years of the Cold War that followed.

First meeting house--2nd & 3rd floors, this end

Not now occupied by the Church, Thomas asked the present owner if he could show us upstairs where the Saints had met for all those years, though empty now but for the old hand-made podium. It was here that the young Apostle Thomas S. Monson came and, having been touched by the sincerity of the faithful Saints living there in that then bleak, grey country behind the Iron Curtain, prophesied of great and marvelous blessings that would come.

The pulpit from which prophesy was given!

Pres. Monson said of that time: “I was humbled by their poverty. They had so little. . . They had no patriarch. They had no wards or stakes—just branches. They could not receive temple blessings—neither endowment nor sealing. No official visitor had come from Church headquarters in a long time. The members were forbidden to leave the country.”

He stood at that pulpit, and with tear-filled eyes and a voice choked with emotion, promised the people: “If you will remain true and faithful to the commandments of God, every blessing any member of the Church enjoys in any other country will be yours.”

That night as he realized what he had promised, he dropped to his knees and prayed, “Heavenly Father, I’m on Thy errand; this is Thy church. I have spoken words that came not from me, but from Thee and Thy Son. Wilt Thou, therefore, fulfill the promise in the lives of this noble people. There coursed through my mind the words from the psalm, ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’”  

President Thomas Lehmann was a young boy of eight years old, baptized just the month before this historic visit, and he has never forgotten the feelings he felt that day. This place we were privledged to see was still full of the Spirit and we felt as if walked on sacred ground.

President Monson continues, “Little by little the promise was fulfilled. First, patriarchs were ordained, then lesson manuals produced. Wards were formed and stakes created. Chapels and stake centers were begun, completed, and dedicated. Then, miracle of miracles, a holy temple of God was permitted, designed, constructed, and dedicated. Finally, after an absence of fifty years, approval was granted for full-time missionaries to enter the nation and for local youth to serve elsewhere in the world. Then, like the wall of Jericho, the Berlin Wall crumbled, and freedom, with its attendant responsibilities, returned.”

A chapel of promise

As of 1995, “all the parts of the precious promise given twenty-seven years earlier had been fulfilled, save one. Tiny Görlitz, where the promise had been given, still had no chapel of its own. Now, even that dream became a reality” with the construction of a chapel.

Dedication day dawned and President Monson with his wife, and Elder and Sister Dieter Uchtdorf, returned to Görlitz. There they were greeted by a young branch president, Thomas Lehmann, serving the first time in that calling.

His face glowed as he told us of the joy everyone felt that day, knowing as they did the significance of the occasion, marking the total fulfillment of the promise. We toured that little chapel with him, which was being prepared for a missionary open house later that afternoon. It sparkled with new paintings just hung and everything polished. We read from the guest book of the dedication in which President Monson and Elder Uchtdorf and their wives had written and we listened as President Lehmann told stories of many others who had returned to see this building, so much the fulfillment of prophecy.

Spring is in the air--and the plum cake was yummy!

Beautiful buildings in Goerlitz

Saturday afternoon we were dropped off in the old town to eat a late lunch and savor the sunshine with its promise of spring just around the corner. We enjoyed slowly meandering the old streets before returning to our hotel close by. John and I had been asked to bear our testimonies in Church Sunday morning so turned in early with our heads swimming with the thoughts of the day.

Morning came and we showered and dressed then headed downstairs to eat breakfast to be ready when our ride arrived at 8:35 for the 9:00 meeting. We were devastated to learn that someone had already been by for us 30 minutes before and would come again. We were not aware that Daylight Saving had come to Germany—No one had mentioned the change over to us the day before!

John and Rudi Lehmann

Fortunately Sacrament Meeting was last so we still made it and had the honor to bear our own witness of the blessings of the gospel in our lives and testify of our own knowledge of Christ. The last speaker on the program was President Lehmann’s father, Rudi Lehmann, another of the stalwarts of the Church in this area, who spoke of the light of the gospel and of the Savior, while he himself glowed with that light. What a wonderful blessing it was for us to meet him. Both he and Brother Maschke and his wife, whom we also met, knew my Uncle Joel who had served as mission president in Berlin during the ’60s and my Uncle Burtis before that. What a visit full of wonderful stories we have had.

Headed home to Freiberg

We traveled by train back to Freiberg Sunday afternoon feeling as if we could hold no more but so grateful for the experiences that had made these two days precious to us. May we be found as faithful and exude like determination, light, and joy in our own lives despite challenges that come. We will never forget our visit to Görlitz.

Today is March 25 and our 25th week. We have received word that our mission call has been officially extended with a release date of March 25, 2013.