Rainy Days

The old Carpenter's song went, "Rainy days and Mondays always get me down..," but that is not true for me.  My Mother loved the rain, and she taught me to love the rain.  Well, at least, I love it when I am inside my own home, looking out the windows, and can hear it pounding on the roof.  If I were a "younger" missionary in Denmark, I would not love being out in it all day long, but senior missionaries are not expected to follow the "rigorous schedule" of the younger missionaries.  Thank goodness!

Still, Elder Parker and I get caught in the rain occasionally, and once in a while we may have an umbrella with us.  You can't see the rain very well in these pictures, but it is there.  Anyway, I was taking the pictures for a change, and Elder Parker looks pretty good!  There is actually a duck and lots of rain drops on the pond, but they don't show very well.

Sometimes we have rainy, stormy days in our lives, and sometimes those days turn into weeks, months, and even years.  It seems that even when we are doing our best to live the Gospel of Jesus Christ, doing our best to teach our families correct principles, doing our best to help others, we have those periods of time when we just don't understand why things are so hard!  I must confess that I have sometimes wondered why: When we are serving a mission full time why...  When we are paying our tithing why...  When we are following all the mission rules why...  When we are reading our scriptures and holding our family home evenings why...  My patriarchal blessing states that I will be blessed many times because of my faith and that my faith will be sufficient..., and that gives me encouragement, but that doesn't mean things will never be hard.

Elder Parker gave me a quote from Elder Neal A. Maxwell a short time ago:  "Patience is tied very closely to faith in our Heavenly Father.  Actually, when we are unduly impatient, we are suggesting that we know what is best-better than does God.  Or, at least, we are asserting that our timetable is better than His.  We can grow in faith only if we are willing to wait patiently for God's purposes and patterns to unfold in our lives, on His timetable."

We have always given Dad a hard time because he struggles with patience.  He is always working on it as one of his "best attributes!"  I can report that he is doing extremely well!  He gave me the above quote, to encourage me to be more patient, which in turn, would help when the days are a bit damp.

If we are patient and do our part, God always comes through.  Then the sun seems to shine again!
I know these pictures are a bit cheezy, but Dad wanted them taken...

We were able to attend the temple in Copenhagen last Friday.  What a blessing to have a temple here in Denmark. I have grown to understand more, and to love the temple more as I have grown older.  That's how life in general works too.  If we patiently work at it, we learn and understand, and grow.

At the end of a rainy day, we were on an errand in a store here in Aarhus when a young clerk noticed that our name tags said "Jesu Kristi" on them, and he asked where we were from.  We told him we were missionaries from the USA here to help support our church in Denmark.  He replied, "I'm Christian!  God bless!"  That is not a normal response in Denmark.  It truly brightened our day.