Joseph's letter dated 19Dec2011

[Dear family and friends,

It is with sadness and excitement that I send you what will probably be the last letter we receive from Joseph in the Czech Republic. While the two years has seemed long, it has also seemed short. It has been a wonderful blessing for our family to have Joseph serving in the Czech Republic. We have learned to love these amazing people we have met through Joseph's letters. We are excited to see Joseph -- a week from today!

Thank you for your friendship and your support during these past two years. Thank you for your kind and supportive notes to Joseph.

We love you and wish you a wonderful Christmas season. Remember that the Spirit of Christmas is the Spirit of Christ!

Much love, Joseph's editor - BWS]

Dear Family,

It finally snowed in Jihlava, while we were tracting, and so I was covered in a beautiful blanket of snow for most of our door approaches. I hoped that I would look pitiful enough for people to let me in, but we were only knocking on doors for about 45 min before we had to run for a meeting nearby. I greatly preferred the snow to the sleet that we had been having earlier in the week however and now we do have snow on the ground. We did not get a lot though, but it may snow again in the next week.

I am doing well here. It is not too cold and so I am managing to survive.

I really am enjoying serving with Elder Story. He and I get along really well and he is one of the favorite companions with whom I have served. We are working well together. By the way, Elder Ingalls wants to thank you dad for the note that you wrote him. He thinks that you are cool. He wants to meet you when we do the road trip to Canada after our missions (more details to come). [Elder Ingalls is from Minnesota!]

I got a haircut again today and once again i am reminded that I am balding.

Our area is doing well here. We are meeting with a wonderful man named Brother F, who is just eating up the Book of Mormon and everything we give him. We gave him a conference Liahona [this is the International magazine published by the church] last time and he liked it, even though the first article he read was the sustaining of Church leaders. He liked the other talk that President Uchtdorf gave a lot more. He even came to the branch Christmas party last Friday and got along well with the members.

We also visited the older couple that we found a couple weeks ago. We ended up visiting on their daughter's birthday, and even talked to her on the phone. She was very pleased to hear that we were meeting with them and encouraged us to be patient with her "stubborn" father.

I am looking forward to hearing from you on Sunday. [We are excited to talk to Joseph on Christmas morning!] I hope that time works out for you. If not, just call at a different time after one oclock my time.

Love,
Elder Schindler

Joseph's letter dated 12Dec2011

[Dear family and friends, here is the letter that we received from Joseph today. We can't believe that he will be home in 15 days!

If you have a Christmas greeting you would like me to pass along to him -- send it as a reply - and I'll get it to him next Monday! He LOVES hearing from all of you.

I hope that you are finding Christ in your holiday preparations.

Love, Joseph's editor - BWS]

Dear Family,

So, I do not really know what to say. I have had plenty of time today to write, but I am feeling very lazy and don't know what to write. I even wrote you a letter this morning since I could not sleep, but there were not very many precious jewels of knowledge in that letter either. I will make a championship effort though for the next fifteen minutes and try to give you something worth reading.

First of all, this week has been very warm. There were a few cold days, when we had rain that turned to snow and then to rain again. It was cool to watch but not to stand in. After that though, it has been feeling like spring. I am hoping for snow right around Christmas time. It is pretty, but I don't want it to fall soon enough that I have to walk in it. I am warm enough though and all is well in that regard.

We found some great new people this week. One was found the week before, but we have already met twice and he, Brother F is progressing well. He is reading quite a bit and is very interested in the message. Finally contacting at the end of the day on a Saturday night paid off (I always knew it would, but it finally came). We also found an older married couple, whose daughter was baptized about fifteen years ago here in Jihlava and now lives in California. They had a wonderful poster of the Salt Lake temple in their dining room. We have not been able to find out if they were ever officially taught the gospel, but we are starting to teach them. They are very sweet and wonderful. They even had one of the old, original copies of the Book of Mormon in Czech that said KM on the front (Kniha Mormonova) that implied that it was a book about Karl Marx, a misconception that the early church members took advantage of. I actually asked if I could have it since it means a lot to missionaries here. They gave it to me, with some apple strudel.

We are very happy to be working with Brother J, our branch mission leader. He is doing a wonderful job helping us and helping the work progress here in Jihlava.

Elder Story is great. He and I are loving our time together, although I think we tease each other and talk about basketball more than we should. We are seeing a lot of success together though and I have been really grateful for the opportunity to work with him, even if he is from Utah (just to clarify, that was a joke).

I am well and happy, but unfortunately Ginger Ale Milka chocolate has been on sale at Tesco (Euro version of Walmart, or Meijer) and so I am not sure how long the well and healthy description will be able to apply. We will be having a branch party this Friday at the Page's home (the senior couple here) and are looking forward to that.

I love you all a lot. Keep me in your prayers and I am looking forward to hearing from you next week.

Love,
Elder Schindler

ps-Ginger ale is good, but root beer is better. hint. hint.

pps-You can buy Oreos here now.

Joseph and his District!

Joseph's district - Dec. 2011

Joseph in the kitchen!

Joseph's letter dated 5Dec2011

[Dear friends and family,

I hope you enjoy this short letter from Joseph. While it's short, it let's us know that Joseph is actively working til the end. I can't believe that these letters will soon end. We are so excited to see Joseph again at the end of this month! (December 27)

If you have a message for Joseph (which he would love), just send it as a reply and I will make sure he receives it.

Let me know if you would like to be on the distribution list for our "Barcelona Letters" -- starting in January!

Thank you for your love and your support of Joseph over the past 24 months.

A fun story from our home: Christopher (soon to be 10) has decided he does not like left-overs. Much to his chagrin, Thanksgiving brought us LOTS of left-overs. We (except for Christopher) were enjoying one of our meal of turkey left-overs, and he took a drink of water (that had been chilling in the fridge). He put his glass down in disgust and said, "Is even the water a left-over??!"

Wishing you the merriest of Decembers as you prepare for Christmas!

I will be posting pictures that Joseph sent -- later today on his blog!

Sincerely, Joseph's editor - BWS]

Hi Family,

So this week went well. We had exchanges this week, so I was able to work in Třebíč again for about a day. It was a lot of fun. Elder Spencer is a good person to work with and we were able to see some good successes together.

We also found a couple last week, with whom the Elders met on Wednesday while I was in Třebíč. We set up an appointment again for Saturday, to which only the boy, Tomaš came. We taught him about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. He loved it. He loved it so much, he asked if he could to get his girlfriend who was unable to come to the scheduled meeting, so that we could teach her as well. We happily obliged. That was one of the best Saturdays of my mission.

The people with whom we are working are doing well, but I do not have much new to share about them.

I do need to go however, but I love you all and hope that you have a wonderful week.

Love,

Joseph

Joseph's letter dated 28Nov2011

[Dear friends and family, here is the letter we received from Joseph yesterday. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did! If you would like to send a note to Joseph, simply reply to this note -- and I'll forward your note to him. He LOVES hearing from you!

We hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We were blessed to be able to spend time with Julie's brother (David and Jennifer) and their sons and family and my niece (Natascia, Andrew and Hazel!) and friends. We ate well -- and enjoyed seeing everyone!

It looks like our beautiful November is ending today - as our first storm is approaching. We hope everyone can stay healthy, warm and safe during this wintry season.

With warmest regards - Joseph's editor - BWS]

Dearest Family,

So not a whole lot has changed in the past few days including my supply [or lack!] of pictures. I still love you a lot though and am grateful that I was able to read letters from three of you today (I am focusing on the good, that three people wrote me and not on the four people who did not (Breston, Brocholas, Bristopher and Brondrew or whatever you changed your names to)). [Can any one crack the code and guess what 4 family members did NOT write to Joseph??!] It sounds like things have settled down a little bit and I hope that they continue to do so.

So here are some cool things that happened in the past few days. One, a potential investigator named Brother T, who I contacted over two months ago happened to be walking along a street that two handsome, dashing missionaries were also walking down (i.e. Elder Story and Elder Schindler). These elegently dressed young men hailed said Brother T and we began talking. He has been going through a rough time trying to get custody of his son, and is worried about him. We set up for a meeting later that day, and he came! We taught about Christ and how He knows his troubles and how he can overcome them. I was so glad we were walking down that street. I was not so glad however that we contacted him right in front of a television playing a Shakira music video. She is definitely not the "guardian of virtue" that Sister Dalten encourages the young women to be. Very hard to ignore since I was standing right in front of it.

Also, we met a young married couple about three weeks ago and we are finally able to meet with them (i.e., every Czech and Slovak missionary's dream). They are quite well traveled and have seen missionaries in several parts of the world. They were a little more interested in getting to know us and why we came on misisons, but we had a fairly good lesson and were able to set some good expectations as to why we meet with people (to help them prepare for baptism). We have high hopes for them.

We did a lot of finding this week and overall I was pleased with what we saw.

I love you all and am enjoying my mission. It is way warm today. We had a rather cool summer and I joked around with my companions that I hoped that the cool summer was an indicator of a mild winter (an act of humor attempting to distract from the possibility of the horror of a frigid winter). We actually are having an unusually warm time here with only a VERY light frosting of snow last week. Now if önly we could have unusually long days leading up to December 21 ( I am not a fan of darkness at four thirty in the afternoon).

I love you. Good luck this week and keep me in your prayers,

Love,

Starší Josef Šindler