Oma's Pages #45

Oma’s Pages #45

Thies de Jonge suggested that we make a plan and support the coming of this event even if we had to pay for it ourselves. He told Jan Weening that it was his job to make sure we had good weather that day. (The weather on the day of the celebration was perfect... so Jan’s prayers obviously were very effective) 

He also believed it would be important to make a book. I told them I felt it was essential to make the book. I told them that there was not any book in the archives of the Church that was a compilation of the history of the Church in the Netherlands from the beginning to the end. I told them that the book currently being used for this purpose had many mistakes in it. It was very old and not complete. There needed to be a more correct version that people could look at for historical purposes.

I began to work with a man named Guus Vreven on making that book. I had the software on my computer to compile, edit, do the layout and graphics for the book. Guus was a retired college teacher and he had the expertise to write the text. He tried to gather the histories from all over the Netherlands and into Belgium (since Belgium was once part of the Netherlands).

It was a massive project that took four months of working every spare minute I could find. I still did all my regular missionary work as well. There were many nights that I never went to bed.

We met the deadline. When Thies surprised me with one of the first copies of the book while I was at JoVo Institute, I posed for a picture and then I cried.

He took Brother and Sister Weening and Opa and I out for dinner as a thank you for all our hard work. He conveniently planned the dinner to be on Opa’s birthday. So it was also a birthday party for Opa.

Jan and Barbel Weening

Opa and Thies

Of course Opa loves to take pictures of our food. He had these tenderloin pieces

I had fish

This was Opa's dessert. That thing in a glass was like a roman candle. It would be totally illegal to set something like that off in Utah, but here it was blowing sparks and small tufts of sparkles all over the place and everybody just joined in singing Lang zal hij leven, which is the birthday song here that you all know ends with Hup Hup Hoorah repeated three times.