Stephen and Elaine Biddulph: 22

Freilicht Hessen Village

Yesterday (Saturday) we drove over to Bad Homburg and visited two historic places. The first was called Freilicht Hessen Park. It is an open-air working museum of old buildings, arts, crafts, and farming of the old Hesse region of Germany. Since 1974 rare and endangered wood-frame buildings have been moved to this park. The village showcases specialty shops that reflect the old art of iron and glass works, as well as baking, woodcrafts, and farming. There is a little shop with about every type of brush or bristle you could ever want or even imagine. Another section is the farming village with an old blacksmith shop, leather and wood shop, church, and barns and animal areas. We only saw goats, fat, pink-belly sows, and a couple of horses. It gives a good taste of life 400 years ago in Hesse Germany.

Hessen Village Farm Houses

We next drove over to Saalburg, the ancient Roman fortress that sits atop the Taunus hills overlooking Bad Homburg and the surrounding countryside. Begun in about 90 A.D., the fort eventually was built into a stone-mortar fortress with surrounding ditches that housed a cohort of Roman soldiers (about 500) and served as one of the boundary fortresses of the Limes Germanic border. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and the most excavated and restored of any Roman fort. The museum has many weapons, medicines, cooking, and cultural artifacts discovered at the site. The surrounding forests reminded me of the beginning scenes of the movie The Gladiator" where the Roman legions fought the Germanic tribes in the dark forests of Europe.

Saalburg Roman Fortress Pretoria Entrance

Other than our Saturday trip, the week has been totally dedicated to telephone calls with missionaries. I received an unexpected telephone call from a sister missionary in France Lyon one day. Her native tongue was French, but she understood and spoke pretty good English. She called because she had heard from her companion that I had helped her and thought that I could be of help. Her struggle was that she was afraid of men, and when the opportunity came to be involved in helping to teach a male, she felt numb and without feeling. Her father and stepfather had been physically abusive and "violent," and we determined in our call that she was emotionally traumatized (numb as she put it) and did not trust any male figure. Normally you would expect that this kind of trauma doesn't easily go away, and it was such in this case. This sister has some work to do, but a real miracle occurred as we spoke.
The spirit guided me to feel nothing but pure love for this sister and to validate her feelings,

Saalburg Roman Fortress Wall Taunus Mountains

which I did. After determining her great desire to be a missionary guided by the spirit, one specific scripture came to my mind to share with her: 1 John 4: 16-19. I had her read it to me over the telephone. When she read verse 18: "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear; because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love," she began to weep. I knew that she was feeling the spirit of that great truth. She was feeling the torment of fear that had numbed her feelings for a long time. This opened up a sweet talk about trusting enough to feel the love of the Savior for her. The love of the Savior is unconditional and pure, and when she feels that, she will also feel his love for all children of God, and she will be able to give away her fear to Him and feel again. We talked about not giving power to things of the past to color her present and future happiness. It was a sweet talk, and this sister was so pure in her humility and faith that she accepted the truth and is working on this process.
That is the way I spend my time. So many tell me they couldn't do what I do, spending 8 hours a day talking on the phone trying to help these missionaries, but honestly, it is for me a joy. Yes, sometimes emotionally draining because many of these talks are not easy ones. But my job is to listen, lift, love, promise, and testify to these messengers of truth, and the Holy Spirit has sustained me in this work. I will miss it when it is over.