Mission Week 38

Tjena, 

Hope everyone is doing well and had a good Easter!

I got to spend my Easter back up in Borlänge for Tommy's baptism. It was 5 hours on the train from my current area, so we went up Saturday night. It felt good to be back in Borlänge and it was great to see all of the members again. A lot of them were confused because I have only been gone a week so they thought I maybe just missed a week or something haha. Everything with the baptismal service went well and as far as I could tell Tommy liked it. The two words he used to describe how he felt afterwards were unusual and special so I would call it a success. The members were all really nice and welcoming and the spirit was definitely there.

The rest of the week went pretty well also. Here is a summary of the notable things that happened:

On Tuesday we were planning to just be out on the streets talking to people all day because we had no other plans, but thankfully one of the senior couples who live in Stockholm texted us and said they would be coming out to take all the stuff out of the old apartment (my apartment is recently moved into for this area because there was a shooting outside of the old one). So we spent the morning hauling a lot of stuff out of the apartment and then they took us for lunch at Burger King afterwards. 

We had our 4th lesson with our friend Rowan, a Swede in his 20s who seems to agree with and understand everything we tell him. When we asked him about baptism, he said he knows it could bless his life, but he's just not ready yet. But that is still steps in the right direction.  

I decided to try and make my approach for talking to people on the streets more personable and genuine and less of just trying to see if they are interested. I had some good conversations with people who were not even slightly interested in religion and was also able to connect with a lot more people who are interested. 

Was able to eat some classic Swedish easter food. The meal was a lot of stuff but included hard boiled eggs, shrimp, beet salad, bread and cheese. 

Got to play some basketball. I posted on facebook when I first got to this area if there was anyone interested in playing basketball. I was able to get in contact with someone from  a group of guys who play twice a week. We went on Thursday and though I was a little rusty, it felt good to get running up and down as well as talk with some people who had an obvious common interest. 

Like I said I felt like I was able to connect with a lot more people talking in public this week. There was a lot of good experiences from it but I'll share 2 that stood out the most to me. 

-One happened on Friday when we had a 15 minute bus ride to a member's house. Early on the bus ride I saw a couple get on and I kept looking over at them and felt like I had to talk to them. So after a couple of minutes I got up and stood next to their seats and started talking to the guy. He and his wife are Christian and he said they would be willing to meet up sometime. After I finished talking to him we had 2 stops left until we had to get off, so I went to take my seat again when I saw another guy get on the bus and sit down with an empty seat next. I don't talk to people on the bus that often, so the fact I had already talked to someone felt good enough already. But I just thought why not so I went and sat next to this guy and had a quick conversation and he said he is also Christian and would be willing to meet. When he typed his number into my phone it said that the number already existed in my contacts. I was a little confused but just got off the bus and texted him hi. He replied saying that he already had our number, and maybe God is trying to send us to him. My companion confirmed one of the previous missionaries had met this same guy a few months ago. As we kept texting he asked us to pray for him because his wife has left him. I told him we would pray for him and that I knew God wanted us to meet that day. And he replied saying thank you, and that right when we met on the bus he felt that God wanted something. We plan to meet with him this week:).

-The other one happened on Thursday when we were on a bus to a different members house. This time though we were 1.5 hours away from the city that we actually live in and talk to people in. Again we had a 15 minute bus ride to the members house from the train station. We got on the bus and just sat in the very back and I just pulled out my Book of Mormon and started reading. The next stop a lady got on and sat in the row in front of us and I did my best to give a smile as she walked up. I went back to reading and could not focus on what I was reading at all. I knew I needed to talk to this lady and that she deserved the chance to hear about the Book of Mormon. I started talking to her by asking if she is Christian to which she replied no, so I then asked if she was religious at all to which she also replied no. I was a little confused for a second why I needed to talk to this lady so I kind of paused for a second and didn't know what to say and then she said that she was just kidding, that she is Christian but we had already met before in Linköping (my city, that is 1.5 hours away). After talking a little bit more I remembered my conversation with her and we were able to talk a bit more. I knew I had to bring up the Book of Mormon and it seemed she was about to get off at the next stop so I just asked her if she had heard of it and she said no and went to take a picture of it. I told her that it was a book about Jesus Christ and she could have my copy. She took it gladly and I got her number to talk more. There is no doubt that God wanted me to meet and talk to this lady again. 

I'm not sure if it's obvious from our emails or not, but a big focus me and Zach have had on our missions is trying to find joy. Like I talked about in my email last week, at the beginning of this week I was having some frustrations. Me and Zach talked about it on our weekly call, and then he told me that we can't get to the end of our missions without having had joy throughout it. I agreed with him but we both also agreed that it is easier said than done. The next day I listened to the talk "Joy and Spiritual Survival" by President Nelson, which I have listened to many times on my mission to try and find more joy. President Nelson talks a lot about how we are here on Earth to have joy. After I listened to the talk this week, I wanted something that I could actually apply and work on to be able to experience more joy, so I read back through and underlined the things that we personally can do to experience more joy. Here's what I underlined: 

-"As our Savior becomes more and more real to us and as we plead for His joy to be given to us, our joy will increase."

-"Joy is powerful, and focusing on joy brings God's power into our lives."

-"What will you and I be able to endure as we focus on the joy that is "set before" us?"

-"He (Christ) taught us how to have joy. When we choose Heavenly Father to be our God and when we can feel the Savior's Atonement working in our lives, we will be filled with joy."

After doing this, I realized that the main things outlined here that we can do to experience more joy is to 1. Ask for joy in prayer and 2.Focus on joy. But focusing on joy seems pretty broad and hard to apply on a daily basis. Something that I have been doing recently in my prayers is asking for something specific that I can improve on, and then I work on that thing for a couple of days or however long I need to get better at it, and then come back to the Lord and ask what else I can work on. That night after reading this talk, I asked that I would be able to feel more joy and asked what I can work on. I got the impression to get a journal and at the end of the day write everything down that made me happy throughout the day. So I have been doing it this week. Not only has it been a good exercise to reflect on the day and think of positive things, but I now find myself actively looking for things throughout the day that bring me joy. And when I notice something, I have been taking the time to feel and recognize the joy that comes from it. Though I had a baptism and some amazing miracles this week, the joy that I have felt from taking the time to feel joy from the little things has really been immensely greater than the joy I felt at the baptism. And it's not big things that I am writing down either, it's just taking the time to appreciate how much we are blessed. Some examples of things that I wrote down are: seeing a cute dog (many times lol), sitting on the top of a double decker bus, seeing a kid happily high five the train conductor, one of our friends reading the Book of Mormon with a magnifying glass, successfully making a new dish, seeing/making someone smile. Here is a quote from Elder Uchtdorf that sums it up perfectly: "There is enough that doesn't go right in life, so anyone can work themselves into a puddle of pessimism and a mess of melancholy. But I know people who, even when things don't work out, focus on the wonders and miracles of life. God didn't design us to be sad. He created us to have joy! So if we trust Him, He will help us to notice the good, bright, hopeful things of life. And sure enough, the world will become brighter. No, it doesn't happen instantly, but honestly, how many good things do?" I'm not saying that specifically what I am doing will bring everyone joy, but I can promise that as we all actively seek out joy and focus on the little things that can bring us joy, we will begin to experience it more in our lives. This week was not perfect for me. Things are not going great with my companion along with other issues. But I felt more joy this week than I have in a long time. I can now back up President Nelson when he said "My dear brothers and sisters, the joy we feel has little to do with the circumstances of our lives and everything to do with the focus of our lives."

Sorry for the long thought, but I thought I would share because of how much this helped me this week. If you read all that I hope you took something from it :)

Have a great week❤️🙏

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Mission Week 38

Sunday, March 31, 2024

Mission Week 37

Hello everybody, hope you have all had a good week. Here is some of the main things that happened to me this past week.

The first half of the week was just a lot of goodbyes to people in Borlänge. Had a few lessons and a few meals with members. The lesson worth talking about is Tommy's lesson though. We finished teaching him everything he needs to be taught before baptism, and went through some procedural things that he should know. Like I have mentioned many times Tommy is a very quiet and awkward guy and rarely says more than 3 words at a time, and though I have not seen huge differences in him since I have been teaching him these past 3 months, I definitely can see small, gradual changes in his demeanor and mood. A little more talkative or a little more happy. That is cool for me to see and a testament that the gospel can bring everyone joy, even if it comes in different ways and speeds for different people. When we asked how he is feeling about the baptism coming up, he gave a typical Tommy answer using only one word, but the word he chose was "special". Thankfully my mission president has given me permission to go back to Borlänge for the baptism this coming Sunday, so stay tuned to hear about that next week. (Tommy is the guy with glasses and striped shirt in the pictures). 

Thursday was travel day, got to my new city Linköping about halfway through the day. The city is pretty cool, honestly smaller than I expected for 5th biggest city in Sweden but it is nice for a change to be in a bigger city even if it's not huge. There is branch here instead of a ward and at church on Sunday we had 13 people (including us 2 missionaries and the visiting stake president), and I already gave my first talk haha. Most of the members are older but they are all pretty nice. 

Friday and Saturday day we had a few lessons, game night (happens weekly in this area 🙌), and a branch activity where we were in charge and we decided to dye easter eggs. All the lessons we have had so far have gone pretty well. For 2 of them we taught the plan of salvation and the people we were teaching were pretty receptive and liked almost everything we said, one was a 75 year old guy from Sudan who grew up muslim but now is wanting to become Christian, and one was with a very funny and energetic guy from Chile who has been taught everything by the missionaries in a short period and has now begun to pray about baptism. 

Things have been decent with the new companion so far. He was in a trio last transfer and though he was in this area it seems that he doesn't really know who most of the people are in our teaching pool so we have just been trying to figure out who is interested and who isn't. Besides that obstacle things have been going decently well so far. He is good at teaching and friendly with the members. 

Throughout my whole mission and still now it has sometimes been hard for me to feel like I am being successful. I could go more into the details of why but that is not what I want to focus on. Of course some missionaries are better at different things and that is just how life is, but it can be difficult for me sometimes feeling I am not reaching the same levels as others in certain areas of missionary work. But after recently talking with my family and pondering more about this, it brings me peace to know that all the Lord asks is that we give our best effort every day. Even if some days we can give more than others. Like it says in D&C 123:17 - "Therefore, dearly beloved brethren, let us cheerfully do all things that lie in our power; and then may we stand still, with the utmost assurance, to see the salvation of God, and for his arm to be revealed." All we need to do is do our best and have humility that the results the Lord knows are best for us will come.

Alma 26:12🙌💪 - "Yea, I know that I am nothing; as to my strength I am weak; therefore I will not boast of myself, but I will boast of my God, for in his strength I can do all things; yea, behold, many mighty miracles we have wrought in this land, for which we will praise his name forever."

Sorry for the more boring email this week, feels like not a lot happened.

Hope everyone has a good week

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Mission Week 37

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Mission Week 36

Hej, hope everyone is doing well. 

First things first, we got transfer news and I will be leaving Borlänge. If you have not been able to tell from my emails I have not been a huge fan of this area but of course I have met countless amazing people that I will be sad to say goodbye to. My new area is Linköping, which is the 5th largest city in Sweden, a couple hours west of Stockholm. I am definitely very excited to be going back to a big city. As far as my new companion, keeping it simple I have not heard good things about him, but I am trying to go in with an open mind hoping we can both learn things from each other. 

This past week was decent. We were without the car the whole week because it is in the shop, so we had to use buses and the bus system in Borlänge is pretty horrible. We did have a cool miracle with the buses though. Our first day we went to get on the bus after visiting a member, and we were going to go to the train station to take a train up to our friend Tommy. The trains only leave every couple hours so we could not miss this train. When we got to the bus stop there was a stop on both sides of the road, but for whatever reason the bus stops here don't have any information about the bus routes or anything like that (every other city I've been in Sweden has that) so we ended up taking the bus that got us to almost the same location but went around Borlänge instead of going straight there like the other one. Well on this wrong bus that we took, a lady that I had met at the mall earlier that day walked on the bus and I was able to talk to her again and we were able to message her about church the rest of the week and although she didn't come there is a good chance she will in the future. Well after we met that lady the problem was we got dropped off at a stop like a 15 minute walk from where we needed to be and our train left in five minutes. We started jogging so we could make it and when we had moved a little bit I looked at the time again and we had three minutes so then it turned into a full sprint the whole way to the train station, ran through the station to our platform, ran down the stairs and walked out the doors to see the train doors closing, but I was able to shove my hand in the closing door and push it open so we barely made it hahaha. 

We taught Tommy about tithing and went more in depth into priesthood this week. He has still had no objections or problems with anything we've taught so his baptism being in 2 weeks is still looking good. 

We had a lesson with Sabrina for the first time in a while. If any of you remember she is an 18 year old girl from Eritrea that has been taught by the missionaries since last summer but has had a hard time understanding priesthood authority and prophets. We have been inviting her to pray about President Nelson being a prophet and listen to his talks, and this time she said that she is starting to receive answers to her prayers and she thinks President Nelson is speaking truth. This is such a huge thing for Sabrina, if I'm being honest because of how stubborn she is I never expected this to happen. After she told us that we tried to teach priesthood authority again, this time with me drawing stuff on the whiteboard and showing a lot of pictures, and she finally understood and said she will think about baptism. If you are wondering what she looks like, I got a picture with her this week. She is the girl that is half of my height and looks like an 8 year old. I promise she is 18😂.

The other interesting things from the week were just a bunch of negative interactions that we had that I do not have the motivation or desire to write about so the negativity will be spared from my email this week lol. 

This week in church and seminary the lessons had a big focus on what a miracle the Book of Mormon is (because the end of 2 Nephi prophesies a lot about it). I love being a part of conversations like this because it just helps remind me the gratitude and love that I have for the Book of Mormon, as well as Joseph Smith. Me and Zach had a good conversation yesterday about our appreciation for how much Joseph Smith sacrificed to bring forth the Book of Mormon. The talk "Safety for the Soul" by Elder Holland is an inspiring testimony of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, and here is an excerpt from it. "... tell me whether in this hour of death these two men (Joseph and Hyrum Smith) would enter the presence of their Eternal Judge quoting from and finding solace in a book which, if not the very word of God, would brand them as imposters and charlatans until the end of time? They would not do that! They were willing to die rather than deny the divine origin and the eternal truthfulness of the Book of Mormon." The sacrifices of Joseph Smith to bring forth the Book of Mormon are immeasurable, as is how much we can learn and grow closer to Christ from and through the Book of Mormon. And a reminder of what our prophet has promised us if we read the Book of Mormon "My dear brothers and sisters, I promise that as you prayerfully study the Book of Mormon every day, you will make better decisions—every day. I promise that as you ponder what you study, the windows of heaven will open, and you will receive answers to your own questions and direction for your own life. I promise that as you daily immerse yourself in the Book of Mormon, you can be immunized against the evils of the day." This is no deep spiritual thought, but of course is of great importance to me. I have come to love and appreciate the Book of Mormon so much on my mission. As I said when talking with Zach yesterday, there is nothing else that I am more sure about in my life than the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon and the gospel. Come and see for yourself if you haven't already:)

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Mission Week 36

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Mission Week 35

What's up, 

Hope everyone is doing well. Pretty good week for me. We were traveling a lot (13 hours of driving plus 5 hours on the train) with only 2 days in Borlänge. 

On Tuesday we had splits with the Gubbängen elders, which is one of the areas in Stockholm. So we decided to drive down Sunday night and take the pday in Stockholm because there is basically nothing to do in Borlänge. The pday was awesome to go around Stockholm and see a lot of other missionaries and felt like we got so much done. 

For the splits on Tuesday the main thing we did was just teach 3 lessons with 3 very different people. Simply put, one was a drunk guy who basically forced us to let him buy us food, one was a Jewish guy where we respectfully learned about each other's beliefs, and one was a lady who has had a past of some pretty big mistakes and thinks that God hates her and was crying the whole lesson. It was an entertaining variety and made for a pretty good splits. Again just felt good to be in Stockholm. 

Wednesday was one of our only 2 days in Borlänge. We drove the hour out to Tommy (quiet guy on baptismal date) and continued to teach him the commandments and lifestyles of the church to prepare him for baptism. Wednesday night we had a member meal with a lady and her son who are from Mexico, and she made us some very good tacos and chocolate cake. I may or may not have thrown up after drinking a cup of soda after having ate way too much food. We stayed and talked with the lady pretty lady and she told us the dark history of everyone in the ward lol. 

Thursday we had a tri-zone zone conference because our Area President 70 came and spoke to us. His name is Elder Boom (pronounced Bome) and he is from the Netherlands. He gave a really good presentation and it was good to see a lot of the missionaries that I haven't seen in a while. Only bad part of the day was that we had to wake up at 5 to catch the train. 

Friday was basically the same as Wednesday and Saturday we had splits with the elders in Gävle where the most exciting thing was playing innebandy (floor hockey) with some guys from their branch. 

The trend of last week with our friends kind of continued this week and we had to drop several more promising people because of inability to contact or loss of interest from them. The most disappointing was probably our friend Liam. Most of you will probably will not remember him but he is a new Christian and we have only taught him twice, and after the first lesson he asked us where he could buy a Book of Mormon and the second lesson (a month later) he told us he had been carrying around the Book of Mormon with him everywhere. Well our calls to him had been going straight to voicemail for a couple weeks and we figured that his phone was broken because our lessons with him were so good. Well when we were on splits we tried to call him from another phone, and when he answered I said "this is the missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ" and he instantly hung up :((. Absolutely no idea what happened but very sad. 

This is kind of a random thought for my spiritual thought but here we go. Basically, if you know me and my brother, you know that we love representing the things that we love. Mainly I am talking about with sports teams, always representing our fandom whether it be clothing, in conversation, or a sticker on our car. Being on my mission I have realized that the thing that I am the most proud of about myself is that I am a disciple of Jesus Christ, and that is the first thing that I would want people to know about me. I have thought how it is a little unfortunate that our church doesn't use the cross as a sign of our faith, which means that I will probably not be wearing a cross necklace or putting a cross keychain on my backpack anytime soon. But Elder Boom this week reminded me of the real way that we should show our faith in Jesus Christ. He had a short phrase that he repeated many times: "Become the message". He was referring to us as missionaries, that we need to become the message of Jesus Christ by the way we act and live, rather than just trying to spread it. Of course this is referring to missionary work, but I think it applies to us all. We all should live in a way that represents our faith in Jesus Christ. The people around us should be able to tell that we are a disciple of Jesus Christ by the way that we act and treat people, rather than by something we are wearing. We should all be more empathetic and understanding of other people's circumstances, rather than taking the natural reaction of being quick to judge. Elder Uchtdorf said something along the same lines: "In truth, we 'all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.' We are all in need of mercy. In that last day when we are called to the judgment bar of God, do we not hope that our many imperfections will be forgiven? Do we not yearn to feel the Savior's embrace? It seems only right and proper that we extend to others that which we so earnestly desire for ourselves." So just a little reminder to you all to continue in trying to live in a way that reflects your faith in Jesus Christ. And if you don't have faith in Jesus Christ, trying to live like He did is a pretty good way to live anyways :)

Sidenote: If any of you are wondering (members or nonmembers) why our church does not use the cross as a symbol of our faith, Elder Holland gave a talk titled "Lifted Up upon the Cross" in October 2022 that explains it perfectly. But because I know most of you who are wondering won't read it 🙃 , I will echo what Elder Holland said by saying that though we don't use the cross as a symbol of our faith, we have "deep respect and profound admiration for the faith-filled motives and devoted lives of those who do." ❤️

Have a great week 🙏

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Mission Week 35

Monday, March 11, 2024