Tjenare
Hope everyone is doing good. This week had a lot of good things for me so I will pick some of the best / most interesting, but this still gonna be long.
I'll start with an experience that was non missionary work related but probably the most interesting thing that happened. We were heading to visit some members that live about an hour away and we were already like an hour late because our lesson before it went long. They live basically in the middle of the forest so when we were about 5 min away we pulled onto a narrow dirt road that would take us the rest of the way there. Problem was there was a bunch of cars coming the other way so I tried to pull as far as I could to the right side of the road but miscalculated and our car ended up with the right two wheels stuck in the ditch/drop off that was on the side of the road (pics included). We tried to just drive out to no avail so we got out and tried to figure out what we would do. The lady who was driving the other direction who kind of caused us to go off the road turned around and was offering to help but there wasn't much that she could do. She was about to just leave when this African guy in a big white van drives by and immediately pulls over and gets out to see if he can help us. After looking for a place on our car that he could hook and not finding anything, he said he didn't have time to help us but to flag down the other lady who had stopped to help (who was now driving away) and have her drive us to the car shop he works at and tell them that Chris sent us. This lady pulled back up and Chris told her she needed to drive us there and she said that she didn't have room in her car because of her 3 daughters and Chris told her to just squeeze us all in. This was all in English and then she says to us in Swedish "I'm not driving illegally" so she preceeded to have all 3 of her teenage daughters file out of the car and stand and wait on this dirt road while she drove us to this car shop about 5 minutes away. When we went into the shop we explained the situation and told the guy that Chris sent us and so he just drove us in his tow truck back to our car. After digging through our trunk he found the hook that he needed so he simply pulled our car out with his truck and when we asked him how much we would need to pay he said "don't worry about it, just drive carefully". We were extremely blessed to drive away with no damage to the car, definitely a miracle that we got help from those 3 people. Not gonna lie I didn't think there was many good samaritans like that in Sweden haha.
Besides doing some service (scraping off old paint) with those members that we were driving to, the rest of the notable stuff from the week was just a lot of lessons, many of which went really good. Here's a short recap of the good ones (bad ones aren't really worth mentioning) -
First one involves a little backstory. So at the beginning of this transfer one of the missionaries serving in Stockholm sent us a phone number for a guy he met that plays basketball and lives in our area. Because of my toe, I told him that I wouldn't be able to play for a bit until it got healed but this past Monday he invited us to play and my toe is better now so we went. It ended up being pretty decent competition and our friend Unisa (from Sierra Leone, muslim) that I talked about in my email last week ended up being there as well. Another guy there who I was guarding the whole time and talked a bit with ended up asking about our missionary tags at the end and asked a few follow up questions about us being missionaries. Pretty regular stuff as a missionary and didn't think much about it but a few days later we ended up seeing this same guy walking in town and we stopped to talk to him. After answering some more questions about missionary life he just ended with "well you guys could probably preach to me sometime because I'm Christian" and offered up his number so we took it and ended up planning a time later in the week to meet him. A lot of the time we were with him was just spent talking a lot about his life and such (he is 19 and from Nigeria, named Justin) but we were able to talk about the Book of Mormon as well. He hadn't heard of it though he said he had heard about Mormonism before. He was pretty open to reading the Book of Mormon and wants to meet with us again. Cool to see something positive like this happen just from playing basketball🙌
Another lesson we had was with our other friend from Sierra Leone who is also Muslim, named Fullah. He is similar to Unisa (basketball player from Sierra Leone) in that he says that he is Muslim but believes a lot of things that someone who is Christian would. We taught him the Plan of Salvation and focused a lot on how Jesus Christ is what makes everything possible and he seemed to really like it and made some comments implying that he wants to continue on this path we have started him on.
We had a lesson with this guy from Uganda named Gilbert who was really friendly. We taught him about the Book of Mormon and Restoration of truth+authority through Joseph Smith. When we were talking it seemed like he was not taking in anything we were saying as he was slightly nodding and then would butt in with a pretty unrelated question. After we explained everything my companion asked him what his thoughts were and he sat there for a second and said he didn't understand the question. I repeated it in bit of a different way and he just sat there for a second again and then says "What are my thoughts?..... It's wonderful!!! I am wondering why I'm hearing this now, why I am not a young man hearing this!" He then proceeded to ask some questions about how our church compares with Catholicism but in the end seemed pretty excited for reading the Book of Mormon and coming to church in the future. This was definitely one of the best reactions I have had to teaching this on my mission.
Adriana (teenager from Peru/USA) who we taught last week and came to church met with us again this week and it went pretty good. The great thing happening with her right now is that she has made really good friends with one of the members so they have been spending a lot of time together which makes it easy for us to teach with the member as well. She came to church again on Sunday and has been reading a little bit from the Book of Mormon so things are going pretty good with her.
Last lesson I wanna mention was with Grace who is also from Uganda. This is the girl that has just gotten back from being a missionary for her church in Peru that I was able to meet a second time on the street after she wouldn't give me her phone number the first time. Well going into the lesson she already knew all of the basic stuff about our church so we talked a lot about the importance of the Book of Mormon and the idea of God continuing to reveal more truth/information to us today. It was a really good discussion and she is really really nice and open to hearing out all the points we make. I don't know why but I have a really really strong feeling that this lady needs / is going to accept the Book of Mormon, but she is not quite there yet because she wants a spiritual confirmation before she starts reading, because she said in her whole life God has guided her step by step so she will continue to follow to the pattern she has learned. Something that was really cool that she said though is that the second time we ran into each other on the street (after she said we will meet if the Holy Spirit guides us to) she didn't even need to go out that day, but she felt like guided by the Spirit that she needed to go to the grocery store even though she didn't need food. And then on her way there she said when someone walked up behind her she already knew it was me before looking to see who it was. So basically just confirming that God guided us to meet again so I'm hoping it will just be a matter of time before we can meet again.
On church this Sunday one of the members gave one of my favorite talks that I have heard in a sacrament meeting before. She talked about expectations - how they basically never end with a positive result. Either the expectation is satisfied so we have a sigh of relief or it isn't and we are feeling disappointed. She proceeded to say that someone once told her that disappointment is prideful, in the sense that if we expect something from God and then don't get it and are disappointed, we are basically showing that we think our expectation/will is more important than God's will in our eyes. Of course every expectation in life doesn't have to do with God and there are many moments where it is natural to be disappointed, but to me this was a good lesson on humility. That instead of expecting a bunch of specific things to happen we can have trust in God's will and choose to be grateful for our current circumstances, which in turn will create an environment where we can feel more joy. The member also shared two really good quotes from Elder Sabin:
-"when nothing is expected and everything is appreciated, life becomes magical"
-"you will never be happier than you are grateful"
Humility and gratitude are both powerful ways to feel more joy in our life. However, they both take action and concentrated effort. As we put in that effort, the Lord will magnify what we put in.
Mosiah 4:9 - "Believe in God; believe that he is, and that he created all things, both in heaven and in earth; believe that he has all wisdom, and all power, both in heaven and in earth; believe that man doth not comprehend all the things which the Lord can comprehend"
Sorry for the extra long email this week but thank you to all those who read I hope it was somewhat interesting.
Ha en bra vecka 🙏❤️
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