Sweden - April 22, 2013

A little more on Swedish culture:

Jordan asked, so just for the record, Swedes do love their meatballs! I've had probably 5 or 6 meals with Swedish meatballs of some sort or another (most often served with potatoes).

Tea is big here. It's at ward functions, we often have it at members'/investigators' houses. There are a huge variety of herbal teas that everyone drinks (since members obviously can't have the other varieties). So I think I've drunken more tea in the last month than the last three/four years of my life.

Transfers will happen on May 9th (if everything goes according to plan and the 19 new missionaries are actually able to make it out of the MTC with their visas on time). I don't know yet if I'm going to be training for sure or whether or not I'll be moving, but the most likely scenario is that I'll stay here and be training. I should know within the next week whether or not I'm training and the week after whether or not I'll be transferring (potentially the two can happen at the same time, but now always, so we'll see!).

I did get the package from you all. Thank you for the Reese’s' eggs especially! I've been giving out most of the taffy since most Swedes have never really tried or even heard of it before.

This week has been a little weird... at the beginning of the week after weekly planning we pretty much had eighteen lessons planned (pretty much set in stone) and over half of them canceled last minute. We were able to make up at least some of the difference, but it was a little strange to say the least.

This week we continued to work with two potential investigators who we help teach English to. One of them is really positive towards the Church (which is how we could use how to pray/how to bear your testimony in English as lesson topics), while the other is still warming up to the idea. We’re doing our best to built up our relationship with her.

We were able to meet with a former investigator and she was super happy that we could come. We have an appointment with her next week. She gave the prayer at the end of the lesson and she even asked for the strength to able to read the assignment that we gave her. She was super sweet.

We also were able to meet with a couple of less actives. One of them actually came to Church yesterday for the second week in a row! He was getting ready to go out into the foyer during Sunday School when we asked him if we could have a practice lesson with him, which he reluctantly agreed to. At the beginning we asked him how much he could remember about the Plan of Salvation and he said that honestly he couldn't remember that much. Well, that didn't last for long, because as we began to discuss things in more detail, he began to remember quite a bit and he would get more animated with each moment. By the end of the lesson, the other member who sat in with us had asked us, "Now when is he going on a mission?" just because of how passionate he was about things. It's very clear that he would make a fantastic missionary, so that's the ultimate goal in mind. It's funny because in many ways he actually reminds me of Jared.

This week we were reading in the Missionary Leadership section of the white handbook, and one scripture really stuck out to me, D&C 121:44, which has a phrase "thy faithfulness is stronger than the cords of death." It got me to think more about how important faith is and how I need to develop it more fully. Having faith that is stronger than the cords of death is pretty significant, because there was only one being that was able to consciously break those cords and it was because of Him, everyone else is capable of being resurrected. So we need to work on having faithfulness even stronger than that! Which is obviously not impossible, but it certainly takes a bit an effort to achieve. So, I'm working on it. Which explains why quite a bit of my scripture reading this week was centered on faith. Ether 12 particularly stood out, simply because of how important it is that we take the time to develop and strengthen the faith that we already do have, let alone of topics we are less sure about. Faith and hope are interconnected and the two together gives us immeasurable strength.