Week 2 in Sweden! March 25, 2013

Another week has already passed by?  Time certainly is in an interesting warp here on a mission.  

This week certainly had its ups and downs.  One of the harder moments was our lesson with a couple that Syster Spjut has been working with for several weeks.  During the lesson we were telling them why we are here as missionaries (our personal reasons) and that our purpose was to teach people about the church.  It wasn't much later that they straight up told us that they weren't interested in becoming Mormon and that they didn't see any difference between our church and their current religion.  And then on top of that our next appointment that day was a no show. 

We were able to teach a little boy his second lesson (he's a member and his mom wants him to have the discussions before he's baptized).  He's definitely excited to have us over.  At church that day he had written out his testimony and then copied it to give it to everyone.  So sweet!  He also really liked out object lesson for the restoration - we use little cups, each labeled with something that is essential to Christ's Church.  We then build a pyramid with those cups, making sure that priesthood is one of the foundational cups.  We then have someone remove the priesthood cup, which of course causes the pyramid to collapse.  We then show how other churches tried to make do with what they had, but it just wouldn't be the same shape as Christ's Church.  We rebuild the pyramid as we talk about the Restoration, the only difference being that the Church is called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints instead of the Church of Jesus Christ.  He agreed to pray about the things we taught to know if they were true. 

We've been working on a member program where we hope to fuel the enthusiasm for missionary work in our ward.  We plan to fully implement it this week and we expect to receive a number of referrals from it, which we are greatly looking forward to. 

A scripture that stood out to me this week was Luke 6:21 where the second half reads "Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh."  It just served as a good reminder to have hope and to find joy in the journey.  Though things may be difficult now, they will get better. 
  It's interesting to me how subtle the Spirit can be and how sometimes we don't immediately recognize its influence.  One thing that clearly stood out to me this week is how the Spirit works through us during preparation for lessons as well as the actual lessons.  Like this week when Syster Spjut and I were going over a couple of different lessons, we realized that inspired questions would come.  Things we haven't previously thought about for our investigators came to mind and we were able to implement these things during our lessons.  Through the Spirit, we knew that we needed to share why we were there as missionaries in the discussion with the couple I mentioned.  Even though things may not have turned out as we expected, it still needed to be shared, perhaps for some reason we won't be able to fathom until much later. 

Things are still a bit hard, but the language is coming along and the future looks bright.


Love you all!