Week 38/39....Finding and Teaching in the Cold

March 08, 2018

Week 38/39....Finding and Teaching in the Cold

Week 38 ---This week has been a lot of time spent finding more people to teach out in the cold! We had a few days of about 0*F or lower which makes for a chilly experience for sure.

Since we've been out finding people so much, we figured we'd try a few new things to spice it up and see if they work.

First idea came from when Äldste Strong busted out a yo-yo in front of a less active member (16 y/o girl) and she went berserk over seeing one. She thought they only existed in America. So we were going to take it out until Äldste Strong got too aggressive learning yo-yo tricks and it broke, but thankfully we had some backup ideas:

Our next idea was to go out contacting (talking to people on the street) with a Rubix Cube and try to use it to teach people about how the Church of Jesus Christ was established, changed for a time by people, yet was restored back to Earth. We used it on this older lady and I asked her to mix it up, so she just rotated the top and bottom once... so that made it easy on my end to solve but hey, she was impressed by it.

Our third idea was to go out with a Mormons Bok (book of Mormon) that had a scripture marked every 2 pages up to page 100. We would go up to someone and ask them to choose a number between 1 and 100 and see what special message God has for them that day. We'd flip open to that page, have them read the scripture, then apply it to them. We used this on a 20 yo girl and the scripture was about a tabernacle and Ä Strong and I just look at each other like "Who's taking this one" ha ha I definitely stretched it but she liked it! It keeps us on our toes :)

Our fourth idea was to call some schools in the area and see if we could go in to an English class and speak good ol' American English with them or present about America (since Swedes love America, especially teens). We made a couple connections and may be going in this week some time to talk about America or speak to a religion class about Mormonism which would be sweet.

Week 39-- It's been a solid week! Had a few more lessons than usual which was good. Here are some highlights:

So Äldste Callor and I met this guy on the street named B (like saying banana with a British accent) who's an older guy, super outgoing, and kinda crazy. He speaks fluent french and apparently arabic, even though he said he grew up in France. Anyways, we got his number.

Fast forward 2 weeks later. Äldste Strong and I finally meet this guy in stan (like downtown) and he wanted to grab an espresso so we go into a coffee shop. We had just eaten lunch, but he said if we are in the shop we have to buy something, we didn't quite understand what he was going for but then he said "Mat kommer med Gud" (food comes with God) so while we agreed to split a cinnamon roll, he insisted on hooking us up with milk, kladkaka (a Swedish chocolate cake/brownie) and some other stuff. We felt bad he was spending so much money on us, so we tried our best to give him something solid about God to help him out. After 30 mins of trying to teach something (this guy's a talker) we finally were able to leave him with a french Book of Mormon and a prayer. Strong and I were catching a whiff of some alcohol on this guy's breathe so we're not sure how much of the meet will stay with him... Not sure if we'll see him again, but we had to take this selfie to remember our generous, good man B.

There is this less active church member who lives about an hour and 15 mins away that Elder Strong and I decided it was time to go visit. We called up Alvin (a church member, 33, from Liberia) to come with us. Alvin isn't a fan of dogs, and can't speak Swedish, just to give you an idea here. We get to this lady's house who lives in the middle of nowhere, and go in to teach her. She said she's sick with a cold and was coughing a bunch. When we walked in it was like walking through a wall of dog musk (she has 7 dogs).... She brought out some weinerbröd (Swedish pastry), pepparkakor (gingerbread cookies) and saft (juice concentrate) for us.. I felt for Alvin, he had to sit there for an hour, not understanding a word of what's going on, and scared of dogs. I looked over at one point and saw him pulling dog hair out of his drink and off his tongue, whatta champ, we're rewarding him with some cookies soon. Great lesson with this lady though, super sweet woman, we're going to start calling her and reading the scriptures with her.

Last experience was last night while we were knocking doors in this neighborhood. After getting a bunch of "not interested", we knocked on this door and 2 Swedish tjejs (girls) answered, about the same age as us. We talked to them about the church a bit, they weren't too interested in our message, we asked if we could come back to teach them some time and they said probably not because they were leaving to Prague this week, so we left them with a card and kept going.

Äldste Strong and I felt like we should've brought up the Book of Mormon with them. At the end of our time in that neighborhood, I had the idea to go back and give them each a book as something to reading on the plane ha ha so we went back and they were surprised to see us again. They said they had just googled what the difference is between Mormons and other churches, so kinda cool we felt like we needed to go back and tell them about that. I gave them each a book, then Äldste Strong went right in and taught them about the book and restoration of our church, while they still weren't crazy interested, at least now they know about the book and have some good reading to do on the flight :)

Small experiences like this show me that God is involved in the work of spreading His message. We didn't know those two girls had became curious and googled our church right after we left, but God did and sent us back there to answer their curiosity.

This week shows that on the mission, you have some experiences like teaching crazy drunk guys and visiting old dog ladies, but you also have solid experiences where you feel led by God to specific people in order to help them come closer to Him. I'm glad to be a part of it.

Have a great week!

Love,

Äldste Gordon