Week 43--- Easter in Sweden

April 08, 2018

Week 43--- Easter in Sweden

Car selfie and my hair cutting skills.

Tjenare!

This week's highlights:

Elder Strong and I bought the ingredients for lasagna and met P at the church during dinner hour and he cooked us up some good lasagna and answered our Swedish questions that we had. He's been helping us with our pronunciation.

We've done a bunch with P, we meet with him every day. We had a family home evening at the branch president's house with him and his wife and played some gospel pictionary. P has read the Book of Mormon almost twice through now so he knew the answers better than most of us did ha ha He's the man. He watched all of conference with us at the church too. His baptism is planned for this Saturday (April 7th) so we've been getting prepared for that.

The baptismal font here in Skellefteå hasn't been used much so the water is brown and rusty. We've been filtering out the water this week and are going to get in and scrub it out tonight, clean the place up for the big day ;) I'm really stoked for P to get to experience being baptized. He's grown closer to God, has visibly become happier, and has had some cool experiences in regards of getting direct answers to his prayers.

We had a solid fika with Ulla again this week so Elder Strong got to experience a complete fika (bread selection, tea, cheese, butter, cookies, cake, meats, etc.).

I'm sure most of you LDS friends and family watched the General Conference that is broadcast on Saturday and Sunday, at home in your comfy PJ's. This is how the broadcast works here in Sweden.

Conference here works differently for sure because of the time change. So Saturday night at 6 pm we watched the Saturday morning session LIVE (and only bishops or branch presidents have the link to be able to watch those live at the congregations, so it isn't available for all Swedes to watch the Swedish translated live conference). Then Sunday morning we watched the Saturday night session not live, the Swedish version was uploaded to the church's website.

Sunday night we watched the Sunday morning session live (with Kjell's link) and then Monday night we're going to watch the Sunday evening session at the church with PerJohan and then watch Priesthood session tomorrow morning with him again.

So the times are a little messed up but it works. I watched Saturday morning in English, and then yesterday morning it was only Ulla who came to watch conference (because she mixed up the times of when the whole branch was coming, long story) and she refused to watch the session in Swedish downstairs in the chapel by herself so she made us watch it in Swedish with her ha ha kind of a grouchy old lady but that's Ulla, gotta love her. P watched it in English upstairs.

There are some swedes here that prefer to watch it in English so that they can hear the actual words and voices of the speakers, so that included P and then an Investigator named S who came last night. He can speak fluent Swedish, English, and Thai, and some French. People here in Europe speak way more languages than we do in america. So besides the Saturday afternoon session, I'll be watching all of them in English which is nice. I can understand everything in Swedish, but it takes a bit more effort and it doesn't stick in my brain as well (also easier to fall asleep )

Conference is a fun time though, I actually watch it here on the mission as opposed to falling asleep on the couch or dinkin around on my phone. It's good for me :)

It's a tradition here that each missionary goes and buys lösgodis, or godis (like candy in bulk) before every General Conference. So we went to the neighborhood Willy's (grocery store) and they had a killer sale where we bought godis for 29 krowns per kg (2.75 dollars for 2.2lbs). Naturally we had to buy two kilos each to munch on. It helped keep us awake too.

Signs of spring... everything is melting. There is still plenty of snow lying around but the roads and small spots of actual ground are visible which is exciting. I feel like it's been months since I've seen actual roads here because they usually are covered. It's been sunny all week pretty much and plus 5C degrees which is feels super warm. Today and yesterday though it got back down to -10C haha so ya never know. It's lighter here too. It's sunny when we wake up at 6:30 which is really nice, makes it easier to wake up. It's only going to get sunnier too. Its nice seeing the sun finally after what feels like 6 months without it, to it being kind of an annoyance because it will still be light at 10 or 11 at night when we're trying to sleep. That's how it was in Västerås when I first got there and it will be even worse here in Norrland.

We had a solid Easter week and got to share the message of Christ with others.

Easter In Sweden, is celebrated but not in a religious way, kinda like everything here. A lot of people take work off from Friday until Monday for Easter break and they go visit family or travel up to the mountains and ski or hangout up there. Apparently kids go around with little cards they made and give them to people at their door and then the people give them candy kinda like trick-or-treating. I didn't see any kids doing that so I'm not sure how popular that really is. No Easter Egg hunts here tyvärr (unfortunately). Easter Ham is a thing here, påsk skinka :)

In search for good scriptures about Easter, I came across Mosiah 16:6-9 which says that because of Christ, death has no sting and we can all be resurrected one day as he was. The part I really like is that Christ is "a light that is endless, that can never be darkened". What power there is in his light. The light is always there, sometimes we just don't recognize it. Try to look for Christ's light in your lives this week and thank him for what he has blessed you with :)

Glad Påsk! Jag älskar er! (Happy Easter! I love you!)

Äldste Gordon

ps. If you want to send a letter, send it to this address and it'll come directly to my apartment here in Skellefteå (arriving quicker): I could get transferred in 5 weeks, so send a letter by April 23rd or I may be gone and I don't think the missionaries are good about forwarding letters, unfortunately.

Aldste Rylan Gordon

Vitbergsvägen 1D

931 41 Skellefteå

Sweden

Just some Swedish words translated.

Vitbergsvägen= White Mountain Way (sounds cool huh)

Sverige = Sweden

Svenska = Swedish

Making choklad bollar (chocolate balls. They're also called nigre bollar,
which isn't very PC to translate in English.)

The Swedish High School English class we visited and taught them about being an
American Teen. They had some fun questions for us to answer. They love America!