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.
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! |
Perjohan making us some delish lasagne. It tasted so good! |
Perjohan, that man! |
Buying godis for conference. There are candy walls like this in all the stores. |
My favorite sour candies, closest to sour patch kids. |
Swedish sunset |
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