One year has passed, what have I learned?

June 15, 2018

One year has passed, what have I learned?

Tjenare!

Whelp the subject says it all. A year ago this Thursday I said goodbye to mom and dad, flew out of SeaTac, and entered the MTC after my last (and tasty) Cafe Rio smothered burrito. Reflecting back on this last year, here are some of my thoughts:

I've learned how to knock doors, speak Swedish, teach people about God, the basic missionary things. That's kind of surface level stuff, but on a deeper more spiritual level I've learned several things:

God has blessed me my whole life, He has given me a purpose and a guide to how I can be a happy man, true happiness comes from focusing on others, things don't always turn out how you want them to but how God meant for them to turn out... among many other things. Those are what come to mind right now.

The rest of the week was great, nice n hot. It has been in the 80's!! Crazy hot. It's enjoyable for sure, except when biking somewhere and especially when biking past swimming places (the hotter it is the less clothes there are on swedes) ha ha

We got to go to the temple in Stockholm this week and help clean it while it's closed for a month. That was about 2 hours of me and Äldste Francis chatting it up with a group of older ladies while cleaning a chandelier, it was pretty fun ha ha older ladies here in Sweden love talking to young clean-cut boys who make them feel good about themselves 😁

On Saturday we had a ward grillfest (Grill Party) at the church. We didn't get the memo it was BYOM (bring your own meat) but luckily the ward looks out for us and brought enough meat for us missionaries to feed us for the weekend. Swedish Grill parties consist of course of grilling up some meat, chatting, then playing some games like Kube (a Scandinavian game where you throw pins and try to knock down wooden blocks), musical chairs, run with and egg on a spoon, and a few more. It was a solid time! The ward feels like a family :)

This week was high school graduation for Swedish students. So after 3 years of high school (they have 3 here), the kids graduate and they have a few traditions. The few weeks before they graduate, the guys wear around a sailors cap everywhere so everyone knows they're graduating haha THEN here's this tradition, it's something that would'nt fly in america. The school rents big trucks and the kids climb in and basically parade through town, blasting loud party music, hanging banners off the side, spraying alcohol everywhere, and just being rowdy. It was pretty funny to see, but definitely a difference between Sweden and America

Another highlight of the week was a tracting stund (session) we had this week. Äldste Francis and I were feeling good, lots of energy, so we set a goal to get 4 people that were interested in meeting us. The first house was a 15 yo boy (typically not very interested) but we had a great conversation with him about God and he said we can come back. The second was a 17 yo boy from China that's been here 4 years. He said he likes to watch TV Series so we related that to how the Book of Mormon can be exciting then showed him a video that shows in 2 mins what happens after we die. The part that made us laugh was that after the video ended he was like "That was really positive! like 100% positive" in Chinese accented Swedish ha ha after that we met a woman from England who works in the Vasa Museum (huge ship) and her husband is from Virginia. They said we are welcome to come back and eat dinner with them some time. Aaand to finish it off we met a Swedish couple that said we could come back sometime and talk more about our message. Pretty successful night.

Our success in that area is due (I believe) to us praying about where we should knock doors, getting this specific area as an answer and then going there. It's been cool to meet people and feel like we were supposed to meet them. Also when we walk through the neighborhood everyone recognizes us because we've spent more than a few hours there ha ha

God is Good and people are crazy! (Billy Currington reference)

Love you guys,

Äldste Gordon