Week 57- Used My Country Dancing Skeels

July 13, 2018

Week 57- Used My Country Dancing Skeels

Hejsan allihopa!!

I hope you all enjoyed a nice American 4th of July filled with bbq, games, and seeing what new ways you can shoot fireworks.

4th of July here was like any other day. I was on splits (when you exchange mission companions and spend the day with a new companion) with Elder Harden and we had a full day of knocking doors! Pretty exciting ha ha we've done quite a bit of knocking lately, but are seeing some fruits of our labors.

But! The real party was the night before the 4th. We had our usual Tuesday night activity on July 3rd, and it was a 4th of July celebration thrown by the Americans. I mentioned it last week I think, but here's how it went down:

We started off with a nice spiritual message as usual. We're always unsure whether to do these in Swedish or English because some of the people that come to the activities speak Swedish and some other languages but have to communicate in English (Sweden is FILLED with people from all over the world. Lots of people from the middle east, and a lot from Eritrea and Somalia, kinda random).

Anyways, then we headed out and everyone did a 3 legged race while me and my friend William started grilling all the meat. William is a 17yo kid we met on the bus one prep day morning to the market and then we saw him again and invited him to the Tuesday night activities and he came! He's come a few times already, but has become good friends with us and helps us with Swedish. But we grilled up everything then everyone ate some good American BBQ.

Afterwards, we headed to the grass field to do some line dancing which actually went pretty well. Elder Francis and I came up with the dance about 15 mins before the activity started and the Swedes loved it... they didn't know if it was good or bad because they've never line danced ha ha. Overall the activity was a good time, we had about 20 or 25 people there (a mix of members and non-members) and it was a solid way to show the ward that we have people we know and are building relationships.

A spiritual experience this week was something that happened on splits. So something Elder Francis and I have done recently is to think of something specific to keep an eye out for while knocking doors. We pray and ask for something specific, for example, to meet a woman with a little girl, or a father watering the lawn, or someone who is cooking dinner; when we see them I guess the goal is to just know we especially need to talk to them because God inspired us with their description beforehand. So on splits, I explained this to Elder Harden and he responds with "A guy with a dinosaur on his shirt"... I thought okay, ha ha pretty specific but I'm not gonna tell him otherwise so let's go with it. I thought of a woman with her hair up. So we head out tracting, meet a woman with her hair up and had a good contact. The stund is almost over and this old man answers the door with a white tank top on. We talk at the door and then ask if we can come in. He says yes, so we head in to teach him the about the Book of Mormon. We take a seat on his sofa, begin with an opening prayer, and then both look up... Over on his bookshelf there were about 5 dinosaur toys all in a line. We taught the man a great lesson, and then left chuckling to ourselves because 1) God answered our prayer/inspired us with those descriptions of people (even with something so specific and random as a dinosaur) and 2) The dino wasn't on anyone's shirt but rather just a toy in an old man's house... God's got a sense of humor.

I think a few deeper lessons can be learned from this. It taught me that we shouldn't be afraid to ask God for specific things when we need them. We asked for descriptions, God told us the description and showed us where it was when we were willing to work for it. But there's the sometimes frustrating side to all this as well-- our answers to prayers don't always come in the way we would like them. They often take other forms but if we are observant then we will see that in the end God answers us in ways that were best for us.

Enjoy the summer sun and eat an otterpop or 10 for me!

With Love,

Elder Gordon