Week 58/59...It hasn't been this hot for 206 years in Sverige!

It is getting hotter again here in Sweden and really feels like summer. Humidity has spiked and it's been in the 80's, so my back and pants are basically wet all the time from biking around in the heat ha ha but hey, I'm not complaining, it's better than knocking doors in -20*F.

Sweden hasn't had this kinda of a summer in 260 years (or 206)... a decent while. This isn't the Sweden summer I remember last year ha ha while biking home 2 days ago, it started sprinkling when we left the station in kallhäll and about 1 min later it was dumping the hardest I've ever seen since being in Sweden. We had a 10 min bike ride home in full downpour and were just soaked to the bone by the time we got back. We had to change out of our clothes and hang everything up bc it was dripping, shoes were like sponges ha ha it was fun. I felt like I was in the hurricane scene of the other side of heaven but Sweden version. Moments like that are fun. 

This week has been pretty fun. We had Zone Conference on tuesday so we got to see the other missionaries and get some more training. As a missionary here in Sweden, you are always doing finding work. Even if you are teaching a bunch of lessons, it usually only lasts so long before you are out finding more people to teach (the goal is to be constantly finding so you can be constantly teaching). So! We've been doing a lot of finding work here in Jakan (slang for Jakobsberg) and thought to spice things up by trying new finding ideas... so here's what we came up with this week:

We went out with a whiteboard that had the question "What makes you happy?" and asked people to write their answers. We got some solid answers like family, and friends, and some others like horses or even Gucci  and beer (which we decided to erase for obvious reasons), they were nice dudes though, meant well. But it was sweet to go around and remind people about what makes them happy. People even just smiled seeing us in stan. 

The next one was listing a Free Book of Mormon on Facebook marketplace. We wrote a nice little description to attract people to the book and now are just waiting for people to collect their free copy, TODAY! We tried listing free help with family history stuff but facebook didn't let us.

The last one was a stretch, buuuut we called the local newspaper and tried to get a little article in there about us, the two new Americans to Kallhäll (the smaller area where we moved to a few months back). After we said we were Americans the lady working at the newspaper company switched to English and asked us "But what's your hook? What's the news?" We told her we'll get back to her with something interesting... I guess being two Americans that say hi to everyone didn't cut it. 

Let me know if you know of/can think of any cool or new finding ideas! shoot me an email.

Along with these new finding activities, we went to a grill out with a cool family. We met the mother and son (he's 13) at the train station and had a solid conversation. The son came to a Tuesday night activity alone and so we took him under our wing and became good friends. He's insanely good at magic and likes skateboarding, so my dabbling in both of those my year at BYU helped me earn some of his respect. He came back the next week with his mom and 2 sisters and they loved it. We went to their place and her swedish sambo (significant other they live with without being married) made us wayyyy good food-- a couple kinds of sausage, juicy steak, and some dank potatoes. We shared a message about the Book of Mormon and she said she felt something like her heart beat picked up. We're hoping to teach them again this week. 

Week 59----

Tjenare familj och vänner!

I'm gonna hop right in to the weekly update! 

I've got some new foods I tried this week that I wanna tell you all about. 

The first one is called a krusbär. We were tracting and a lady was out front of her house picking these. They look like little watermelon berries but she gave us one to try and it tasted like a raspberry. She said it was called a gooseberry in English... sounded familiar but I'd never seen or tried them. 10/10 would do again. 

The next one is called risgrynsgröt, or rice porridge. It comes usually in a plastic tube you buy at the store. You squeeze it all into a pot, warm it up, throw some cinnamon and sugar in there if ya want it extra sweet, and eat. Smaklig måltid! (bon appetit). This can be eaten for dessert, but I've had it for a dinner at a members house before. They cook up regular rice with milk, then you add your own cinnamon and milk to it. Warms the soul :)

The last new food for the week is something called maishy (something like that). It's an Arabic dish that a family from Syria made for us (the mom whipped it up in like 10 minutes then they gave us TONS, they're way nice people and offer tons of food). So after a big fruit platter, water, and juice, they gave us maishy which is a stuffed zucchini with rice and meat inside of it. Maybe you're wondering how it went down meeting a family from Syria, welll that's where the inspired flying by the seat of your pants comes in. 

Elder Francis and I were out knocking doors one night and this lady walked by with a Ben n Jerry's shirt on. The conversation went something like this:

"Hi! Do you work at Ben and Jerry's?" "Yeah" "Where is it?" "Barkarby, come by and I'll invite you to ice cream" "What time?" "I work this friday 11-8" "Sweet we'll be there!". So we wrote it in our planner without much thought besides scoring some free ice cream during lunch time on friday. 

Friday rolls around, after we finish planning for the week we headed to Barkarby and went by a member there who wasn't home. So THEN we decide to look up where the Ben n Jerry's is. Nothin comes up on google... so we start asking some of the locals and they have no clue. We laugh because it was dumb of us to not even look up and see if a Ben and Jerry's existed there haha we thought, okay we have about 30 mins before our bus leaves, lets pray and figure out what we should do. Elder Francis felt like we should walk 15 mins one direction then come back in time for the bus. So we did that, and there was no one on the path bc it was basically next to a small side road. But we saw a mother and a daughter who's car had broken down so we helped them push it to the side of the road. I thought, okay sweet that was the reason why we came here, to help those two. We kept on walking and we see only 1 guy, way out in the distance, so we walk over and talk to him and after about 3 mins he invites us to his place so we of course agreed! We got to teach him, his brother, and mother about what the Book of Mormon is and that was when they made us tonsss of food haha we met him again and taught him, so we'll see how it goes. He ended up giving us a ride back to Kallhäll too. 

Thinking back, we normally think through things more (we're not total scrubs haha) but for some reason this time it's like we didn't even question it, we WERE going to Barkarby (maybe it was the free ice cream offer). But we so clearly needed to go there in order to meet our new friend and teach him. It's like God gave us a mental brainfart so we'd head there. God works in mysterious ways. 

I met a guy that is 100 yrs old this week by the way. He didn't look a day past 80. I asked him what's the meaning of life and he says He's always like girls but when you get old it's hard because they don't like you as much. So after 100 years, that was the wisdom I got haha take it how you'd like. 

Ha en bra vecka!

Äldste Gordon