t-Minus 10 Weeks-- Transfers, New comp and the Bird Man

March 04, 2019

t-Minus 10 Weeks-- Transfers, New comp and the Bird Man

Hallå hallå everyone,

The time has arrived and some people are gettin transferred around. I, thankfully, am stickin around here in Gothenburg another 6 weeks (and likely the full 12 weeks until I head home) but sadly Elder Moss is taking off. The good ones never stay together long😖 Good news though is that he is moving to Gubbängen to be with the guy that replaced me there 6 weeks ago! So I got to fill him in the juicy deets of that blessed area 🙌 it'll be sad though sayin goodbye to a brother.

This past week went quick mainly due to being on exchanges for 2 days down in Kungsbacka again. Except this time I got to be with Elder Balls. We had a good time out knocking doors and chatting with people on buses. One experience that we laughed a bit at looking back was that we first knocked on the door of a swedish mother who wasn't really interested but we saw she had some kids so we offered to sing a nice children's gospel song for the kids to which she said "go ahead". We sing "I am a Child of God" for them and then after we said "We like that song because we believe we're one big family..." and all that jazz. We keep goin on to the next one and we knock on the door of a house that was playing some familiar music nice n loud for us to hear. After ringing the doorbell, the song "I'll Be Missin You" by Diddy turns off and we expected a 15 yo kid to come to the door, but instead a 40 year old african woman answers. We tell her where we're from, what we do, tell her she's got a nice taste in music, and then I say "I like that song because it talks about his friend who passes away and how he hopes he's taken care of up in heaven". That then led to a conversation about life after death and she closed the door afterwards with the good word of God placed firmly in her hands. Sometimes ya gotta get creative with finding ways to tie stuff back to the message. Later that night we bonded with a guy on the train over a conversation about R Kelly which was then somehow tied back into life's biggest questions. #blessed for my knowledge of certain music from before the mission but also some plans to clean it up coming back haha

Besides that, we're all healthy again and prepping for the changes coming this week. It's been cool to see our teaching pool grow over the last 6 weeks as we meet people through "pure coincidences". It shows me God has his eye on everyone and knows what we're goin through and which people we need to talk to/meet in order to get the help we need.

Week 91

It's been a week of change here in good ol' Göteborg. We got transfer calls this last week and Elder Moss is taken off the Gubbängen so I helped him to the station down town and sent him off with a big old bro hug. About an hour later, after being on splits with an elderly missionary couple, we picked up Elder Blake Thompson. He's from Mesa, AZ, graduated 2018 but is only like 2 months younger than me. He's a fun guy to be around, easy going, personable... it's gonna be a solid last couple months with him.

For some reason when you are working for God you get some odd people that contact you... this week we were at the church when we got a call from a man that said he had a bad sense of conscience over something he did to a bird, and he said he wanted us to come on by. So we bike over there to try and teach him something to comfort him. We get talking to him and find out he actually pushed back a birdhouse into a ventilation unit a few years back and the bird was trapped and died. This guy was telling us how bad he felt about it for the past few years and how this bird has been on his mind on and off. We read some good scriptures for him about how everyone can be forgiven if their heart is in the right place and after telling him it felt like his heart was in the right place, he got up and shook elder Thompsons hand and thanked him. So after a confession about an accidental bird death, lots of tears, a drippy nose, and a hug to comfort the man, we left our 53 year old friend and hope he'll feel some relief soon.

Besides that, we met this cool dude who works at a rock climbing gym. He's from Ecuador but moved here 8 years back and learned fluent Swedish and then moved on to learning English. He's spent time in the jungles of south America with monks, up in the Andes mountains, in temples in India, and now he's here in Göteborg still on his spiritual search for truth. We taught him about how God has given all the truth including Christ's church back to us and everything seemed to click for him. Things are lookin' positive with him 😏

Take care,

Elder Gordon