T Minus 8.5 weeks--- Finding the Lost and the Pro-skater pirate

Week 92—Finding the Lost and Pro-Skater Pirate

Hello everyone!

This week has been a jam-packed week with stuff. Recently there has been a focus in our mission of "ministering" with the congregation here, which basically means going and visiting other members in the church and making sure they are taken care of. Part of this focus includes helping the members that aren't very active make their way back to church. We've had some cool experiences with that. 

We've met 3 members this week (a Russian lady in her 70's, lady from Ecuador in her 40's, and a Swedish guy in his 20's) that for one reason or another stopped coming to church. The ways we were able to meet them were all through things lining up perfectly with our schedule, more like our original plan getting wrecked and us feeling like we should go by these people and see if they were home. We were able to meet 2 of them again in the same week and hear their story of how they were baptized in the past, and one of those came to church for the first time in 20 years. What was so interesting to me was that each and every one of them remembered well the feelings they had when they met the missionaries and started changing their lives to follow God, but over time just forgot and stopped doing the necessary things to keep a faith going -- life's small inconveniences slowly pulled them away. As we heard their stories, you could just tell that they felt the feelings over again and could remember the pure happiness they experienced at the time of their conversion. We've have about 100 members that come to church here, and several hundred who are members in the Gothenburg area yet don't come, so there are a lot of these kinds of stories out there waiting for two 20 yr old American goobs to come knocking on their door. 

The second notable experience of this week happened on Monday. We were headed home from the young adult center downtown and we started chatting with this guy also waiting for the spårvagn. He had long hair, shabby clothes, and was smoking a cigarette. After chatting with him for a few minutes, we hopped unknowingly onto the wrong spårvagn only to realize 30 seconds later that it was the wrong one, so we did the walk of shame back to the original bus stop and our friend was still there. After chuckling that we went the wrong way, he asked us "so why did you come up and talk to me?", because earlier that day he had prayed and asked God to help him meet some good people that could help him. Here's a bit about this guy, he is a sjöman, or a sailor that had his own boat, late 20's. While sailing around, he parked his boat in the wrong parking spot and it turns out boats don't get a little parking ticket here when they're in the wrong place, they get confiscated. So the boat and all of his belongings were taken and he had come back to Sweden the very day we met him. After meeting him the day after and then another time during the week, we heard this guy's story about how he had struggled with addictions to serious drugs, depression and at times suicide yet through the hope and light he felt from Christ was able to pull himself out of the dark. Several other events with this man showed me so clearly that God knows what is going on in all of our lives. I laugh thinking about how slim of chances it is that me, a boy from Sammamish, WA would meet him, a sailor and pro skater in Sweden who found himself in the middle of a crisis right at the time he needed it. 

If my mission has taught me anything, it's that God helps us through guiding other people. Often His "miraculous" interjections aren't complete miracles, aren't saving someone's life, aren't healing someone from sickness, but rather are just making it so that kind people are in the right place to be able to help someone else feel seen and cared about (aka God's love). I'm glad to be that guy to help others feel a deeper sort of love and purpose. 

Week  93

Hej!

We were busy this whole week with splits, teaching people and returning members, and being with members yet I can't really think of much to write about. 

Some funny things from the week/about Sweden:

- Sweden is an incredibly safe country. Any time you lost something, you will pretty much always get it back. I left my backpack filled with valuables on a train in downtown Stockholm once and was able to reclaim it 4 days later and everything was still there. If you drop a glove out while walking, or an article of clothing, Swedes will pick it up and put in on the nearest eye-level thing they can see in the same area so when you come back it is easy to find. So you'll sometimes see gloves put onto fence posts waiting for people to come back to reclaim them. I saw a flyer last week that someone put up because they found a lost watch at a bus stop and put their number on the flyer so the person who lost their clock could get it back. Swedes are very kind people. 

- While talking with this guy at a Swedish Church hot chocolate stand, he started laying into us about our beliefs. He kept referring to a "Robert Brown" who was a prophet in our church... turns out he was talking about Joseph Smith ha ha

- While out knocking doors this week, a lady switched to English on us when we said we are from America (because swedes love to practice their English when the get the chance). She expressed herself fairly well and then looked up at me and just said "You've got a big brain" ha ha not sure what she was going for there. 

As you can tell, nothing crazy happened here this week that would interest you, but things are tangibly improving here in Gothenburg with not only the congregation, but also with bringing back members of our church that have taken another path. 

One principle that I really have grasped lately is the idea that once someone is baptized and becomes a member of the Jesus Christ's Church, they are promised to be taken care of. Christ made sure that all of his "sheep" were tended to, and especially being here and being a representative for Christ, I have seen that the members of this church aren't forgotten (Moroni 6:4), and that the other sheep are there to make sure they continue to receive the care they need. 

With love,

Elder Gordon

My Pro Skater Pirate friend

Dessert

Visiting from Gubbagen ward...excited to see these cute faces

Gothenburg

Visited the high school invention presentations

Typical Swedish neighborhood