I do know Elder Knudson. He is in my zone and I just met him at a zone conference last week. It's his first transfer here in Norway, he just got here from the MTC about 7 weeks ago. I didn't have a chance to talk to him too much, but he did sit right behind me for the whole conference. Crazy small world.
I did get the hoodies, but there weren't any shoes. We just got another package slip the other day, so if you sent them separately that may be what that is. The problem is, they moved the place where our packages get delivered to and it's about a kilometer or so out of the way. Kind of annoying, but in any case we have to walk over there sometime this week and pick that up.
It has started to get cold. I've started thinking in Celsius so I can only tell you it's been around 5 or 6 degrees during the day and then dropping below 0 overnight. That's about 45-50 degreesish Fahrenheit during the day. No snow yet, but snow isn't a huge feature of Bergen anyways.
Norwegians attempt to celebrate Halloween haha. It's just starting to catch on, but apparently the kids have a tendency to dress up and try to get candy on the 30th and November 1st, hahaha. They'll get it eventually, I'm sure.
We didn't manage to find anyone really positive this week. Kent and his brother come to pretty much all of the church activities during the week, so we see them several times outside of teaches. They are doing pretty well though, and things seem to be moving forward towards their baptismal dates in 12 days. Apparently these brothers have a long history of investigating the church off and on for years. I spoke to a sister missionary who taught Kent about a year ago, and they never made any real progress with him. So it's really exciting to be around when he starts to make the decision to be baptized.
I did talk to a couple of chinese guys this week. That was really cool. It's amazing how little they know about religion and the outside world in general. They were extremely intelligent, and they knew quite a bit about history and those sorts of things, but as far as experiencing the world outside of China, they got nothin'. But it's made them extremely curious and a very humble people, and a lot of fun to talk to. Unfortunately, I don't know how much they understood of our message....there was a pretty huge language barrier. But their little eyes just about popped out of their heads when we showed them a chinese translation of the Book of Mormon. I don't think he had a clue what the book actually was, but he seemed excited just to read something in his own language. We'll invite them to some of the YSA activities this week, but I don't know how far we'll get in teaching them. But we'll see.
My district attended a funeral this past friday for the family member of someone we know. It's a part member family, so the funeral was held in a Norwegian State church. This was the second time I've attended the State church's services. It was a very nice ceremony, but a little sad. The grandmother at one point stood up and said, "I don't understand why this happened." The priest later stood up and tried to offer comfort. The grandmother again stood up afterwards and said, "I still don't understand why this happened." The priest herself said she didn't know why God allows bad things to happen. It was sad and frustrating to sit at the back of the church watching this grieving family's questions not be answered. We decided it wouldn't be tactful to mention the Plan of Salvation, but it certainly was tempting. The part of the family which are members later came up to us, and we were able to offer some comfort. It really made me appreciate the answers that the Gospel and the knowledge of God's plan bring to us.
Oh and I almost forgot! I might have mentioned before about how we have been taking advantage of the sunny days by drawing the Plan of Salvation in chalk in the middle of Bergen. Well we did it again this week, and attracted the attention of the local Bergen newspaper. There was a man snapping about a million and a half pictures of us drawing and then he asked a couple of questions to another one of the missionaries. It was a nice surprise to see the branch president hold up the HUGE picture which was in the Saturday edition of the newspaper during Priesthood yesterday. There wasn't an article to go with the picture, but we did get a caption with a quick explanation and a quote from our missionary.
That's all folks!
Elder Sessions
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