Kjære familie og venner!
I spent this week trudging through snow and ice with my handy dandy snow boots. When a missionary going to Norway opens his mission call (or, in my case, hears his call read over the phone), the first thing that runs through his mind is despite being awake for about 30% of geography class freshman year, he doesn't know exactly where Norway actually is. (Go figure.) When said missionary takes a look at a map, globe, etc. and realizes just how high up on the map Norway actually is, a wintry tundra being blasted by a blizzard is what flashes through his mind. Throw in the fact that my dear MTC teachers delighted in telling me stories of wiping frozen tears from their eyes, and you've got some pretty darn cold expectations.
My first 4 months here were anything but cold. I wrote home begging for short-sleeved shirts, cause I was melting like 12 year old girls at a Beiber concert. However, September hit and suddenly things started getting cooler....and cooler and cooler and colder and colder, until I thought it couldn't get much colder. Finally, the snow came last week. I mentioned that in my email. Mother Nature wasn't quite finished though. Despite the reports that Bergen didn't get a ton of snow, I woke up the next morning with about 6 inches on the ground. Norwegians have a twisted sense of how much snow is "a lot." Or maybe that's the part of me that lived in New Mexico, Texas, and Mississippi talking =P
It's not quite a wintry tundra and a blizzard, but trudging with my boots certainly fits my slightly less ambitious conceptions of serving in Norway. I mentioned to Elder Bird that I felt like my mission has finally begun, frozen tears and all. He agreed, as he carefully navigated the sidewalk which was frozen solid. The imagery was perfect haha
I may have mentioned before the news reporter who was following me and the district leader around. Well yesterday, Elder Perry and I were the main features in a 3 page spread in the Sunday Edition of Bergen Tidende (The Bergen Times). I've asked the reporter to send me the PDF file so that I could send it home for everyone, but he hasn't done it yet. So I'll send that along later. It's in Norwegian of course, so it'd be tough for ya'll to read, but at least you can look at the massive pictures! Or you could always Google translate the whole thing haha. It wasn't a bad article at all, and he only misquoted us once. So it wasn't too bad.
Norwegians definitely know how to celebrate Christmas. We had a massive Christmas concert and dinner on Saturday at the church. I sang in the choir (my parents' jaws just dropped there), and joined with the other missionaries in playing waiter for the dinner. It was a ton of fun, and we had a huge turnout. President Johansen flew in for the whole thing, and he got to see Jan, Kent, and Ane Rebekka in their element, which was really good. He was so impressed by the changes that can be seen in those three that he mentioned them in the mission wide phone call later that night. He used them as an example of how the Gospel literally changes lives. It's humbling to be a part of that. As a missionary, you don't see the gratification of your work until someone actually makes the changes themselves. But when it happens, it makes everything else worth it, and you realize that the little things you do have a huge effect on those around you.
The Gospel works. The Book of Mormon is true and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints literally is God's church on the earth today. That is our message. How anyone can disregard that, I don't understand. I don't understand how I ever disregarded it. NO ONE is born with a faith. We gain that through trying to find it. That doesn't mean we pray and ask God and that he'll suddenly light our lungs on fire. It doesn't always work like that. In fact, 95% of the time, it doesn't. We're supposed to find out for ourselves, and that does NOT mean that God is just gonna give us the answer. We commit ourselves to living the way that we're supposed to, and IF we are reading the scriptures and praying, THEN we'll get our answer. You can't expect to pray in the morning, go out and live completely contrary to the guidance of the scriptures and then expect to be told that it's true! You're lying to yourself and you're lying to God. But it's different for everyone. To me, stuff just makes sense, and I don't feel like an idiot while I'm explaining it or trying to understand it for myself. It may be hard to describe because of the varieties of ways in which our Father in Heaven speaks to us, but that doesn't make each individual person's answer any less real. A man is a fool if he denies the effect the Gospel has had on Ane Rebekka, Jan, Kent, me and millions of others. Something that good doesn't come from nothing. I don't know what I'll be going through for the rest of my life, but one thing is for certain, so long as I remember the good things that come of this Gospel, I won't need to worry about what a cherubim is, or the size of God's shoe. It's still true.
Elder Bird and I have been trying to encourage the people we're working with to keep their commitments. That's probably the biggest problem we're having right now. People can't progress without reading and praying and coming to church. That's probably why we ask them to do it =P It's been a busy time for our investigators with exams and things for school. This is the last week of that though, so hopefully after this we can start to work with them a bit more closely.
Christmas Week is gonna be a little odd. We're having a Mission Conference for two days over in Oslo, and then we'll come back the night before Christmas Eve. We'll be skyping home to our families and spending a lot of time eating pinekjøtt, classic Norwegian Christmas food. It's gonna be a pretty fun time, and I'm so looking forward to my first Norwegian Christmas. After that, there's only a week and a half left in the transfer! Time flies too quickly.
Hope everyone has had a good week and God Jul!
Elder Sessions
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