27 February 2012

Kjære familie og venner,

Well, this is my last email on "this" side of my mission. By my next email, I'll be over the hill...my year mark is March 2nd, on Friday!

We met with Inara last Tuesday, and she asked Gjermund, a recent convert, to be the one to baptize her. We're going to have a returned missionary who served in Russia to do the confirmation, because Inara speaks Russian, and it'd be cool for her to hear it in her own language.

Inara was taught by the missionaries about a year ago, but they ended up dropping her because of the difficulties with her father. In December of this year, she was again contacted by Elder Strange and his previous companion, so we've been teaching her for about two and a half months now. She'll be coming to the church for her first time tonight, for Family Home Evening, since her father left last night.

We also taught a nice newlywed couple from Vietnam this week. They seemed to be pretty positive, especially the wife. She said she was really curious to learn about what we believe. We're going to try and go for a baptismal date the next time we meet with them this week. So hopefully that will turn out well.

So that's who we are working with right now. It's exciting times in Norway right now. Originally, the Stavanger district had a conference planned for all of Western Norway in April. That has now been changed to a country-wide conference in Oslo. We don't know for sure, because nothing has been confirmed yet, but most people believe it's because we'll finally be getting a second stake in Norway. So it's exciting for that reason, and also because we could potentially have another Mission Conference if we get the approval for that weekend in April to attend the Norwegian conference. And those are always fun =)

I got the email about Great Grandpa Hanson. I remember when I lived in Idaho we would go and visit him every now and then. It was always fun, and he always seemed to be in a good mood. He and Grandpa Hanson would occasionally race to see who could fall asleep on the couch the fastest. I'm pretty sure most times it ended up being a tie. I remember going there one time right after he had just gotten his cell phone. Poor guy said he didn't know how to use it. We explained it to him though =) I'll definitely miss those visits when I get back to Rexburg next year.

That's all I've got going on this week! See you on the "other" side =)
Elder Sessions