Kjære familie og venner

Well, we decided to take our prep day on Wednesday this past week instead of Monday, so that we could visit some museums which, for some reason, are not open on Mondays. We bought a city pass for 270 kroner and then headed out to hit as many of them as we could. In all we visited 4 museums: the Kon Tiki museum, the Fram museum, the Viking Ship museum, and a Technology museum. They were all pretty cool. 

The Kon Tiki was the name of a raft that 5 college students built according to ancient South American customs. They then left from Peru and headed west on the Pacific ocean eventually drifting to one of the Pacific islands. They did this to prove that people from ancient South America could have left on one of their water craft and populated the islands in the Pacific. Most people thought they were crazy and that they would starve to death before they got there, or that they wouldn't drift in the right direction at all, but after 101 days of open ocean they made it there. Pretty interesting, and it's cool because in the Book of Mormon it talks about a group of people left from the mainland population and embarked out on the ocean. It doesn't say where they ended up or anything like that, but many people have theorized that they went to the Pacific islands. Kon Tiki proved that it was possible =)

The Fram was the name of a ship that was specially built to travel all the ways to the North pole and all the ways to the South pole. It did, in fact, make it. They had the original ship in the museum that you could go on board and see how the men on the ship lived. So that was a pretty cool museum too. The Viking Ship museum has three ancient viking ships which have been excavated in Norway. Kinda straightforward, but it made for a nice picture, which I sent home =P 

Then, the technology museum was the coolest of all. It was kinda like the science museum I went to in Trondheim, except bigger. There was a bunch of things you could do there, a lot of hands on science stuff. I dunno, I just like to go to those kinds of museums, I could spend all day there haha. They have those balls with the electricity in them that you can touch and the little bolt of lightning goes towards your hand. Just cool stuff like that...

But anyways, that was P day. I promise I did some work this week too haha.

I decided to revive my member plan that I used when I was in Bergen and to expand on it a little bit. I was looking at some of the investigators in my district and I realized that almost all of the investigators in all of the areas being taught right now have come from referrals. So I decided that it's probably a good place to focus on. I typed up the plan and showed it to our bishop yesterday and he said he liked it. We're basically going to start visiting members and teaching them the missionary lessons. It will help us to get to know the members a bit and get some feedback on our teaching and language skills. The members can see how we tend to teach investigators and offer suggestions on what other members we could visit and stuff like that. By starting with just a few families in the ward, we will hopefully end up meeting with a lot of the members, both active and less active. It'll give us lots of opportunities to ask about people to teach. So I'm pretty excited about that, we should have a busy week.

We did have 3 people in church yesterday. One of them was a friend to the guy who the sister missionaries baptized on Saturday. He came to the baptism and I talked to him afterwards and invited him to church. I dunno how interested he actually was, but he came to church at least and I was able to give him a Book of Mormon. Another one is a Hungarian guy who has been coming to church for a while. We're working with some missionaries in Hungary to help us teach him, because he doesn't speak any English or Norwegian. The third one was a norwegian girl named Benedicte. She was a foreign exchange student in Las Vegas...actually in my trainer, Elder Davis' ward. Elder Davis' parents were here this weekend to pick him up and take him home, and they brought her with them to church. She hadn't been to church in Norway before, but she had visited the church a lot with her host family in Las Vegas. So hopefully we're going to start teaching her this week. We invited her to a YSA activity tonight, we'll see if she comes =)

That's pretty much what we're doing right now. The weather is treating us pretty nicely right now, it's pretty stable between 65-70 degrees. Sometimes it rains, but we get plenty of sun too, so that's good. It's going to start cooling down by the end of this month though. Heading into my second winter...I've heard rumors it's gonna be a nasty one haha. Should be exciting. It also means that vacation season is almost over. People have started coming home and we had a lot of people in church yesterday. The most I've seen since I've been here. I think school starts in about 2 weeks so that's when things will really start rolling again....at least until winter hits haha.

Hope you guys like the pictures. I had fun taking them =)

Elder Sessions

6 August 2012

Kjære familie og venner

We have been getting plenty of teaches throughout the week, but just not really much to show for it. We've pretty much decided we need to not focus so much on talking to people on the street, without at the same time working with the ward here to find less active members or part member families to find people to teach. So that will be something we're going to try spending a bit more time on this week...I've set up an appointment with the bishop next Sunday to get his ideas and input on who we could visit. Hopefully we'll be able to find some interested investigators out of that.

Yesterday we were waiting at a subway station for our "T-bane" to take us to an appointment. To my left, there was a man kind of leaning on the wall staring at us with this goofy grin on his face. This went on for about 5 minutes. I glanced over at him probably about 7 times, just to let him know I saw him and his stare. Finally, I guess he got tired of this little game of cat-and-mouse and told me he had a question:

"Is God good?"

Yep, I believe He is.

"Is He All-mighty?"

Yup, I sure think so.

"Then, why are there so many suffering children and so many evil things in this world?"...he said this with a triumphant smile as if he had caught me, and I had never thought of this particular question before.

At that moment, our T-bane arrived, so I didn't have a chance to answer his question.  As I walked away from him he shouted at me that I needed to think long and hard about the life-changing question he had just asked me. So I'll just answer it here =)

This answer comes in two parts:

1) To assume that just because God is good and all-powerful that He would force all people and all things in this world to always be good is foolish and denies everything we know through common sense and experience of what life is really like here.

and, 2) Beyond the fact that much of the evil in this world is a product of our own human stupidity and greed, the evil things that remain are not going to disappear with a clench of God's mighty fist....it just doesn't work that way.

I understand why this man didn't understand that. His conception of God is an Almighty Power in some corner of the universe who created all things and tells us lowly humans through His commandments written on stone tablets that unless we meet His mighty expectations, He's gonna let us burn in an endless @#!*% for all eternity. That certainly does not sound like a good God, yet that is the impression that many atheists get of the mass of misunderstanding of God and who He is in the world today.

God is an Almighty Power in some corner of the universe who created all things. But He is also our Father in Heaven. Just like our father here on Earth, he wants the best for us...meaning he wants us to learn and grow and become the person that we have the potential of being. He can see that potential in a way that we cannot, and sometimes, that means we have to go through trials and tribulations in this life. Our earthly parents cannot protect and shield us from any and all evil or hurt that could possibly cross our path, without stunting our growth and development. We learn through adversity. We know that. God knows that. So sometimes, yes, he allows us to suffer, because He has an understanding of the fact that it really will be for our good. We only have to look at the bigger picture that He is trying to give us.

The most important thing God has given us is our free agency. That means, for better or for worse, we can choose for ourselves what we want to do. If God came down to stop every murder, rape, robbery, accident, or burnt piece of toast, we would never learn the consequences of those evils...especially burnt toast.

The fact that evil exists in this world does not mean that God isn't there. It just means there is "opposition in all things" (2 Nephi 2:something). Evil in our lives works to highlight the good. We recognize the good things because of the evil, NOT in spite of it. For me, the existence of evil only strengthens the fact that there must be some source of good out there to combat it. Though the man in the subway station would like to focus only on the evil things in the world, he cannot overlook the fact that there are many good things which are out there as well....that has to come from somewhere right? It would be really inconsistent to say that the good things in this world are only a result of our own human efforts while at the same time saying that Evil is a result of God's negligence or inability to stop it. 

I wish I would have had the opportunity to explain this to the man. But there will always be others =) I'm just glad I've been able to figure out for myself...well, it probably had to take some divine intervention for that one actually haha.

It's been cool serving with a long lost cousin. It seems like every week one of us gets an email explaining more about this or that relative. There's a lot about the Lillywhite side of my family that I just didn't know.

That's been my week folks! We're actually taking a normal working day today so that we can spend Wednesday visiting a bunch of museums in the Oslo area...all of the museums are closed on Mondays. So I'll have some good pictures to send back next week. 

Have a good week!

Elder Sessions

Kjære familie og venner

Well another week down in Oslo. We spent a lot of time out on the streets trying to find people to teach. Our biggest problem is it is vacation season in Norway. Vacations are huge in Norway, the country literally shuts down. It's not as bad in Oslo as it is in smaller areas, but there are still entire stores which are closed for the summer because all of their employees are on vacation. Most people who are still around are either currently on vacation, meaning they are not from here, or about to leave on vacation, meaning we can't meet with them for another few weeks. So we've met a couple of cool people who are gone for a month haha. The investigators who are left over from the previous elders here turned out to be not as positive as they sounded. It's been a week of canceled appointments and people not showing up. 

Fortunately, Oslo is an alright city for that to happen in. Just cause there are definitely more fish in the sea. 

Elder Lillywhite and I did a little checking on familysearch.org. Turns out we're definitely cousins. There are two Lillywhite brothers who were with their families in Nauvoo when the Mormons started heading west. Elder Lillywhite is descended from one brother, Benjamin, and I'm descended from the other, Joseph. Incidentally, Joseph's son married into the Romney family...the sister of Mitt Romney's ancestor. So that is how Mitt Romney and I have the same something-great grandfather. But anyways, yes there is definitely a family connection between me and Elder Lillywhite.

President Evans came and spent studies with us one morning this week. That was pretty cool, he also went contacting with us afterwards. He's a much more by-the-book kind of guy than President Johansen was and there are definitely some changes about to happen. The district leaders in the mission have a meeting with him this Thursday, so I'm sure we'll hear all about it there.

That's really it for exciting news this week. We don't have any real positive investigators who are worth mentioning, so check back next week =) We went on a hike later today. Pictures are attached.

Elder Sessions