Well, I finally got out of the hospital on Thursday morning. The Assistants have been watching me like a hawk ever since then. We had a meeting with our bishop scheduled for Thursday night, and I'm pretty sure me going to that meeting was the equivalent to the sin of blasphemy in Elder Bekker's book. Friday morning, Sister Evans made some crepes and sent them with the Assistants to our apartment, expecting me to be at home. But I was already in the city haha. After 6 days in the hospital, I definitely was not going to be limiting myself to 4 walls anymore. I haven't done anything too intensive yet, but I'm feeling great and I've been able to get out of the apartment every day since being released. So that's good. We've planned on having a normal week, so we'll see how that goes. I'm still feeling extra tired, and I'm popping about 20 pills a day, no joke haha.
We've just recently gotten a new ward mission leader. He is fantastic. He's 25, just got back from his mission in Poland a few years ago, and he's recently married. He's way excited to do the work, and he's already arranged a couple of nights this week where we are going to go out knocking on doors with members. So that's really exciting. We're working on just getting ourselves organized so that we can better work with the ward. One of the things I've been doing in my down time the last couple of days, is working on an online map with all of the ward members on there. That way, when we are planning on our traveling to appointments, we can easily see what members live in the area we are going to, and plan on visiting them. There are 600 members in the Oslo ward, and we've found that they are pretty well spread out, yet concentrated, on the map. So pretty much, wherever we go in our area, there will be at least one or two members who live around that spot. Only 150 of the 600 members are currently active, so there's lots of less active work that we can be doing. That's one of the major things we're hoping to start on once we can get settled. We're really wanting to focus on two things. 1, getting the members excited about missionary work. 2, organizing those efforts so that when new missionaries come into the area, they can pick up right where we left off. So it's been pretty busy, despite my handicaps the last few days haha.
I missed out on the mission conference with President Teixiera. I did go to the leadership meeting with him on his first day here, but the morning after that was when I was admitted to the hospital, so I missed the general session. Sounds like it was a pretty good conference though. From what I saw in the leadership meeting, President Teixiera is quite the fireball, haha. He doesn't mince words, which makes his presentations painful, but necessary. The mission has set some serious goals since that conference. We want to be able to get 100 new investigators a week. Right now we average around 40-50, so it'll take a lot of work haha. Another goal that President Evans has asked that we make as a mission since the conference, is to read the four Gospels and 3 Nephi before the end of the year. I've had some extra time on my hands the last few days, so I made myself a little study worksheet. I'm gonna study the four Gospels along with Jesus the Christ by James E Talmage. He goes through the entire New Testament and there's a ton of extra study material in there that I think will make things interesting. I've read the book about 4 or 5 times already on my mission, but this will be the first time that I do it alongside the New Testament. It took a few hours, but I lined up each chapter of Jesus the Christ that goes over the Gospels with the section of the Gospels that it covers. So, now I can read my "reading assignment" from the New Testament and then James E Talmage's commentary on that same section of scripture. I've started today, and I think I'll be able to finish before the end of the year. I attached the reading list to the email for anyone who is interested. It seems to be pretty popular among the missionaries here so far =)
I attached a couple of pictures from my hospital stay. One, is the view of Drammen from my window. Not bad, and we had just gotten the first snow of the winter so it looks pretty cool. Another is a picture of Elder Bekker, looking so happy to be visiting me. The third one, is a picture of the food I got in the hospital. It usually wasn't that glamorous. Usually it was sandwiches and soup. I'd put a picture of me on there, but it's not pretty, so we'll save that for my post-mission slideshow when I can face the shame in person haha.
My companion was on splits with the zone leaders the whole time that I was in the hospital, and he didn't do a whole lot of work with our people for the week and a half that I was down. So, our area is dead now, we've pretty much got to restart. Kinda disappointing, because we were really starting to see some progress before I got sick. But we've got a busy week planned, so I'm excited for that.
Have a good one everyone!
Elder Sessions
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