10 December 2012

Kjære familie og venner

Winter has set in. We've gotten over a foot of snow this past week. And it's been way cold, about -17 celsius. So that's been fun. It's supposed to keep snowing this week, and it isn't even technically winter yet! Looks like my last winter in Norway is gonna be a good one.

I've got some pictures to send home this time. The first  one is a picture of the "super-district" in Oslo a couple of days before I left. The rest are from today. Early this morning, getting ready to go out....the view of Kristiansand from the top of the mountain-hill we climbed....and the view from the bottom on the ways up.

I'm trying to think of anything else interesting that happened this week. Dunno, the only investigator we meet consistently with right now is Nancy. And actually, I've only met with her once. She is a 22 year old Norwegian girl who met the missionaries a little over a month ago. She's cool, and I'm hoping we can set a baptismal date with her soon. We've just got to meet with her more consistently, but she's got a crazy work schedule, so we'll see. Adam we haven't met with yet again, but I'm gonna send him an email right after this and see if we can visit him soon. We've got an investigator named Dag who we'll meet with on Wednesday who has some potential so that's exciting as well. We've got the perfect member lined up for him, so hopefully it will go well. It'll be our second meeting with him.

Tonight, the ward is showing the First Presidency Christmas Message. The Arendal Elders are driving here to Kristiansand for that and then they are staying the night at our house and we are getting up tomorrow to drive 3 hours to Stavanger for a training meeting. Then we'll have a pretty normal week after that. We're starting to get our Christmas dinner appointments set up, so that's exciting, and our Christmas Mission Conference is gonna last for 3 days, from the 26th to the 28th. Best time of year ;)

God Jul alle sammen!

Eldste Sessions

3 December 2012

Kjære familie og venner

Well congrats first to Alexa and her dude for having a baby. We almost have the same birthday now, which woulda been cool but hey, she's gotta come when she's ready to come I guess. I'm sure it was a relief for Alexa at the very least haha. And ya'll can tell her I said that =P

I got an email back from Adam this week. He's doing well and he wants us to come back "sometime in December." So hopefully we'll be able to get back there sometime in the week or so before Christmas. He's kinda busy with family stuff right now, but it was really encouraging that he at least replied to our email. 

We had a bunch of other investigators kind of coming out of the woodworks this week. No one really making a TON of progress just yet...by that I mean, no one has come to church yet. I don't consider someone a serious investigator until they come to church =P But, we really have a lot of potential and some follow up appointments that I'm pretty excited about this week. So, tune in next time =)

We're starting to see the effects of the new missionary age here in our mission. My whole mission, we've had between eight and ten sister missionaries here. Right now we have eight, I think. When Elder Bekker and I go home in March, we'll be replaced by fourteen missionaries. So that's a gain of twelve, right there. Of those fourteen missionaries, six are sisters! In may, there are, so far, five missionaries who have gotten their calls. Four of them are sisters. So that's ten sister missionaries coming, and none of the ones who are here will be going home again until July. President Teixiera, our Area President, told us that by the end of next year, we'll have 120 missionaries in Norway, up from 56 right now. Kinda sad I'm gonna miss it =)

Christmas is a fantastic time in Norway. We've gotten a ton of snow this weekend. The decorations and tree are up in the city. I freakin love Christmas in Norway. Especially as a missionary haha. So we're looking forward to that, or at least, I am.

Merry Christmas season everyone!

Elder Sessions

26 November 2012

Kjære familie og venner

Transfer weeks are always really long. Especially when you move. I think it's cause suddenly you realize you are in a different city, in a different part of the country, around different people, and a different dialect...It seems as though your previous area was an eternity away, when really you were there only 4 days ago. It feels like literally forever since I wrote my last emails in Oslo.

Kristiansand. I'm really diggin this city. It's waaay smaller than Oslo in every way, which is a little weird for me. So that is taking some getting used to, but I think the changes are good, overall haha. Preparation day has been a lot quieter as well, without 8 missionaries running around here. There's a ton of WW2 history in this area though. Today, we visited the only surviving Gestapo headquarters in Norway. That was kind of interesting. The building, which is right down the street from our Young Adult center in the city, was the torture chamber and prison for Norwegian resistance members who were arrested by the Nazis. Norwegians are very proud of the role they played in WW2, for good reason. The German army completely demolished the country when they first invaded, with the Government only escaping by a matter of hours to London. From that point in 1940 until the end of the war, the Norwegians ran the best organized resistance efforts in their own country, without any real assistance from other Allied forces. They were a little preoccupied elsewhere, obviously =) There's a ton of other bunkers and old things around this area which I'm pretty stoked to check out.

As for investigators here, there are a ton of names of people that I haven't been able to meet yet. So not sure how positive I'm willing to say those people are. All of our appointments with our "progressing investigators" have fallen through, so I'm a little bummed about that. Apparently they were progressing a lot more before I got to the city haha. Hopefully we can get some appointments with them this week though and figure out where we want to go with them. A couple sound like they might be ready for baptism in the next little while, but that'll be hard if we can't meet with them.

One guy we met on my first night here out in the city was pretty cool. His name is Adam, he's from Bosnia. We talked to him on the street and then he invited us over to his place a couple of night later. He's got a muslim background, even though he's pretty much Norwegian...he's spent most of his life here. The appointment went really well. We talked a lot about prophets with him and he seemed intrigued by the concept of a modern day prophet...provided he really is a prophet of course haha. So he was pretty willing to start reading in the Book of Mormon and praying about it. He invited us to come back some time and he mentioned that his wife might be interested in sitting in next time as well. So we're excited for that, although he'll be busy with exams the next couple of weeks, so we'll just be keeping contact with him over email.

After all this....I'm turning 21 tomorrow. Honestly haven't thought about it that much, haha. I definitely don't feel that old though. The only thing it really means for me right now I guess, is that I officially don't have a military ID card anymore. 1st time since I was 10. So that's a little sad haha. Other than that, I don't really feel like there's gonna be that much of a difference for me. Tomorrow will be a day just like any other =P

Have a good week everyone!
Elder Sessions

19 November 2012

Kjære familie og venner

Found out yesterday morning that I'll be moving to Kristiansand on Wednesday. My new companion's name is Elder Donahue. He's 26 years old. I've met him once before and he seems to be a pretty cool dude, so I'm excited for that. I'll be a district leader again, but there only going to be one other area in the district. So there will be 4 missionaries total, instead of 18 total haha. So a little bit of a difference. It'll be nice to get out of the big cities though. I've heard lots of really good things about Kristiansand. It's way down south, so that'll be a good place to go for the winter. There is a ward of about 75-80 members there. And the dialect sounds fantastic. All in all, it'll be a pretty good place to finish out a mission. I've got 3 months or so left, so it's not very likely that I'll move again. 

We met with S.K. Kim again last week. He's Catholic and he was pretty stoked about the fact that we have Apostles who live today. There's a little bit of a language barrier so it took him a couple of minutes to realize we were talking about living people, not just the ones in the New Testament. He was pretty excited about that haha. So he said he was going to go home and tell his wife about it, who has already started to read the Book of Mormon. Elder Lillywhite is also leaving Oslo, so I'm hoping that we can meet with them one more time before Wednesday. He's an executive for Samsung in Norway, so he stays pretty busy during the week on business trips out of the country and stuff, so that makes it hard to meet with him. Cool dude though.

We had a really cool dinner with a member named Yelda and her mom this week. I actually taught Yelda when I was in Bergen and we had a baptismal date with her. She moved to Oslo and was baptized here a couple of weeks after her mom was also baptized. They've have some health issues and things so it's been tough for them to have very much contact with the church. They are from Iran and when I was in Bergen, Yelda promised me that if I ever came to Oslo, she would invite me over for some Iranian food. That was one of those promises that you make without thinking it would ever actually happen, you know? haha. But it was cool, I was able to collect on that and we had a good time. I ate a dried lime. It was pretty gross, but the rest of the food that you are actually supposed to eat was fantastic. Yelda is dating this returned missionary named Morten and he's legit. He's been worried about the family not being visited and stuff, so that was good. I was pretty excited about starting to visit them more often, so that's one thing I'm sad about in leaving Oslo. Elder Bekker and I are probably going to eat dinner at their house when we come back to Oslo in March to fly home. 

Exciting week ahead as I head to a new area. I'll take some pictures =) Have a good one!

Elder Sessions

12 November 2012

Kjære familie og venner

It's official. My release date has been changed to March 6th. So I'm coming home 3 weeks earlier than I thought I would. The mission office told me that I could tell my family, so I'm calling that official. I'll get my flight plans in a couple months.

Enough of that. This week we set a goal as a mission to get 100 new investigators. A new investigator is someone we've taught once and gotten a return appointment with. Basically someone who is showing genuine interest in taking the missionary lessons. To put it in perspective, we've been averaging between 40 and 50 new investigators a week. So, we were looking to more than double our numbers. We ended up with 98. So we didn't quite meet the goal, but I think we got the point across haha. As the largest district in Norway (18 of the 56 missionaries are in the Oslo District), we had wished that we could have carried the mission a bit more than we did...of the 98 new investigators, only 24 came from our district, but I've decided that we really couldn't have worked much harder than we did. Either way, the Lord helped us to miraculously increase the number of people we were talking to this week, and I don't think anyone here should be dissatisfied with that.

We had a district meeting on Accountability this past week. I wanted to share some of my notes from that meeting. 

Accountability is knowing there are no "free tickets" in life. We are responsible for our own actions. Accountability includes being responsible for our actions before our peers, our leaders, and the Lord. Accountability is the law of Justice. It's also the law of Mercy. The blessings we receive for obedience and the consequences we face in disobedience are all founded on the principle of Accountability. All throughout our lives, we learn step by step, mistake by mistake that there are always consequences for our actions. Accountability is described in the Doctrine and Covenants. Section 130 says, "There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundation of this world, upon which all blessings [we can even say all consequences here] are predicated. And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated."

Essential to Accountability, is our free agency. We could not be accountable for our actions, if they were not actions based completely on our own free will and choice. "And now remember, remember, my brethren, that whosoever perisheth, perisheth unto himself; and whosoever doeth iniquity, doeth it unto himself; for behold, ye are free; ye are permitted to act for yourselves; for behold, God hath given unto you a knowledge and he hath made you free. He hath given unto you that ye might know good from evil, and he hath given unto you that ye might choose life or death; and ye can do good and be restored unto that which is good, or have that which is good restored unto you; or ye can do evil, and have that which is evil restored unto you." I love that scripture. It basically says, "It's your choice."

I think one of the biggest lies that Satan tells people today is that what they choose doesn't matter. That it doesn't affect themselves or others. There are always consequences for our actions, and choosing to follow the teachings of the Gospel brings happiness in personal and family life, both here and in eternity. When it comes to the Final Judgement, we will all have been given a fair chance to accept the Gospel. For some people, that means they grew up in the Church and had to gain their own testimony independent of their parents'. For others, it means they accepted or rejected the Gospel later in life, even after this life. Whatever our situation, we will have a perfect knowledge of the truth at the Judgement, and a perfect ability to have made our own decision.

Our final fate will be dependent on the principles of Free Agency and Accountability. Ultimately, our Heavenly Father has provided a way for us all to be happy in the end, though our opportunities for further progression depend on our faith in Jesus Christ and his Grace in this life. How we show that faith and make ourselves accountable for our choices is up to us. "...ye are permitted to act for yourselves"

Obviously I tied that a little bit more into missionary work when we talked about it in district meeting haha. But the principle is the same and applies to everything, not just missionary work. So, I'm a fan haha.

Other than that, we're still working to find some people to teach. We're meeting with a Korean man tonight who took a Book of Mormon last week. I called him this weekend and he and his wife have both started reading and he said his wife especially is interested in hearing more. He's a way nice man and we call him S.K. cause his name is way hard to pronounce. My tongue was definitely not made to pronounce Korean words. 

Hope everyone has a great week!

Elder Sessions