21 January 2013

Kjære familie og venner

I'm getting a new companion. His name is Elder Rasmussen. He's another older guy, about 26 or 27 now. He came to Norway when I was in Bergen, so he's been here for a while. He's in the military...he worked out some kind of deal with them so that he could go on the reserves for 2 years on his mission. Pretty cool. I've served around him before, he was in my district in Bergen and Oslo, so I'm excited. He's going to be my senior companion, so it'll be a nice little break, haha not really. I'm just glad I don't have to carry the phone anymore =P He'll arrive on Thursday morning.

Well I was pretty excited about this next week until I logged on for emails this morning. We've really been having a hard time finding people to teach, and the investigators that we've had have not been making progress, so we've ended up dropping pretty much all of them. We had a family that we were excited to go visit this week, if you remember Adam that I talked about when I first moved to Kristiansand. Adam emailed me this morning and said he wasn't interested in any more visits. I kinda expected that since he hadn't responded to our emails until I called him on the phone this weekend, but it was still a bummer. So Elder Rasmussen is going to get a fresh new start in an area with no investigators haha. I'm honestly looking forward to it though, I've felt like we needed to reboot for a while and a transfer is the perfect way to do that. 

I spent a couple of days in Stavanger this past week. Two of my former companions, Elder Lillywhite from Oslo and Elder Peterson from Trondheim, were there so that was cool to see them again. It was the first time that I had been on splits in Stavanger, and I've now completed my tour of all of the big cities in Norway so I considered that a real accomplishment haha. Elder Abrams, the zone leader, and I spent most of the time walking around in the city contacting, although we did have two dinner appointments with some cool families. With one of the families we had planned to ask for a referral. We shared a great spiritual thought after dinner and the atmosphere was perfect to ask for the referral...it was going to be the next sentence out of Elder Abrams' mouth. And then, the father said they had to run the kids to the church and asked us to close with a prayer. So that was a real bummer haha. The family reacted really positively though and they'll get the referral the next time they go over there I'm sure.

It's still snowing outside, though not as much as it did in December. It's a bit cold, though again not as cold as it was in December. The days are starting to get a bit longer though, so I'm looking forward to some more sunlight and maybe even warmth at some point haha.

Til next week!
Elder Sessions