Well, I'm back!

Thanks for watching! :)

4 March 2013

Kjære familie og venner

Elder Rasmussen is moving to Arendal and we're getting "whitewashed" with sisters. Guess that's what happens when you change the missionary age for sisters. Luckily most of our investigators are in a pretty good spot to be taken over by sisters and it will actually be good for some of them, like Nancy and Nicole.

Torbjørn had his daughter this weekend so he wasn't able to meet with us or make it to church. He's still doing good though. We told him on Saturday that we both would be leaving (we've actually known about the sisters since January, but we didn't want to say anything to anyone until it was sure.) He took it pretty well, I'm hoping we'll get to skype with him one more time before I leave Kristiansand on Wednesday.

Nicole came to church. She seemed to enjoy it again.  We met with her and John George this past week and it went well. Gave them a chapter to read in the Book of Mormon together. We'll visit them for the last time later this afternoon.

Nancy has been a no show. We set up an appointment for her and the sisters on Friday. Hopefully they'll be able to click well with her.

I pack today and get on a plane to Oslo on Wednesday morning. I'll spend the day in Oslo with Elder Bekker until his family gets here Wednesday night. Then I'm chillin with another old friend, Elder Peterson until Thursday. I don't have a clue what I'll do on Thursday, except that Elder Bekker and I have our dinner with the mission president that night. Elder Bekker is going to tour Europe with his family so I'll spend a lonely night in the mission home and get on a plane to England at 7:40 the next morning. 

Between now and Wednesday, I've got packing, cleaning, and a couple of last minute appointments. It'll go quick cause we're gonna be busy. 

See you soon!

Elder Sessions

P.S. I want a steak. A big one.

25 February 2013

Kjære familie og venner

We decided to start Skyping with Torbjørn, since he lives so far out. So we did that on Saturday. It went really well, he said he has been reading in the Book of Mormon and that he can't put it down. We taught the Plan of Salvation and he really liked that. He has a car that he can borrow to get to Kristiansand, so hopefully we'll be able to get him here for Institute on Fridays and church on Sundays. Eventually, he hopes to move closer to Kristiansand, but we didn't talk to him too much about that.

We met with John George and Nicole on Saturday as well. Taught the Plan of Salvation and focused on the role of temples so that we could answer Nicole's questions about it. We gave her some scriptures in the Bible to read and pray about, and we'll meet with them again on Wednesday. She was a little skeptical, but I think she was glad to see the scriptures in the Bible about temple work. John George has also stopped smoking and he had a long conversation with the Bishop yesterday in church so he's going good too. He's pretty frank with Nicole about her being baptized, and she said that she would be baptized when she knows that what we've taught is true. 

Our meeting with Nancy went as usual. She didn't talk much and we talked a lot. We just had lunch with her and another one of the YSA. We didn't really teach any lesson, we just wanted to get her to open up more. Well, she didn't. It's a little frustrating. Elder Rasmussen had been working on a spiritual thought that we could share for weeks now. He shared it and it went really well, but when we asked if she would read a chapter out of the Book of Mormon, the only thing she said was, "Maybe"

Our area is pretty big. It's not the biggest area I've had, that was in Trondheim. It takes about 2 and a half hours to drive across the area from West to East and it would probably take about 4 or 5 hours to drive from South to North at it's farthest point. (Although we never go up that far.) You can actually look at my area on lds.org. Log into with your account and go to the maps app. If you click on map layers, and then boundaries, you can highlight the ward boundaries for anywhere in the world. My area includes the ward boundaries for Kristiansand and also Evje Branch, which is the highlighted area just north of Kristiansand. (The shape ends up looking like a slice of pizza haha) You could also see how big my biggest area was in Trondheim. Easily an 8 or 9 hour drive from North to South.

18 February 2013

Kjære familie og venner

Well we were able to meet with Torbjørn on Tuesday after our meeting. That went pretty well, but we had the Arendal Elders with us and he had a friend over as well...so it was a little tough to teach a lesson. We did have a chance to get to know him a bit better though and talk with him about his future plans. He says he wants to try moving in closer to Kristiansand...as of right now it's an hour and a half drive away. We hit a snag this weekend with him because he wasn't able to get a ride into the city for our appointment on Friday or on Sunday for church. So we'll have to borrow the car and take a drive down to him sometime this week. 

We didn't meet with any of our other investigators this week. We have another appointment with Nancy on Friday. We're going to make her lunch with one of the YSA here, so she can help us fellowship her. John George gets home tommorrow, so we'll be able to meet with him and Nicole this week as well.

We took a drive up to the Evje Branch yesterday for church. It's another branch that falls into our area who don't have missionaries right now...haven't had them for years actually. It's too far away to do any real proselyting there, but I've gone there a couple of times to visit. The Branch President is from New York, so I've become pretty good friends with that family there. It was a nice little sacrament meeting. Just us, President Zurcher's family, and one other member couple. Elder Rasmussen and I both gave talks. It seemed to go well.

That was my week. How was yours? =)

Elder Sessions

11 February 2013

Kjære familie og venner

Cool story this week. Last week we got a referral from the mission office. It was a guy named Torbjørn who had found the church website and ordered a Book of Mormon and a missionary visit. The problem was that he lives almost halfway in between here and Stavanger, which means it would be an hour and a half to two hours for us to drive there. So we decided to wait until this week when we knew we would be traveling to Stavanger for a training meeting, and then we could visit him  on the way back home. 

Well, turns out that wasn't good enough for him. On Friday night, we were at our apartment eating dinner. The Arendal Elders were with us for a YSA activity in Kristiansand that night. One of them was talking about some pictures he wanted to stop and take on the way home from Stavanger. I told him that we didn't have time because we had to stop and visit this guy on the way back. Right around the same time we got a call from Elder Cressal, the senior couple who serves in the Institute center here. He said there was a guy who walked into the center with some questions about the Church. This happens occasionally...usually they're under the influence or something. So I wasn't too excited about it at first.

We get to the center and start talking to this guy. He wasn't socially awkward and he wasn't drunk. In fact, he seemed pretty normal...a 20-something year old Norwegian guy. He starts telling us his story, and we recognized it...he was the referral from last week. He convinced one of his friends to drive him all the ways into the city and somehow found the address for the institute center so that he could meet with us. 

We answered his questions and gave him the Book of Mormon and DVD that he had ordered. He committed to preparing himself for baptism and we set up an appointment to visit him on Tuesday after our meeting in Stavanger...as originally planned. The really cool part of this story is how he found the church website. He had never heard of Mormons before...or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints for that matter. One day, he was listening to some music and thinking about life when he heard a voice say the word "mormon." He didn't have a clue what a mormon was or what it meant...so he Googled it. (Go figure haha) It eventually led him to our website.

We were pretty excited about that. Then, I received some more good news. A man that Elder Peterson and I had contacted and taught in Trondheim was baptized this weekend...Jan Peder. We taught him the lessons and committed him to baptism....then he disappeared. I moved to Oslo and Elder Peterson never heard from him again. In January, the missionaries in Trondheim found his number on our old teaching record and called him up. This time he was ready. I had the chance to talk to him on the phone last night and was pleased to hear that he remembered the first missionaries =) We had a good conversation and I congratulated him....and gave him my Facebook of course haha.

That was my week. Nicole and Nancy both weren't able to come to church yesterday despite our invitations. Torbjørn doesn't have a car for the moment, so it's a bit tough for him living so far away. But we're going to talk with him about that tomorrow night. He has already expressed a desire to make the drive to Kristiansand once he can get his own car. So we'll see. 

Elder Rasmussen and I have been having fun going geocaching on P-days. We've found some pretty cool places in the area that we wouldn't have gone to otherwise, and I've got a couple really cool pictures. I forgot my camera at the apartment, so I'll have to throw them on here later before I send the email.

Have a great week!

Elder Sessions

4 February 2013

Kjære familie og venner

I'm a little confused by what you said about Mom and Sami making baby clothes for Sami's baby. Just what baby would that be exactly?

Well this week. We met with Nicole and John George this past week and talked with them about temples and eternal marriage. John George has said he has set a goal to be able to go to the temple again. With us backing him up, I think he felt a little more comfortable calling out Nicole and saying she needed to get baptize so they could go to the temple and be sealed together after they are married in July. I got the impression that Nicole hadn't heard it from John George before haha. It was great though, we didn't actually have to say too much...John George said it all. Nicole said that she has been reading in the Book of Mormon and she said that she likes it. She said her only doubts had to do with the temple...she has never heard of anything like the doctrines of the temple before so she's a little skeptical  I promised her we'd come back and show her how it's just a restoration of the principles from the Bible. She seemed excited about that =) John George is going to be gone for two weeks for work, so it will be a little while before we can get back there again. We want to get Nicole to church on her own while he's gone, so long as she isn't working. She worked yesterday, so she wasn't able to come to church. John George came.

That was pretty much it for this week. A new ward mission leader was called yesterday, so we're pretty excited about that. It was a tough situation with the previous mission leader...we weren't able to meet with him very often. Our days have pretty much consisted of walking around the streets of Kristiansand trying to contact. Not exactly the most effective form of missionary work, and definitely not my favorite either. At least with a new mission leader we'll be able to work closer with the members and maybe work on actually getting some kind of referrals from them. We'll see how that goes =)

Today for P-day our plan is to go out and find some geocaches. It's a pretty fun little scavenger hunt type game. Someone hides a box of some sort and posts the GPS coordinates on the website for others to try and find it. There's a ton of them all over Kristiansand, and we've already found a couple. You find the geocache and sign your name on the log which is included inside. We're going out to an island today which has some old WW2 bunkers and things to see if we can find the geocaches which are out there. At some point over the next couple of weeks, we've gotta stop by the Kristiansand zoo...so long as the weather is nice haha. That's definitely on my list of Pday activites.

Vi snakkes neste uke!

Elder Sessions

End of the World and back again 2011

Oh man, I don't even remember what happened last week. This week was way more interesting anyways haha.

I did get a new companion. His name is Elder Stratford, he's a pretty cool kid. He's from Logan, Utah and we're getting along just splendidly. <-----word? I'm not sure.

We started off this week by going to Verdens Ende, which translates to The End of the World. It's basically a collection of cliffs right on the southern tip of Norway, and you can look out onto the Atlantic ocean. It was way cool and I got some good pictures, hopefully I can get those sent home soon.

Then we had a zone conference with a bunch of missionaries in Oslo. That was pretty cool, I got to see Elder Davis again and he sounds like he's having a ton of fun there in Oslo now.

This week was the annual Slottsfjellet Festival here in Tønsberg. People from all around Norway came for the festival, which meant there was a ton and a half people out on the streets all week. We found SO many people to teach it's crazy. I'm excited for this week, we're gonna be way busy.

We found one guy who's about our age. He was actually one of the main musicians in the festival this week. But Elder Davis and I had talked to him a few weeks ago and I gave him a card with mormon.org on it and told him to check out the website. He actually did, and said he was interested to learn more. Elder Stratford is a music guru and I'm pretty into music as well, so we're gonna meet with this guy later tonight and have a little jam session in the church. We'll teach a lesson of course too :)

That's just one of the many people we've found that we can talk to this week. Pretty much anything that could have gone right this week has gone right, so it's been pretty exciting.

By the way, we did get an email from church headquarters that says we need to be more careful about the information we share about the people we are teaching in our letters home, especially for missionaries like myself who have it posted online. So I won't be using real names of people on the blog anymore, but I can still share stories and things from the people here.

With that said, there is a man we have been teaching for a couple of months now who I have mentioned on the blog before. Despite that, we're gonna call him Timothy. Haha, this fake name thing could be quite fun.

Anyways, Timothy has come to church a few times now, and I think he's really enjoyed it. We certainly enjoy teaching him, our biggest problem is getting out of the house after a lesson just cause he's so darned fun to talk to. But he's a way nice guy, and he's really come a long way.

I managed to slice my finger this week. A friend of mine here apparently talked to my sister about it on Facebook (can't believe she's talking to my family!). In any case, reports of my "crying" over a little "paper cut" are grossly exaggerated on both counts. Slightly more then a paper cut, slightly less crying. haha. Basically, I was carrying a metal sink in someone's yard (haven't a clue why there was a sink in a yard, but that's not really the issue here) when we dropped it and it sliced my finger. Didn't feel too awesome. Certainly brought some excitement for a few minutes, but luckily Elder Stratford was there to assure me I'd have to lose something like 4 quarts of blood before I passed out. Thanks bud. He also offered to superglue the cut shut for me. I passed on that delightful opportunity.

That's pretty much been my week. We're extremely happy with all the people we found, and I'm exhausted. We had to work hard, but it definitely paid off. We've got some exciting times ahead.

Thanks for the drawings from the CTR 6? class in the Gainesville Ward! There must have been some sort of discussion involving platypuses (platypi?) in their class that day. In any case, I got plenty of wonderful, friendly looking platypuses to cheer me up. I really hope they were supposed to be platypuses. Could have been backwards beavers though.

Have a good week everyone!
Elder Sessions