10 September

Kjære familie og venner 

Our last P-day was pretty fun. We went out to an island in the middle of the fjord and had a little bbq. There were these cool ruins on the island which we got to go climbing through...it was an old 12th century monastery. As we were eating our lunch, a fox decided to come join us. It literally came to within 5 feet of our little eating circle. I took some pretty cool pictures of the island, the ruins, and the fox so I'll send those on. There's also a picture of me in a skate shop by the name of Session. I thought it was cool that the store was obviously named after me, so I took a picture with a couple of the hoodies bearing my name which they sell there. Birthday present, parents? =)

Well, Renaldo moved to Tromsø this week. Things were going all up and down this week with him haha. First he lost his job, which really was a good thing cause it meant he could come to church...and he recognized that as well. So we were pretty stoked about that. A couple of days later though, he comes to meet us at the institute center with a train ticket up to Northern Norway. He said he wanted to move up there to find a job. Luckily, we have missionaries in that city so we gave him the number for those missionaries and he was able to get in contact with them before he left Oslo. He was up on our mission website with a baptismal date for a couple of weeks in Tromsø already. So that was a little bittersweet.

Other than that, we did get to visit a less active guy named Jonathan on Saturday. He is from Mexico and he was baptized here in Oslo last year. He hasn't been able to come to church only because of his 3 year old son who has leukemia. It's kind of a tough situation. But he's an awesome guy and the best part is that he has a 9 year old daughter and a girlfriend, both of which are not baptized. We talked with them a bit when we visited and we're going to go back sometime this week to see if we can teach at least the daughter. It'd be fantastic if the girlfriend was interested as well...especially since she is a Norwegian and we always love teaching those =P

This is the last full week of the transfer. We'll have our transfers call next Monday morning. Don't have a clue what is gonna happen there...I'm pretty sure I'm going to stay here in Oslo. But we'll see =)

Good luck with school everyone...I'll be back in two semesters!

Elder Sessions

3 September

Kjære familie og venner

I was filling out a Preach my Gospel survey from Church headquarters just now and one of the first questions was: "Choose the number of months you have been on your mission", then there was a slider with the number of months increasing from left to right. It took way too long to slide that thing over to 18 months. Can you believe that? I hit 18 months yesterday...

My parents always told me there was a time when I would have to start studying to get good grades in school. They told me this when I finished elementary school, middle school, and even high school. It's a point of extreme pride on my part that I have continuously proved them wrong. One part of my life where I cannot avoid studying though is definitely the Gospel. I can sleep through my DNA class and still get an A, but I can't sleep through personal scripture study and still apply the principles of the Gospel to myself. Luckily, I've discovered I really really really like studying and learning. It's awesome. So maybe I'll apply it to school when I get back, but the look of chagrin on my college professors' faces when they wake me up to hand me another "A" exam may be far too satisfying for me to miss out on ;) One thing is for sure though, I'll definitely have to show a lot more diligence in school from here on out. I got pretty darn lazy up there in Rexburg my last semester. 

Well, Renaldo got caught up at work again yesterday so he wasn't able to come to church. Which means we're going to have to move his baptismal date back. We haven't told him this yet....he'll be way bummed. We invited him to watch a baptismal service we had just this past Saturday and he thought he was the one getting baptized. So that was a little awkward. We sorted it out though and I was really glad he was willing to do it haha. We gotta finish teaching him and he's gotta be able to come to church first. 

He's really the only one we're meeting with consistently right now. It's been kinda frustrating in the search for new investigators the last couple of weeks. Not that I'm frustrated by it, it's just been a frustrating situation. There's a difference =) I have been feeling pretty worn out though, so I'm grateful for the P-day today haha. I'll get about 6 or 7 hours of relaxation before we gotta get back out there again. We cherish those hours.

One thing that has been really fun this transfer has been being a district leader here in Oslo. I haven't talked about it too much, but once I week I'm giving a district meeting presentation to a group of 12 missionaries. It's been a lot of fun, and the mission theme for August has been our missionary purpose. This past week, we talked about our personal covenants with God. It's something I've thought a lot about lately, and I'm grateful to have a nice platform to kind of get my thoughts out once a week. Our missionary purpose is to "invite others to come unto Christ by helping receive the restored Gospel..." Despite the use of the word "others" in that purpose, my basic point was that we cannot invite others to come unto Christ, without getting ourselves on the path first. That's something we have done by being baptized and confirmed by priesthood authority to enter into that sacred covenant with God. 

We cannot teach the Gospel without the Spirit with us. How sensible is it then that our baptismal covenant is our key to having the Spirit as our companion? As stated in the sacrament prayers we hear each week in church, if we (1) take upon us the name of Christ, (2) always remember Him [aka allow the Atonement to be a part of our daily lives], and (3) keep His commandments, we are then promised that we will always have His Spirit to be with us. Maybe it's cause I'm a dirty "Spirit-less" heathen, but sometimes I think missionaries aren't selfish enough. We think too much about solving this problem or that with our investigators, without remembering that we ALSO need to make and keep that covenant with God, in order to have the Spirit present in inviting others to do the same. If we focus on our covenants and "getting the Spirit", everything else in our lives will fall into place, because we have the assurance that God is with us every step of the way.

Another important thing to remember for everyone is also that taking the name of Christ on us, remembering him (daily!), and "keeping" his commandments, are descriptions of a process rather than an event. No one is going to "keep" the commandments. Ever. Cause we aren't perfect, remember? But that isn't what "keeping the commandments" means. God doesn't need us to keep His commandments. It's for us. By living the Gospel and doing our best to follow Christ's example, we put ourselves in a position to be worthy of having His Spirit as our companion. That is what cleanses us and helps us improve. And that's really what it's all about.

Til next week!

Elder Sessions

20 August

Kjære familie og venner

Well this week was a busy week. We had a dinner appointment with members pretty much every day, and we were able to get to know a pretty good number. So that was good. We also got lots of names of families and less actives to go and visit. We ate dinner with the bishop and his family yesterday, and that went extremely well. He gave us a list of about 10 names to visit. We're also going to help his 20 year old son move this week...his son has been less active for about 3 years, so that will be a good opportunity for us to get to know him. So from one busy week to the next we go, haha.

There was this way cool guy from Nicaragua who came to our language class this past week. We've been teaching a Norwegian class of about 30-40 people twice a week. It's been pretty successful in getting people to come out to our institute center in the city and it's pretty well known in the community. The employment agency for Norway, called NAV, has started to advertise our class to immigrants moving to Oslo. So yeah, it's pretty intense. But anyways, this Nicaraguan guy hears about the class and shows up on the day we had planned to show the Joseph Smith movie after class. I invited him to stay and he was like "Man, I'm christian, of course I'll stay!" Haha he's a way cool dude and we've started teaching him about the church. There's a slight language barrier, but there are plenty of Spanish members here in Oslo to help us out on teaches. I'm hoping we can commit him to a baptismal date sometime this week.

I went on visit to Fredrikstad this past week to do a couple of baptismal interviews there. After checking on familysearch.org, I found out that I have a lot of Norwegian ancestors from that area of Norway, so I convinced my temporary companion to drive through the village they lived in on our way back to Oslo. So that was pretty cool to see that, it was just a bunch of farmland and stuff. The village is called Onsøy, Østfold, Norway. I didn't have my camera, but if I get back there at some point, I'll have to snap some pictures.

I meant to say this last week, since it happened yesterday...but Happy Birthday to Mom! I won't say how old she is, but I just know it's twice as much as me! =) Crazy thought just hit me...if I was my mom 20 years ago, I'd be pregnant with ME right now. Nuts man....then my sister is turning 17 next Sunday. So that's cool. I'll probably freak in about 3 months when I hit 21, but I'm not gonna think about it too much right now.

So yeah. It's raining right now and we had planned on grilling some stuff in a park for P-day. So Mother Nature just rained all over that idea. Eh...we'll prolly do it anyways haha.

Have a good week!

Elder Sessions

26 August

Kjære familie og venner

Well we had a pretty good week this week. I'm pretty sure I talked about Renaldo last week, the man from Nicaragua who came to our language class. Well we met with him pretty much every night last week, as per his own request haha. We set a baptismal date with him for the 15th of September. He would definitely be able to make that if it weren't for his job. He works Saturday night-Sunday morning and so he isn't able to come to church. Which is kind of a problem for him getting baptized. He likes everything we've talked with him about though, and he brought a friend with him to the center on Friday. So we're just hoping and praying for a change in his work situation. He's not exactly in a position to ask for a change of hours or anything like that. So we need a miracle.

We're continuing to work with the members, especially the families with inactive youth, who were referred to us by the bishop. We haven't had too much progress with it just yet, but the families have at least reacted positively to the idea of us, someday, coming to get to know their kids. We're hoping to gain their trust so we can change that "someday" to "today"...but that's a work in progress. 

This upcoming Sunday is my year and a half mark on the mission. We have transfers in about 3 weeks and after that I'm only going to hear my name read two more times during moves call. It really is insane how quickly time moves on our missions. March still seems forever and a day away, but it'll be here before I blink. 

Elder Godfrey, one of the zone leaders here in Oslo, and I had a pretty cool experience yesterday after church. A man who was visiting the church for the first time asked the bishop for a priesthood blessing and Elder Godfrey and I were asked to participate. Another member actually said the blessing, while Elder Godfrey and I stood in, but it was the most powerful priesthood blessing I've been a part of. As we stood there with our hands on this man's head, you could literally feel the power of the priesthood in the room. It was pretty legit. Hope it helped him, haha.

Well that's all folks! Fun fact: "et folk" in norwegian means "a people" Go figure.

Elder Sessions

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