Jeremy and Elder Davis with Marie at her baptism

Bonfire on the longest day of the year

Elder Davis, Elder Tedrow, and Jeremy with Loa at her baptism

Elder Davis and Sessions

Elder Sessions, Davis, Somone, and Crandall

Elder Davis and Jeremy (taken by a member)

How they dry their clothes

The fjords at sunset

Jeremy and Elder Davis at the Bonfire with the typical thumbs up picture :P

Some Pictures of Jeremy and his fellow Norway missionaries while he was at the MTC

Home Sweet Tønsberg

It's official. I'm staying in Tønsberg another 9 weeks!

My trainer is moving to Oslo to be a zone leader! So that'll be cool to have him come back on splits and things like that. My new companion has been in an area called Hamar for the past transfer. He'll get here on Wednesday. His name is Elder Stratford.

We had a baptism in Tønsberg on Saturday! Loa got baptized as planned =) It was really cool. Her sister (the baptized one) got up and bore her testimony in church yesterday as well, and basically told their mother that she needs to be baptized too. Haha it was way funny, but I think Rosa took it seriously....which is good.

There was an older Norwegian couple in church yesterday. A member had invited them, and they came for the first time. They loved it! They said it felt like they were "coming home." They had been to a lot of different menigheter (congregations, basically churches) and they said as soon as they walked in, they knew this was the right one. They asked to be baptized, and the missionaries haven't even met with them yet! So that was cool, hopefully we'll meet with them soon and begin teaching them.

We went bowling last week on our P-Day. Anyone who has seen me bowl before, knows I am HORRIBLE! It was no different with Norwegian bowling balls. I don't remember exactly what my score was, but I'm pretty sure I didn't break 100.

One of my teachers in the MTC once told us about a tough time he had on his mission in Norway. He and his companion were so bummed out, they ate a giant box of Snickers in depression, haha. The first part of this week, I thought about that story, and really wished I had some Snickers.We could not find ANYONE to teach!   We spent almost all day on the streets contacting people, and no one was interested. It was bad. I was really bummed. I went the healthy route and ate a bunch of apples instead.

But Elder Davis and I kept working. There wasn't much else to do, honestly =p. But we did, and we ended up having a great weekend. We had the baptism of course, and then the Norwegian couple asked for baptism  on their first time in church. We still have Patrick who we have been teaching, and we hope we can set a baptismal date with him tonight. So things are looking up, when just a few days ago, I thought we'd never teach again.

The missionary work is really going awesome in Norway. In May, we had only 6 baptisms in all of Norway (including Marie!). But that was way bad. June 5th we had a mission wide fast for the missionary work, and the church members participated. Over the next five weeks, we've had 28 baptisms! We had a record month for the mission in June. It was amazing how much it changed. And the best part is, there's many more people in Norway who still have baptismal dates for July. So things look like they might continue going great. I really hope so.

By the way, Happy 4th of July to everyone!

Have a good week!

Elder Sessions

The Unfortunate Automobile Backing Incident

This transfer has been 9 weeks of firsts for Elder Davis and I. It was my first area. Elder Davis' first time training. First time being a senior companion for him actually. We got our first parking ticket in Norway. And the other night, we also had our first, what I like to call, "unfortunate backing incident."
 
Nothing major. It was kinda boring actually. Elder Davis was backing up, and I was behind the car directing him. Problem was, I wasn't paying too much attention, and neither was he. We were in a hurry. But we bumped into a car behind us. Little paint transfer, that's all.
 
But, we find the owner of the car and let him know. He's about 20. He is also in the middle of a party with his friends, so he's in a more....dizzy state then usual. Still seems pretty functional though. However, he was convinced that the repair would cost 10,000 kroner, which is about 1500 dollars. It was kind of a ridiculous claim. I could have taken a wet rag to it right then and there and fixed it in about 20 minutes. But, we kept our mouth shut. It took a while to exchange the information....he couldn't remember what his address was. We got it sorted, but unfortunately, it pretty much killed the rest of our night.
 
So that was kind of a fun thing haha. We also have a baptism this next Saturday with a girl named Loa. Her sister was baptized about 3 months ago, and she told us last month that she wanted to be baptized too. But then she left for Iceland for a month. So we've been teaching her over skype haha. She gets back today, so we have a week to give her a refresher course before her baptism.
 
It's also the last week of this transfer period. Which means come next Wednesday I could be moving! Or I could be staying in Tønsberg another 9 weeks. We don't really know. But either way, it will most likely be my last week with Elder Davis. But it's totally possible that we both could stay in Tønsberg. It's all up in the air at this point. We'll find out on Sunday for sure, so my next blog will have that info.
 
I've gotten a few questions about whether or not you can send me pictures. As Norwegians say, "Vær så god!" Basically means, go ahead! I love the pictures, keeps me connected in a way :)
 
Also, shout out to the Activity Day girls in the Gainsville Virginia ward. The package was great, and the stuff will be well-used. Another shout out to Corey and Selena who are gettin married this week!? Send pictures! haha.
 
Thanks to everyone for the emails and support. It really does help us out here.
 
Love,
Elder Sessions
 

Careful what you wish for

I'm short on time once again this week. So this'll be a quick one.
 
We finally got our copies of the conference edition of the Ensign this week. One of the talks I remember hearing was by Dallin H. Oaks about our desires. I remember thinking it was a really good talk, and so I went back and read it this morning. It was a really good talk.
 
I had actually been thinking about how our desires affect what we do. That was the subject of one of our lessons for one of our investigator families. There's a scripture in Alma chapter 29 that talks about how God grants unto men according to their desires, "whether they be for good or whether they be for evil." I think it's interesting how much of an emphasis is placed on our desires.
 
If you think about it, it makes sense though. Everything we do is based off of one or more desires. When we are hungry, we eat. When we are tired, we sleep. Desires are the most basic motivation of every action we take in our lives. So our salvation must definitely be based off of our desires right?
 
How do we make sure our desires qualify us for salvation? First, we need to know what kinds of desires we should have. What is a "good desire"? Luckily, Heavenly Father has given us the scriptures and prophets to tell us.
 
I think the basic purpose of this life is to change our desires from bad to good. King Benjamin from the Book of Mormon tells us that "the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been since the fall of Adam." We have to "put off the natural man" and desire to be better. Desire to do the things which bring us closer to Christ. We know what those things are through the gospel of Jesus Christ. By developing faith, truly repenting, being baptized and receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost we can obtain our salvation. But we won't do those things unless we really desire it.
 
The most important thing is to make certain that our good desires are always stronger then our bad ones. A desire to sleep can be overcome by a desire to finish a project late into the night. In the same way can a desire to partake in things which cannot help us in an eternal sense, be overcome by a desire to have good works. We build our desire to have good works by learning more of what it means to have good works. The more we learn about the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the more we will desire the blessing of that in our life. There's no if, ands, or buts about that.
 
Ultimately, everything comes down to desire. Do I desire to work as hard as I can, every day I have here to bring as many people to Christ's church as I can? That's my desire, but maybe I can develop it a little stronger....to overcome a desire to sleep too much =)
 
Have a good week everyone!
 
Elder Sessions

The Calm after the Storm

Last week we had our little miracle with the 6 teaches in two hours. This week we wanted to focus more on getting some real progress with people, rather then getting a lot of teaches. Both things are important, but they need to come together. This week, we managed to get some real progress, but not so many teaches. Hopefully this next week, we can put it together and get both of them haha.
 
It was yesterday in church when I suddenly realized I can speak Norwegian! I have been a little apprehensive to talk with people, not so much because I'm afraid I'll say something wrong, but because I'm afraid I won't be able to understand what they say back! So that's been the challenge, but yesterday I had several very good conversations with the members, all in Norwegian. So I wouldn't say I'm completely fluent just yet, but I'm definitely functionally fluent.
 
I also had the "opportunity" to translate for someone during church yesterday. There is a member here who doesn't speak Norwegian, so we had another member translating for her. I guess he was having trouble with the translation, cause one minute I'm minding my own business trying to figure what the heck the person was saying for myself, and the next minute I'm being thrown into the chair next to this Filipino lady who was looking very expectantly at me for a translation. I think it went ok though, I managed to translate the gist of the talk into English. Definitely wasn't Gettysburg Address quality though.
 
We had a pretty cool teach with a guy named Patrick last night. We've been meeting with him for a couple of weeks now, but last night was only our third real lesson with him. He has a really erradic work schedule so it's hard to get appointments. Patrick has investigated a lot of churches, and so we're definitely not the first religion who's explained our beliefs to him. He's been around the block haha. But at a certain point during the lesson he stopped us and asked why we were talking to him. Why did we care so much that he came to know of the truthfulness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? He said with the people he has met with before, he felt like as soon as they realized he's not the richest guy in the world, or the most clean cut (basically when they realized he didn't have much to contribute to their church), they didn't want to meet with him much anymore. At least, that was his perception. But he said "You guys are really persistent. You really want me to find out for myself, and you don't care one bit that I'm broke as the next bum. You do realize, I don't really have much to offer your church, right?"
 
I was really glad to be teaching someone with that perspective. Because it doesn't matter who we're teaching, or how much money they have. I didn't come to Norway to pick and choose who I think is "worthy" to hear this message. I came here to tell people about something I know is true. If it is true for me, it is true for everyone else, and applies to and can help everyone else. The most important thing is that we tell as many people as possible that Christ's church is back on the earth, exactly as it was in New Testament times, and let them decide for themselves whether or not they believe us.
 
This is what we told Patrick. I told him straight up. "Patrick, I'll be honest, I want you to be baptized. But, it's because I know this is true, and I want you to find out for yourself." I was a little scared how he'd take that, but he took it well and rolled with it. We had a great lesson after that with him and I think he'll start to get his answer about whether or not this is true. He's just got to ask the question through prayer. And that's all we ask people to try.
 
Til next week!
Elder Sessions
 

Recipe for Success

Happy 6th of June everyone!
 
Why is the 6th of June important? Because, ladies and gentleman, 2 years ago today, I graduated high school. Has it been two years already? That's just insane. And here I am back in Europe. Ha go figure. Maybe I'll die here too haha.
 
So happy 2 year anniversary to the other 39 Alconbury 2009ers out there.
 
Anyways, enough reminiscing.
 
So I'm gonna talk about the recipe for success in Tønsberg, Norway. And it's not just success with missionary work. It's not even just success in Tønsberg, Norway either. It's kind of a general recipe for success. You can pretty much get away with applying this recipe anywhere at anytime, and consider your results successful.
 
The first ingredient you need is also a recipe. It's Marit Oslen's baked salmon recipe. None of you know who that is, but trust me, the salmon is good. I don't know what crazy culinary magic she did to this fish, but it tasted like heaven. So her recipe is definitely an essential ingredient in man's quest for success. Maybe not essential, but I'm definitely going to try and get that from her.
 
On a more serious note, we discovered last night that really the only thing you need for success is faith. Faith isn't just a concept of religion. You have faith when you go to work, that you're gonna be paid for your service. You have faith that when the light is green, it really is safe to cross the intersection. As Christians, we have faith in God and his love for us. The trick with faith, is it doesn't always SEEM like a guarantee. Once in a blue moon, your paycheck might not go through, or someone runs a red light and causes an accident, and sometimes, it can even seem as though our faith in God means nothing in reality...sometimes life is just too hard. While all of these situations may cause us to lose faith every once in a while, it's the good experiences (money in the bank, a safe intersection, or blessings of any kind), which help us to renew our faith. My companion and I had one of those faith renewing experiences, just last night.
 
The story really begins last Sunday. Our mission president has counseled us to get at least 21 teaches every week. As far as we can tell from previous records, this has never been done in Tønsberg, or at least not in a very long time. We have certainly not done it in our first four weeks here. After explaining to the zone leaders that we once again had not reached our goal, Elder Davis had what I like to call a conniption. He grabbed our portable white board, wrote a giant "21" on it and circled it. He then circled it again, either for effect or frustration, I'm not really sure. He said: "We are getting 21 teaches next week, Elder Sessions, whether you like it or not." I told him I liked it.
 
So then we fast forward to a week later. It's Sunday morning, and we're frantically calling everyone we know trying to get SOMEONE to come to church. We had a couple of people say they were interested in coming, but they wouldn't commit to it. Sure enough, we ended up with no investigators in church. It was a bit of a bummer, considering we needed 6 more teaches to reach 21, and by the time church was over with we had 4 hours left to get them.
 
I was hungry after church. It was fast sunday, so I hadn't eaten since the night before. I was really looking forward to eating some dinner and then getting out to try and get as many of those teaches as possible. Elder Davis had other ideas. He said that we weren't going home (which meant no dinner) until we got our 6 teaches. I honestly didn't think we'd get 6 teaches in the 4 hours we had. We hardly ever get that many in a whole day, let alone 4 hours. But Elder Davis is the one who drives, so I knew I didn't have a choice =p
 
We decided to pray. We wrote down all of the places that we could possibly  drive to in order to contact people on the street. We prayed and asked which of the places we should go to. Tønsberg(where we were)? Nope. Sandefjord(20 min drive)? Nope. Horton(25 min drive)? Nope. Holmestrand(30 min drive)? Nope. Larvik....(1 hour away!)???? Are you kidding me? We both felt like that was where we were supposed to go, but seriously? Larvik was an hour away and we were short on time as it is! But, Elder Davis had the keys. So we went to Larvik.
 
We get there and we are now down to three hours, two really if you count the hour it'll take to get back home, and we still need 6 teaches. There's no one on the streets. I literally saw like 2 people as we drove in. But we get ready to get out and go, and we get a call from a member. She likes to talk. We like to talk too, but the conversation goes on for 30 minutes. So we're now down to an hour and a half of good contacting time. Let's get started.
 
This is where the miracle happens. I'll admit, I didn't have much faith. I didn't think we could get 6 teaches in an hour and a half. We're normally lucky to get one or two in that amount of time. But we walk around the first corner and talk to a man who was slightly interested. We talk to him about the Book of Mormon and exchange numbers. He says that he has some time next Saturday, so it looks like we'll be going back to Larvik then. 1 teach.
 
10 minutes later, we had another 2 teaches, and two new appointments for Saturday. So in the first 15 minutes we had 3 teaches, and two appointments set. I wasn't hungry anymore. We found yet another man who was interested, and taught him as well. Got an appointment for Saturday. So we had 4 teaches and three new investigators, within a matter of 30 minutes. We decided that we would drive back to Tønsberg and get the last two teaches we needed before the night was over. There was literally no one left to talk to in Larvik anyways.
 
So we get back to Tønsberg. By this time, I'm dying of hunger, but we're ignoring it. I wanted those two teaches, if I had to work until the last possible second. There was no way I was going to tell the zone leaders that we got 19 teaches that week, but we weren't able to make 21.
 
At 8:55pm, with 5 minutes before we have to be back in our apartment, we got our last teach. Subtracting the driving time, we had managed to get 6 teaches in about 45 minutes of contacting time. It was unreal. But by the time we had gotten back to Tønsberg, I knew we were getting 21 teaches, no matter what had been running through my mind an hour before.
 
So what does that all mean? Were we successful? Yes. Did I have a perfect faith the whole time? Of course not. We had worked all week, but the paycheck hadn't come yet. I doubted definitely. The thought crossed my mind that driving to Larvik was the stupidest thing we could do. But we knew it was what the Lord wanted us to do, and so we did it, even if I wasn't too excited about it. But somehow, that little act of faith was considered worthy enough of being blessed with the teaches we needed. It really was a miracle of success, and it all came from the tiny amount of faith that we had.
 
If we want to be successful in this life [I don't mean rich or powerful, I mean success and in happiness and satisfaction with our place in life], then we need to have faith. Faith in ourselves. Faith in our families and friends. Faith in our ability to BE successful. And yes, a faith in God helps.
 
Have a good week all!
 
Elder Sessions