Hej allesammans!
This week was another great week here in Göteborg! It was good to finally have time back in our area and do things to help the work move forward.
We were able to attend a baptism for a person the zone leaders were teaching named Ammar. It was so awesome to see how happy he was to be there and he had peace in the decision he made to be baptized. Ammar honestly is such a great example to me. The baptism was all for him and obviously no one would expect him to set up anything so that he could prepare spiritually, but he asked at every opportunity to help out for the baptism. He moved chairs out of the chapel, fixed the plug in the font, wiped up the floors leading to the baptismal font, and was still asking if there was anything else he could to do help. It was so cool to see!
There had been another baptism planned that day, but our good friend that the zone leaders were also teaching, ended up not being baptized as he didn't quite feel ready yet. He came anyways to the baptismal service and I was able to sit next to him and offer him words of encouragement and I helped him recognize the spirit there. Also, as I was sitting there, Heavenly Father impressed on my mind to share John 14:27 with him, and so I pulled it up on my phone, showed him the verse, and let him know that it was what God wanted him to read at that moment. His eyes got really wide knowing that it had come direct from God. That was a really spiritually strengthening experience not only for me, but also for our good friend there.
A few weeks ago, we had tracted into a nice family out in Partille that really wanted us to come back. When we went back the first time, we were able to find out more about their situation, and it was the wife was christian, and the husband was muslim, and so things were a little shaky on them allowing us to come in and teach the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, but we found out that the wife's mother, who lives there, is also christian, and so they were both interested in meeting us another time and at some public place instead of at their home. We gladly accepted the request, but since we were in the area one night, we decided to swing by again just to see how they were doing, and when we went by this time, a different lady answered the door and we're just like hej vem är du, but she didn't know any swedish and so we switched to straight english and we found out that this lady was this family's nanny. We chat just for a bit and try to find out when the family was coming home and she let us know, and then I was like wait, this message we teach is for EVERYONE, do you want to learn more about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints? And she said yes she would love to and so this past Saturday, we had the privilege to teach our new friend Jessica, who just recently moved here from Brazil.(s/o Elder menjivar and Sister Bartels!!) We even had the help from a member for Portuguese translation and it was cool to teach her! She will make a lot of progress in the gospel as she lives here in Sweden.
We never really know when someone is going to be interested in the gospel of Jesus Christ and so we just need to be fearless and ask absolutely everyone we meet if they want to learn more. That's actually a big thing that we talked about in our zone conference this past Thursday. We need to be inviting a lot more people to learn more about the gospel of Jesus Christ, and stop being so casual about it. We had gotten in the bad habit of just casually saying who we are and just saying yeah we just teach people about the church, but in reality, we teach the restored gospel and help people live after true principles.
Sorry to make a long email longer, but I felt like I needed to share another thing that we talked about in zone conference. We talked a lot about teaching repentance and what that looks like. We were able to watch a little clip of Elder Andersen, as he spoke of his thoughts when missionaries talk about how many people they have baptized. His thoughts are basically, well that's nice, but how many people did you teach how to repent? Helping people to repent is one of the greatest callings we have as missionaries, as we try to help people understand that their sins can be forgiven.
I thought back a lot to my time in Övik, and there was this one man that we helped out a ton when I was there....goodness gracious Bertil, I love that man. I've never cared about someone on my mission as much as I did for Bertil. But, in the end, he didn't want to be baptized in the church. There were some of our doctrines that just were too hard for him to understand him. And it just felt like I didn't help him. But, as I thought a lot about what President taught us and I realized that Elder Thompson and i were truly able to teach repentance to our good friend and there were multiple times where Bertil would say a prayer asking for forgiveness, acknowledging how tired he was of making the same mistakes. Let us all be humble, align our wills with God, and make all the wrongs in our life, right like Bertil did.
I love you all and I hope y'all have a great week. Ha det bra!
Pictures:
1) Lennart, our Swedish teacher
2) HÖST
3) a house we tracted had a lot of pumpkins and squashes
4) this was our dinner the other night
-- Äldste Steele
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| 1) Lennart, our Swedish teacher |
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| 2) HÖST |
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| 3) a house we tracted had a lot of pumpkins and squashes |
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| 4) this was our dinner the other night |
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