Elder Kyle Steele: Wake Me Up When September Ends

Email written: 10/1/18

Äldste Steele's birthday package arrived in time!

Hallå Oktober, Hejdå September! How do these months go by so fast??Things continue to be alldeles utmärkt here in Utby with Äldste Harper. We have had plenty of time to teach, find and serve. As we planned for this week, we realized that we won't have as much time this next week to do all the things we did this past week. Not only do we have splits in Karlstad from Tuesday to Thursday ( a city that is about 2.5 hours away by train), but there's also have a few baptismal interviews that Äldste Harper needs to do for several people getting baptized, and all the sessions of general conference this upcoming weekend, so it'll be an interesting week ahead of us, but I know that it will still be a good one since we stil have the desires to serve and help the people we teach progress. The Lord will help us find a way to keep in good contact with our friends and also will bless us with the time we need to make our visits and try meeting new people.

This past week, we were able to teach the same woman that came to church this past week. We were able to teach the plan of salvation and every time I teach it, the more and more I know it to be absolute truth restored to us in our time. Because we aren't allowed to just teach people of the opposite sex alone, she invited one of her good guy friends to be along the lesson, so we were able to teach him as well!! Apparently the word for 'chaperone' in Swedish is the same word for 'apron' and so we were pretty confused when she kept calling her friend her 'apron'.....gotta love languages haha.

We also have been meeting more with one of our good friends, Agha, who is trying to give up smoking so that he can be happier in his life. It's so great to teach people that are humble enough to make changes in their life that bring them closer to Christ. We are working on building his confidence in himself and so we helped him set up his own short term plan for the next month in preparing to stop smoking. We hope that he can continue to progress!

We also continue to see last door miracles. I really didn't think that I would have those experiences on my mission, but they happen time and time again, where we are out knocking doors all evening, and no one is interested until the last door, and someone gladly welcomes us back over to teach them. We were out in Partille on Saturday evening and were out knocking doors and one of the first doors we knocked into were these two older Swedish guys that still lived at home with their mom and they were just jacked out of their mind. One of the brothers told us that he could bench 185 kg so yeah, these guys were huge, but they actually let us in and they told us to give them our 'pitch', so we had a nice little mini lesson which turned into a 45 minute conversation about truth and belief and it was a great conversation and it didn't really go anywhere and one of the brothers is just like, 'I still feel like you guys are trying to sell me something' and so I then told him that we were set apart full time representatives of Jesus Christ and so that's why it feels so different when we were with them. In the end they weren't interested, but they understood what we do and what we stand for, and at least gave us each bananas for the road.

We then carefully chose our 'last door' of the evening and the spirit was telling me knock on the door, but my mind was like ehhh i don't know, because it was pretty dark and no lights were on in the house and it was kind of sketchy walking behind the house, but we went anyways and knocked on the door. Then, a woman comes to the door, and we begin talking pretty quietly. She was about to put her kids to bed and so it was just nearing an ineffective time to knock on doors, but as we told her who we were and who we represent, she was so happy to have met us and can't wait for us to come back and teach her our message. She then told us that she had recently bought an angel necklace that reminds her of Christ and so that was a nice little bonus in there!

Things are going well here, and I'm loving my time in Utby! Hope you all have a great week. Ha det fint! Tack, hej!

Pictures:

1) WOW

2) Nice view on a walk to Partille

3) building in göteborg stan

-- Äldste Steele