Äldste Nathan Sirrine: October 30, 2018 Up to Umeå! And Back to Stockholm??

From the airplane

Getting off the plane in Umea!

The chapel

Well, on Wednesday I left the the bright yellows and oranges of fall in Stockholm and came to the white wonderland of Umeå. The view out the window of the airplane is absolutely incredible, and if you look out one window you see Sweden, while if you look out the other side you see Finland in the

Map of my area!

distance. So I can now say I've seen Finland! It's been about 10 degrees here, so we've already gotten some good snow which makes everything beautiful, and the lake by our house is starting to freeze! I also really enjoy the fact that my area is now bigger than most missions. The Sweden Stockholm mission has big area boundaries in general, but now that I'm in the north I have about 1/8th of the country. Just to give you a little perspective, We have a member that lives six hours away by car and still lives well within our boundaries. Unfortunately we don't really have much reason to go that far away from the city, so I'll probably never get to go that far, but hey, at least I don't have to worry about going out of my boundaries ;)

Interestingly enough, I didn't get much time to enjoy Umeå before I found myself heading back to Stockholm... We had MLC (Missionary Leadership Council) on Monday (the reason

Elder Simmons and I

in the mission home for MLC

I'm emailing on Tuesday this week), so we flew down on Sunday night, had our meeting on Monday, and then flew back Monday evening. Flying in over Stockholm was incredible, and it was strange to get a bird's eye view of my last area! I couldn't pick out my apartment itself, but I saw the building just down the street :)

We have some great investigators right now, and it's been awesome to get to know the members here. A couple nights ago we decided to swing by a few people that Elder Simmons had tracted into, and one of the people we went, Michael, let us in and we had a great lesson with him. I didn't think too much about it at the time, because it was my first time meeting him, but Elder Simmons told me later that that's only the second time the missionaries have ever been let into his house (usually he just talks to them for a minute or two by the door) and now we have a return appointment set up to teach him the Plan of Salvation because he had several questions regarding it. The timing of our visit was truly a miracle, because the reason he let us in was because his wife suggested it, and it was also the first time she's ever been home. One of the best parts of missionary work is the little miracles like these, and they are also the things that bring us great joy in the gospel if we're willing to look for them.

Äldste Sirrine