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| I took this on the train ride from Stockholm to Umeå |
The mission is a non-stop adventure, but that adventure got significantly more intense this past week.
It all started on Tuesday. We had a member meal, and during our planning Tuesday morning we decided that we would arrive in the area 45 minutes prior to dinner in order to Tract in the neighborhood. We wanted to set a goal for this time, and the thought came to mind that we should call the member when started tracting and ask them to pray for us. We then set a goal to get a return appointment for Saturday at 5 pm, because we wanted to have a concrete success we could report to the member instead of just, "We'll, we had a really nice conversation with your neighbor." We followed our plan in having the member pray for us, and then after a few doors we met a young couple with whom we shared a brief summary of our message. We asked if we could come back Saturday at 5 pm, and after checking their calendar, they responded that we could. It was a really neat experience to sit down at the dinner table with those members and Testify of the power of prayer as we shared this miracle with them and asked the father if he could join us for the lesson. We ended up teaching them on Saturday, and the lesson went rally well. They listened humbly and are excited to meet us again this week.
On Wednesday night, we flew down to Stockholm for our mission tour/zone Conference with Elder Massimo De Feo of the Seventy. He talked about our love for the Savior and letting his Atonement motivate us. He likened our motivation to a rock thrown in the air. Regardless of how strong you are, or how hard you throw the rock, it will eventually fall to the ground. In like manner, if our motivation comes from an external force that acts upon us, it will eventually fail. Our task is to learn how to change our motivation to an internal source, drawing on the power of the Atonement which will never fail us.
We had MLC in Stockholm with Elder De Feo on Friday, and then we were supposed to fly home. I say "supposed to fly home" because after waiting at the airport for 7 hours our flight was cancelled
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| At the hotel |
and the airport put us in a hotel for the night because of some major snow in northern Sweden. Not gonna lie, that hotel was really nice. They included dinner and a breakfast buffet that had everything. It even had salmon :) Well, not only our flight was cancelled, but so were all the flights for Saturday and Sunday.... So Saturday morning we hopped on a train and took it all the way up to Umeå. Definitely the most beautiful eight hour train ride I have ever experienced. I guess it's also the only eight hour train ride I've ever experienced.... We are incredibly blessed that we were on that train, because the storm has continued and the trains also got cancelled yesterday.
So how much snow did we get? About a solid 2 feet between Saturday and Sunday. When we came out of church our car was almost buried and it was all we could do to get out of the parking lot. When we got home, they had plowed the street in front of our apartment creating a massive snow bank we had to remove (which took about 40 minutes of shoveling) before we could park our car... An older lady in the ward asked us yesterday to come shovel a path for her to get out of her house, but they hadn't plowed the roads in that area yet so our car couldn't make it... We went back and shoveled it this morning which made for quite the adventure. They've finally plowed most of the streets by now, but the last 2 days has pretty much been one continuous prayer that we dont get stuck in the snow with the car. I'm absolutely loving the snow, and just wondering how much more we need to get before I can the mission president if we can upgrade our car for snowmobiles ;)
Elder Sirrine
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| Before shoveling a path for an older member... |
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| After shoveling :) |
