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| Elder Clarke and I |
Well, here I am at the start of my last week in the mission field. It's impossible to describe the roller coaster of time experienced on the mission, with certain days and weeks feeling like an eternity and others feeling like the snap of your fingers. Regardless of all that, the overall feeling is one of pure amazement, having no idea how I am already reaching the end of two years. I'm not alone in this feeling, and will be accompanied by 21 other missionaries leaving the Sweden Stockholm mission and heading home next week. This is directly following the departure of 18 missionaries last transfer. Considering the fact that our mission only has about 100 missionaries, this is a rather large chunk of missionaries and has created some interesting challenges. Several areas in the mission won't have missionaries for the next 3 months, so to prepare for this change several missionaries had to move areas this last week. As a result of this, I got a new companion, Elder Clarke, for my last week and a half here in Sweden.
We've been together for a few days now, and have discovered that we are almost the exact same person. Our personalities, opinions, and ideas are so similar I'm starting to wonder how it's possible. Elder Clarke comes from American Fork and has been a missionary for about 11 months now. He's got incredible Swedish and loves being out among the people here and talking with them.
This week we celebrated Midsommar, a Swedish holiday almost as largely celebrated as Christmas.
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The maypole we built. It might not be the best,
but we made do with what we had...
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Yesterday we saw some incredible miracles and found two new people to teach. The first is a woman we found by knocking on her door a couple weeks ago but haven't really had a chance to teach her. She's had an operation on her neck recently and has had a difficult time recovering, so we asked if we could share as scripture and read Alma 7:11-13 with her. We testified of the Atonement, and as we did so she talked about how good it felt. It was really cool to hear how good it felt to her, because she describes her faith as being in a higher power, but consisting of the parts from many other faiths that feel right. She asked about our belief in the afterlife, so we asked if we could return to teach her about it and scheduled a return appointment. Before we left she thanked us for coming and said, "It might sound weird, but you guys literally shine from within. I'm not sure what it is, but I've seen it even since the first time I met you."
Last night we were going by some people the missionaries had met before and saw a house for which the only record we had was "Ask about his 32 cars." We were pretty curious, so we decided to give it a try. The man we met didn't remember ever meeting the missionaries before, but when he saw the Book of Mormon in our hands, he got really excited and told us that he had some ancestors who became members in the 1800's and emigrated to Utah. He said he wants to visit some day and do some research to learn more about them. We told him about the family history center here and hardly finished before he started asking us about the Book of Mormon. Long story short, we ended up teaching him the entire restoration while standing there in his backyard. After teaching him, we asked about his cars and he just seemed to light up. He showed us several of his cars, old American classics that he's restored, and told us how he started an American Motors club here in Karlstad. He started telling us all about George Romney, Mitt Romney's father, who was the president of American Motors and had written some sort of biography that he had read. He then showed us one of the cars he's currently working on and was proud to say "This car is one of the originals. That was Romney time." He was so excited to tell us about his love for American cars and all the connections to our church he's come across. He also asked us where he could buy our book, and you should have seen his face when we put it in his hands and told him it was free. His expression was priceless, and he told us he can't wait to start reading it.
These are just two of the incredible miracles we've seen, but I wish I could share them all! The Lord has truly blessed us, and I find it such an honor and privilege to serve Him with all my might, mind, and strength.
Elder Sirrine
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| The Romney era car he's working on |
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| One of the cars |
