Ah, I don't have my planner so I'm trying to remember what happened this week. Probably something about missionary work. That's usually how these things go.... We are reading Sister Jackson's brother's email in Arizona and he already committed someone to baptism and he has been there for a week. I'm just trying to make anything from this week sound relatively cool now haha.
We gave out a few more of our "Family Mission Plans" and we have gotten really positive and not so positive reactions. We have had people say, "Oh, I feel so guilty! I have not been doing this!" and we have had "No one is interested here. No one wants religion. I've tried, it doesn't work." It's easy to lose faith here. I'm seeing it everywhere. But we also got a really positive response yesterday. The Chilean couple came up to us and told us all about someone they are planning to invite over and asked us to pray for them and she was just GLOWING and so excited. It was really cool to see! If I can just get the ward excited about missionary work and talking to their friends in addition to my own efforts, I will feel okay about my time here in Stockholm. It's been really clear that this is what we are supposed to do!
We also made some Rice Crispie treats and brought them by less actives. One of them was so confused, "Is this rice?????" Haha. Oh! And Soledad is doing awesome! We are going to start having family home evening with her family once a week and we are going to help her teach her kids about Jesus and stories from the scriptures. I can't wait. :) If you want to pray for her and her family, that would be awesome. I really hope her husband will respond to it well! Also, an older Finnish lady's son came to church after about 20 years of not coming, and why? Because a member called him and invited him. Don't ever underestimate how powerful a simple invitation can be! That's all we are asked to do as members of the church, but we need to do it!!!! "Just do it" is our motto nowadays, or "Gör det bara."
Oh, so we tried to do chalk art again... Fail. We did it in this really public place and we were drawing a map of the world and all the sudden there was these two little tiny Chinese boys that started singing Michael Jackson and crowds of people started gathering... Then, I was in the middle of teaching a lesson and all the sudden I looked up and saw a bunch of signs for "Human Rights" and a HUGE crowd gathering around and all the sudden people were chanting "No borders! No nations! No segregation!" "Borders are illegal not people!" It was incredibly ironic that we were drawing all the different countries as this was going on, we realized pretty quickly that we didn't want to be associated with that so we took off. But yeah, there's quite a bit of political talk here about whether or not Sweden should let so many immigrants in, especially with everything going on in the Middle East. It was interesting to say the least.
A cool story I read about repentance that I wanted to share. Repentance is one of those topics that we hear about so often that I think we brush it off and think "I know" kind of like prayer. But we need to ask ourselves:
Am I repenting every day?
Are my weaknesses becoming strengths?
Am I relying on the grace of Christ every day?
Am I using the sacrament to renew my baptismal covenants and become clean as I was after baptism?
Are the scriptures/conference talks/church meetings ... etc. leading me to CHANGE?
If not, we are living under our potential. So that's something I'm working on! Those are just my thoughts.
Oh my gosh! I just realized this talk is from Elder Howard! In our ward! WHAT. MIND BLOWN.
I LOVE YOU GUYS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Syster Stetler
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